Hanley pressed his hand, and said, “You’ve conquered, Charlie; you’ve held out to the end. Oh, I wish I were like you!”
Chapter Thirty Four.
A Conspiracy Foiled.
As the feathery snows
Fall frequent on some wintry day...
The stony volleys flew.
Cowper.
Yes, Charlie had conquered, thanks to the grace that sustained him, and thanks, secondarily, to a good home training, and to Walter’s strong and excellent influence. And in gaining that one point he had gained all. No one dared directly to molest him further, and he had never again to maintain so hard a struggle. He had resisted the beginnings of evil; he had held out under the stress of persecution; and now he could enjoy the smoother and brighter waters over which he sailed.
His enemies were for the time discomfited, and even the hardy Wilton was abashed. For a week or two there was considerably less bravado in his face and manner, and his influence over those of his own age was shaken. That little rap of the cane which Bliss had given him had a most salutary effect in diminishing his conceit. Hanley retracted his promise to deny all knowledge of anything wrong that went on, and openly defied Wilton; even Elgood ceased to fear him. Charlie had felt inclined to cut him, but, with generous impulse, he forgave all that was past, and, keeping on civil terms with him, did all he could to draw him to less crooked paths.
Mackworth was so ashamed that he hardly ventured to show his face. He had always made Bliss a laughing-stock, had nicknamed him Ass’s Head, and had taught others to jeer at his backwardness. He had presumed on his lazy good humour, and affected to patronise and look down on him. An eruption in a long-extinct volcano could not have surprised him more than the sudden outburst of Bliss’s wrath, and if the two blows which he had received as he fled before him in sight of the whole house had been branded on his back with a hot iron, they could hardly have caused him more painful humiliation. For some time he slunk about like a whipped puppy, and imagined, not without some ground, that no one saw him without an inclination to smile.
Kenrick, too, had reason to blush. Every one knew that it was Bliss, and not he, who had rescued the house from attaching to its name another indelible disgrace; and when he heard the monitors and sixth-form talking seriously among themselves of the bad state into which the Noelites had fallen, he felt that the stigma was deserved, and that he, as being the chief cause of the mischief, must wear the brand.