Heriot flushed and flashed. He could not have been the martinet he was without seeing himself as such, and for the moment in a light injurious to that essential quality. Then he laughed heartily, but not very long, and his laughter left him grave.
“You were an awful young fool, you know! It would have been the end of you, without the option of a præpostors’ licking, if not with one from me thrown in! But you may tell Dudley Relton, when you see him out there, that I’m glad to know what a debt I’ve owed him these last three years. I won’t write to him, in case I might say something else while I was about it. But Lord! I do envy you both the crack you’ll have in those forsaken wilds!”
Mr. Heriot perhaps pictured the flourishing port of Geelong as a bush township, only celebrated for Dudley Relton and his young barbarians. Colonial geography, unlike that of Ancient Greece, was not then a recognised item in the public-school curriculum. It may be now; but on the whole it is more probable that Mr. Heriot was having a little dig at the land to which he grudged Jan Rutter even more than Dudley Relton. And Jan really was going to the wilderness, or a lodge therein where one of the uncles on his mother’s side ran sheep by the hundred thousand. It was said to be a good opening. Jan liked the letters he had read and the photographs he had seen; and if that uncle proved a patch on the one in the Indian Army, he was certain to fall on his feet; but his house-master held that after a more or less stormy schooling the peace (with cricket) of the University would have replenished the man without impairing the eventual squatter. The immediate man was Mr. Heriot’s chief concern; but when the thing had been decided against him, after a brief correspondence with the Revd. Canon Ambrose, he saw the best side of a settled future, and took an extra interest from his own point of view.
“What are your sheep going to get out of your Public School?” said Heriot. “Will you herd them any better for having floundered through the verbs in μι? Don’t you think a lot that you have learnt here will be wasted?”
“I hope not, sir,” replied Jan, with the solemn face due to the occasion, though there was an independent twinkle behind Heriot’s glasses.
“So do I, indeed,” said he. “But I shall be interested; you’re a bit of a test case—you see—and you may help us all.”
“I only know I’m jolly glad I came here,” said Jan devoutly. “I wasn’t once, but I am now, and have been long enough.”
“But what have you gained?” asked Heriot. “That’s what I always want to know—for certain. A bit of Latin and a lot of cricket, no doubt; but how far are they coming in? If you get up a match at the back of beyond, you’ll spoil it with your bowling. On the other hand, of course, you’ll be able to measure your paddocks in parasangs and call your buggy-horses Dactyl and Spondee—or Hex and Pen if you like it better!”
Jan guffawed, but there was an unsatisfied sound about Heriot’s chuckle.
“I want a fellow like you, Rutter, to get as nearly as possible 100 per cent. out of himself in life; and I should like to think that—what?—say 10 or 20 per cent. of the best of you came from this place. Yet you might have learnt to bowl as well on any local ground. And I wonder if we’ve taught you a single concrete thing that will come in useful in the bush.”