If Dorothy had there and then asked Tom to sit down and make a comforting meal of dynamite washed down with prussic acid it is odds that he would have set to bowl and platter with a cheerful heart; but to put knife and fork into a rich brown crust that crunched beneath the blade and to see the hot jelly gush out over the plate and to catch the fragrance of the red and brown pork with judicious blending of lean and fat cut into squares like dice, and to see all this flanked by a crested jug of foaming beer.—Oh! Don’t talk to me of nectar and ambrosia.
“Yo’r health, miss,” said Jack, politely and as distinctly as he could with his mouth full, “and yo’rs, too, aw’m sure”—this to Betty, whose ample form he surveyed with lingering approval “and a merry Chersmas when it comes.”
But Tom, even as he plied his knife and fork heard ringing in his ears the words that some instinct or some dim apprehension or prompting of native delicacy had compelled from Dorothy’s lips.—“Mister Pinder”. Tom had never been called Mister Pinder before in all his life “Gentleman Tom” and “Dandy Tom” he heard occasionally from the lasses of the mill, smarting from that worst of feminine ailments—injuria formal spietal,—the quiet unconsciousness of or indifference to advances none too coy. But “Mr. Tom”—’t was the baptism into a new life, the stirring of a new manhood, his accolade; it fell on his senses as falls the sovereign’s sword on shoulder of kneeling knight. It was a new and nobler Tom that turned his face that afternoon over the hills to Diggle.
“Go to see your sick friend?” Dorothy had cried. “Why, of course you’ll go. I’m sure uncle would say so, and anyway if he faults anyone, why he must fault me.”
“An’ aw hope his first mince-pie may choke him if he does,” wished Betty, but kept her wishes to herself.
Tom was shocked at the change a few weeks had made in the old schoolmaster Mr. Black had, truly, been failing ever since the sudden and unexpected death of the shrill Priscilla some twelve months before. His devoted if exacting sister had gone to that land where there is neither dusting nor teaching, and where she must have received a shaking of cherished convictions if she found any schoolboys. Since then her brother had lived alone, cooking and generally doing for himself, save that one of the boys scrubbed the schoolroom floor and scrubbed the desks, in consideration of being put on the school free-list. More and more as the days wore on the schoolmaster had seemed to shrink within himself, and find a placid joy in the not wholly unpleasing melancholy of reflection and regret. Perhaps Priscilla’s faithful girding had been to him like a tonic and an irritant, and saved him from a natural tendency to the introspective absorption of a lonely life. Gradually the nightly symposia at the Hanging Gate were abandoned, much to the wrath of good Mistress Schofield, who roundly declared that “if th’ Schooilmaster had nobbut gone theer o’ neets, takin’ th’ best chair, an’ sittin’ i’th’ warmest corner, just to be out o’ reick o’ his sister’s tongue, she for one fun’ his room as gooid as his company.” Perhaps one reason for Mr. Black’s inconstancy might be found in the fact that so long as Priscilla lived, he knew there was a shield and buckler between him and the engines and weapons of attack the buxom widow knew so well how to employ. Priscilla gone, he felt himself as a city girt round and besieged, but helpless and defenceless, its strong tower razed to the ground. Reason be what it might the angle nook of the sanded kitchen knew him no more and the friendly circle had a very sensible gap. And ere long the news, the all but incredible news, spread through t’ village, and up the valley, and about the steep hill-sides, that “owd Black wer’ givin’ up teeachin’, and what to do wi’ th’ lads and lasses ’at wer’ allus under yo’r feet, or up to some mak’ o’ devilment till they we’ owd enough to go to th’ mill, ’ud pass a weary woman’s wits to tell.”
Tom felt as he neared the school a strangely depressing air of solitude and desertion. The playground no more resounded to the eager cries of boys revelling in a brief freedom, nor from the open windows came the murmuring buzz of unwilling voices droning in unison the tables of multiplication. The schoolmaster he found in his little bedroom, not in bed, indeed, but looking far fitter for bed than up. To Tom’s surprise, he found Moll o’ Stuarts in attendance on the sick man. She had, it transpired, carried the citadel of the sick-room by assault and taken possession with characteristic coolness and determination, and there she had announced her resolve to abide till the schoolmaster should be either better or worse. As for her more legitimate profession she declared:
“They mun get someb’dy else. Onyb’dy wer’ gooid enough to bring a fooil into th’ world, but it wer’ worth while tryin’ to keep a wise man in it. Th’ best of men’s poor feckless things when i’th’ best o’ health, but if they nobbut cut their little finger, they’re as useless as babes unborn, an’ it were well there wer somebody to look after him, sin’ those ’at had most reight to kept away for weeks at a time, an’ ne’er cam’ near till they wer’ sent for.” And with this Parthian shaft, Molly at a sign from the invalid, withdrew, to give Jack, who had stayed below, gazing open-mouthed at the maps and globes, the benefit of her pent storm of wrath.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Tom. I knew you would, but hesitated to send for you. I know you have little time away from work, and youth companies best with youth when work is laid aside.”
“Indeed, Mr. Black, I had no notion you were so ill or nothing could or should have kept me away. I would have come to help and nurse you if I had had to break my indentures and go before the magistrates for it.”