‘You’d look miles older if you’d locked your master in his study and then done a bunk—and been running and hiding for half a day and a night,’ said Rupert, a little crossly.
‘But what did he do to you?’ they asked.
‘Well, you saw what he was like in the train.’
‘But you seemed so frightened of him. I wonder you dared to run away.’
‘That wasn’t funk—in the train. That was just suppressed fury,’ Rupert explained tranquilly. ‘I was wondering where I should run to if I had to run. And then I did have to run—like Billy-o! And when I saw the name on a sign-post I remembered what you’d said about “true to the death”—and I kept behind the hedges, because I wasn’t sure about the fern-seed being any good, and I got up a tree and I saw you go by, and when you came back with the parson I just followed on quietly till I got to outside your house. I hoped you’d come out, but you didn’t. And I hid under one of those fancy firs, and then, I suppose, I went to sleep, and when I woke up there was a light in a window, and I went towards it, stupid, like a bird. You know how sparrows come out of the ivy if you show a light?’
They didn’t.
‘Well, they do. And then I saw you monkeying about. I was glad, I tell you. And I tapped on the window, and—you know the rest,’ he ended, like a hero in a book.
‘But what did the Murdstone man do to you?’ Charlotte insisted on knowing.
‘He was playing up for a row from the very first,’ said Rupert; ‘and when we got to his beastly house that night’—Rupert lowered his voice and spoke in a tone of deep disgust and bitterness—‘he gave me bread and milk to eat. Bread and milk—with a teaspoon! And when I said I’d rather not, he said I must learn to eat what was set before me. And he talked about discipline and showed me a cane. He said he was glad there were no other little boys there—little boys!—because he could devote himself entirely to breaking me in.’
‘Beast!’ said Charlotte.