With that Scrafton could be heard taking a tremendous pinch of snuff; but Harry was still on the stairs when a couple of resounding smacks, followed by a storm of sobs, announced that Master Murray (aetat. 11) had received his alleged deserts. The boy's ears were red and swollen for the rest of that day.
At first Harry could not understand how a religious woman like Mrs. Bickersteth could countenance and keep such a flagrant bully, since what he heard at odd times must be heard morning after morning by some member of the household. The explanation dawned upon him by degrees. Scrafton had been there so many years that he had gained an almost complete ascendency over every adult in the establishment. The one instance in which Harry knew Mrs. Bickersteth to stand firm was that of his own continuance in the school. The one member of the Bickersteth family whom he ever heard breathe a syllable against Scrafton was the good-hearted, golden-haired Baby. Harry once met her face to face on the stairs when a roaring and a thumping and a sobbing were going on behind that terrible closed door. Harry looked at her grimly. Miss Bickersteth reddened to the roots of her yellow hair.
"It does sound dreadful," she admitted. "But—but Mr. Scrafton's kinder than you think; he sounds worse than he is. And he teaches them so well; and—and he has been here so many years!"
Harry thought there was a catch in her voice as she brushed past him; for one thump had sounded louder than the rest; and first a slate had fallen, and then a boy. Indeed it was a common thing to hear the boys whispering that so-and-so had been knocked down that day. But the fiend was clever enough to keep his fist for their bodies, his flat hand for their faces; the wretched little victims were never actually disfigured.
That he was a clever teacher Harry did not doubt. With quick receptive material he was probably something more, and there were one or two boys whom that baleful face, that ready hand, and that roaring voice did not instantly daze and stupefy, and who were consequently getting on remarkably well under Mr. Scrafton. With his repulsive personality, and his more repulsive practices, the man had yet a touch of genius. He wrote the boys' names in their Latin Grammars in the most perfect and beautiful copperplate hand that Harry had ever seen. And those quicker boys would show him sums worked out by no recognised rule, but with half the figures expended in the "key": for Scrafton had a shorter and better rule of his own for every rule in arithmetic.
Weeks went by before Harry and this man exchanged another word; but daily they met and looked each other in the face, and daily the younger man became surer and surer that the look those blue eyes shot at him was instinct with a special venom, a peculiar malice, only to be explained by the unravelment of that mystery which he was as far as ever from unravelling. And every night of all these weeks he lay awake wondering, wondering; yet every day the daily duties claimed and absorbed his whole attention; and he took no step because he had found no clue, and was still determined to find one; also because there were certain cogent reasons for his keeping this mastership, for its own sake, for one term at least. Mrs. Ringrose was still at the seaside with the Walthews. She wrote to tell Harry how kind they were to her; when they returned she was to remain with them until he rejoined her. Meanwhile the flat was costing nothing but its rent, and Harry was not only earning his board, lodgings, and ten pounds for the term, but from ten to fifteen shillings a week from the excellent and munificent Tiddler. If he chose to throw up the mastership at Christmas, they would be able to start the New Year on a much sounder financial basis than would have been possible had he never obtained it.
So October wore into November, and the autumn tints became warmer and richer in Bushey Park, and Harry grew fond of his walks with the boys, and very fond of the boys themselves. Somehow his discovery on Richmond Hill came to seem less significant than it had appeared at the time. The idea grew upon Harry Ringrose (who was fully alive to the defects of his own imaginative quality) that very likely there was a much simpler explanation of Lowndes's lie than he had suspected at the time: and though he loathed Scrafton for his brutality to the boys, and never failed to meet that baleful eye as though he saw through its bloodshot blue into the brain beyond, the look became a mechanical part of his day's routine, and it was only in the long nights that the old suspicions haunted him. So it was when the clash came between Harry Ringrose and "I, Jeremiah Scrafton" (as the harpy loved to call himself to the boys); and with the clash, not suspicion any more, but the dire conviction of some rank and nameless, yet undiscovered, villainy.
CHAPTER XXI.
HAND TO HAND.
It all came of the junior master's clandestine connection with the Tiddler.