Chapter Twenty Six.
A Turbulent School Meeting.
I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue have no tongue to check her pride.
Milton’s Comus.
Next morning, after second school, Power went to see how Eden and Walter were getting on. He opened the door softly, and they did not observe his entrance.
Eden, very pale, and with an expression of pain and terror still reflected in his face, lay in a broken and restless sleep. Walter was sitting as still as death at the head of the bed. A book lay on his knees, but he had not been reading. He was in a “brown study,” and the dreamy far-off look with which his eyes were fixed upon vacancy showed how his thoughts had wandered. It was the same look which attracted Power’s attention when he first saw Walter in chapel, and which had shown him that he was no common boy. It often made him watch Walter, and wonder what could be occupying his thoughts.
It was looking at poor little Eden that had suggested to Walter’s mind the train of thought into which he had fallen. As he saw the child tossing uneasily about, waking every now and then to half-consciousness with a violent start, occasionally delirious, and to all appearances seriously ill—as he thought over Dr Keith’s remark, that even when he was quite well again his nervous system would be probably found to have received a shock of which the effects would never be obliterated during life, he could not help fretting very bitterly over the injury and suffering of his friend. And his own spirits were greatly shaken. It was of little matter that every time he raised his hand to cool his forehead, or ease the throbbing of his head, he felt how much he was bruised, cut, and swollen, or that the looking-glass showed him a face so hideously disfigured; he knew that this would grow right in a day or two, and he cared nothing for it. But when Harpour’s blow knocked him down, he had dashed his head with some violence on the floor, and this had hurt him so much and made him feel so ill, that Dr Keith was not without secret fears about the possibility of a concussion of the brain. Yet all the sorrow which Walter now felt was for Eden, and he was not thinking of himself.
He was mentally staring face to face at the mystery of human cruelty and malice. The little boy, whose fine qualities so few besides himself had discovered, was lying before him in pain and nervous prostration, solely because malignant unkindness seemed to give pleasure to two bad, brutal fellows. Walter had himself rescued Eden by his consistent kindness from being bullied, corrupted, tormented—yet apparently to little purpose. That the poor boy’s powers would be decidedly injured by this last prank, was certain. Dr Keith had dropped mysterious hints, and Walter had himself heard how wild and incoherent were Eden’s murmurs. If he should become an idiot? O God! that men and boys should have such hearts!
And then and there Walter, while yet a boy, solemnly and consciously recorded an unspoken vow that he at least, till death, would do all that lay in his own power to lighten, not to increase, the sum of human misery; that he would study all things that were kind, and gentle, and tender-hearted, in his dealings with others; that he would ever be on the watch against wounding thoughts, and uncharitable judgments, and unkind deeds; above all, that he would strive with all his power against the temptation to cutting and sarcastic words, against calumny, and misrepresentation, against envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. These were the noble thoughts and high resolves which were passing through the boy’s mind when Power’s quiet footstep entered the room.
Power stopped for a minute to look at the somewhat saddening picture in the darkened room—Walter, still as death, deep in thought, his chin leaning on his hand, and his face presenting an uncouth mixture of shapes and colours as he sat by Eden’s bedside; and Eden turning and moaning in an unrefreshing sleep.