This positive assertion of an unrepentant spirit nonplussed his elders. Belle looked helplessly at her brother for inspiration; but Mr Musgrave avoided her eye with a care which suggested a cowardly sympathy with the offender if not with the offence. The punishment of children, while he admitted its necessity, was peculiarly distressing to him. Master John Sommers, with a child’s quick intuition, began to realise that he had very little to apprehend from his uncle, but his mother was a different matter; he had had contests with her before and he could not remember ever having come out of them triumphantly.
“John,” she said gravely, and with a gentleness which John did not find reassuring, because his mother was always gentle even before and after she smacked him, “you are not going to be a naughty little boy and grieve mother. You know it is very wrong to be rude to anyone, and it is dreadful to kick. I insist on your telling Eliza you are sorry. You must be sorry.”
“I’m not,” John persisted.
Belle appealed to her brother direct.
“Uncle John, what is to be done with this very naughty little boy?”
Mr Musgrave flushed and looked almost as uncomfortable as though he were being reprimanded for the kicking of Eliza instead of the chubby, unrepentant little sinner before him. He stared at the culprit and frowned.
“Perhaps,” he suggested hopefully, “if you let him run away and think about it he will change his mind.”
“No,” said Belle firmly, having grasped the fact that she would get no help in this quarter; “he has got to change his mind now. If you won’t say you are sorry, John, you will be punished—severely.”
John began to look sulky, but he showed no indication of a proper sense of his own wickedness. He had kicked Eliza deliberately, and had experienced immense satisfaction in the knowledge that he had thereby got a bit of his own back. Eliza was always annoying him and locking him out from the kitchen. He liked the kitchen. Martha gave him cakes when he found his way there; but Eliza baulked him in his purpose whenever she could by closing the door in his face.
“But I’m not sorry,” muttered John obstinately. “And you told me I mustn’t tell stories.”