“He’s worth fifty such chickens as little Evson, any day.”
“Chickens!” said Bliss, with a tone as nearly like contempt as he had ever assumed; “it’s clear you don’t know much about him; I wish, Kenrick, you’d do your duty more, and then the house would not be so bad as it is.”
Kenrick opened his eyes wide; he had never heard Bliss speak like this before. “I don’t want the learned, the clever, the profound Bliss to teach me my duty,” he said, with a proud sneer; “what business have you to abuse the house, because it is not full of young ninnies like Evson? You’re no monitor of mine, let me tell you.”
“You may sneer, Kenrick, at my being stupid, if you like; but, for all your cleverness, I wouldn’t be you for something; and if you won’t interfere, as you ought, I will, if I can.” And as Bliss said this, with clear flaming anger, and fixed on Kenrick his eyes, which were lighted up with honest purpose, Kenrick thought he had never seen him look so handsome, or so fine a fellow. “Yes, even he is superior to me now,” he thought, with a sigh, as Bliss left the room. Poor Ken—there was no unhappier boy at Saint Winifred’s; as he ate and ate of those ashy fruits of sin, they grew more and more dusty and bitter to his parched taste; as he drank of that napthaline river of wayward pride, it scorched his heart and did not quench his thirst.
Chapter Thirty Three.
Martyrdom.
“Since thou so deeply dost enquire,
I will instruct thee briefly why no dread
Hinders my entrance here. Those things alone
Are to be feared whence evil may proceed,
Nought else, for nought is terrible beside.”
Carey’s Dante.
Gradually the persecutions to which Charlie was subjected mainly turned on one point. His tormentors were so far tired of bullying him, that they would have left him in comparative peace if he would have yielded one point—which was this.