“I should hope so,” replied Jan, unscrupulously. “But here’s Chips; you ask him.”
Devereux, however, despite his law-abiding instincts, was not the one to draw back when two were for going on. He was an excitable boy with a fund of high spirits, but not an infinity; they ran out sometimes when least expected. This morning, however, he was at his best, and incomparably better company than either of his companions. Jan was shy and awkward, though his soul sang with pride and pleasure. But Chips the articulate, Chips the loquacious, Chips the irrepressible in congenial company, had least of all to say, except in the bitterness of his own heart against the boy who had usurped his place.
“He’s hardly spoken to either of us,” Chips was saying to himself, “since the very beginning of our first term; and I should like to have seen him now, if the Tiger hadn’t finished fourth in the Mile!”
The worst of the enthusiastic temperament is that it lends itself to cynicism almost as readily, and vice versa as in Jan’s case now. Jan also had felt often very bitter about Evan, if not exactly against him, yet here he was basking in the boy’s first tardy and almost mercenary smile. But Jan’s case was peculiar, as we know; and everything nice had come together, filling his empty cup to overflowing. He might despise public-school traditions as much as he pretended for Chips’s benefit, but he was too honest to affect indifference to his little succès d’estime of the day before. He knew it was not little for his age. He would have confessed it some consolation for being at school against his will—but it was not against his will that he was walking with Master Evan on equal terms this fine spring morning. He had always seen that the making or the marring of his school life lay in Evan’s power. It had not been marred as it might have been by a cruel or a thoughtless tongue; it might still be made by kind words and even an occasional show of equality by one whom Jan never treated as an equal in his thoughts. He was nervous as they trod the hilly roads, but he was intensely happy. Spring was in the bold blue sky, and in the hedgerows faintly sprayed with green—less faintly if you looked at them aslant—and in Jan’s heart too. Spring birds were singing, and Evan bubbling like a brook with laughter and talk of home and the holidays that Jan knew all about; yet never a word to let poor Chips into the secret of their old relations, or even to set him wondering. Any indiscretion of that sort was by way of falling from Jan himself.
“Do you ever see the Miss Christies now?” he had inadvertently inquired.
“The Christies!” Evan exclaimed, emphatically, and not without a sidelong glance at Carpenter. “Oh, yes, the girls skated on our pond all last holidays. Phyllis can do the outside edge backwards.”
“She would,” said Jan. “I doubt you’re too big for Fanny now?”
Fanny had been Evan’s pony, on which he had ridden a great deal with his friends the Christies; hence the somewhat dangerous association of ideas. He said he now rode one of the horses, when he rode at all. His tone closed that side of the subject.
“Do you remember how you used to hoist a flag, the first day of the holidays, to let the young—to let the girls know you’d got back?”
Evan turned to Carpenter with a forced laugh. “All these early recollections must be pretty boring for you,” said he. “But this chap and I used to know each other at home.”