All Kenrick’s faults and errors had had their root in an overweening pride, a pride which grew fast upon him, and the intensity of which increased in proportion as it grew less and less justifiable. But now he had suffered a salutary rebuke. He had been openly blamed, openly slighted, and openly set aside, and was unable to gainsay the justice of the proceeding. He felt that with every boy in the school, who had any right feeling, Bliss was now regarded as a more upright and honourable—nay, even as a more important and influential, person than himself. Among other mortifications, it galled him especially to hear the warm thanks and cordial praise which Power and Walter and Henderson expressed when first they happened to meet Bliss. He saw Walter wring his hand, and overheard him saying in that genial tone in which he himself had once been addressed so often—“Thank you, Bliss, a thousand times for saving my dear little brother from the hands of those brutes. Charlie and I will not soon forget how much we owe you.” Walter said it with tears in his eyes, and Bliss answered with a happy smile—“Don’t thank me, Walter; I only did what any fellow would have done who was worth anything.”
“And you’ll look after Charlie for me now and then, will you?”
“That I will,” said Bliss; “but you needn’t fear for him—he’s a hero, a regular hero—that’s what I call him, and I’d do anything for him.”
So Kenrick, vexed and discontented, almost hid himself in those days in his own study, the victim of that most wearing of intolerable and sickening diseases—a sense of shame. Except to play football occasionally, he seldom left his room or took any exercise, and fell into a dispirited, broken way of life, feeling unhappy and alone. He had no associates now except his inferiors, for his conduct had forfeited the regard of his equals, and with many of them he was at open feud. The only pleasure left to him was desperately hard work. Not only was he stimulated by a fiery ambition, a mad desire to excel in the half-year’s competition, and show what he was yet capable of, and so to some extent redeem his unhappy position, but also his heart was fixed on getting, if possible, the chief scholarship of Saint Winifred’s—a scholarship sufficiently valuable to pay the main part of those college expenses which it would be otherwise impossible for his mother to bear. He feared, indeed, that he had little or no chance against Power, or even against Walter, who were both competitors, but he would not give up all hope. His abilities were of the most brilliant order, and if he had often been idle at Saint Winifred’s, he had, on the other hand, often worked exceedingly hard during the holidays at Fuzby, where, unlike other boys, he had little or nothing else to amuse him. Mrs Kenrick, sitting beside him silent at her work for long hours, would have been glad enough to see in him more elasticity, more kindliness, less absorption in his own selfish pursuits; but she rejoiced that at home, at any rate, he did not waste his vacant days in idleness, or spend them in questionable amusements and undesirable society.
Almost the only boy of whom he saw much now was Wilton, and but for him, I do believe, that in those days he would have changed his whole tone of thought and mode of life. But he had a strange liking for this worthless boy, who kept alive in him his jealousy of Walter, his opposition to the other monitors, his partisanship, his recklessness, and his pride. Sometimes Kenrick felt this. He saw that Wilton was bad as well as attractive, and that their friendship, instead of doing Wilton any good, only did himself harm. But he could not make up his mind to throw him off, for there was no one else who seemed to feel for him as a close and intimate friend. Many of Kenrick’s failings rose from that. He had offended, and rejected, and alienated his early and true friends, and he felt now that it was easier to lose friends than to make them, or to recover their affection when it once was lost.
But the bad set at Saint Winifred’s, though in one house their influence was weakened, were determined not to see it wane throughout the school. Harpour and his associates organised a regular conspiracy against the monitors. When the first light snow fell they got together a very large number of fellows, and snowballed all the monitors except Kenrick, as they came out of morning school. The exception was very much to Kenrick’s discredit, and in his heart he felt it to be so. During the first day or two that this lasted the monitors took it good-humouredly, returning the snowballs, and regarding it as a joke, though an annoying one; but when it became more serious, when some snowballs had been thrown at the masters also, and when some of the worst fellows began to collect snowballs beforehand and harden them into great lumps of ice as hard as stones, and when Brown, who was short-sighted, and was therefore least able to protect himself, had received a serious blow, Power, by the advice of the rest, put up a notice that from that time the snowballing must cease, or the monitors would have to punish the boys who did it. This notice the school tried to resist, but the firmness of Power and his friends put a stop to their rebellion. If the notice was disregarded he determined, by Walter’s, advice, to seize the ringleaders, and not notice the younger boys whom they incited. Accordingly next morning they found the school gathered as usual, in spite of the notice, for the purpose of pelting them, and, saying nothing, they kept their eyes on the biggest fellows in the group. A shower of snowballs fell among them, hitting several of them, and, to the great amusement of the school, knocking over several hats into the snow.
“Harpour,” said Walter, very sternly, “I saw you throw a snowball. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself that you, a fellow at the head of the eleven, should set such a bad example? Don’t suppose that your size or position shall get you off. Come before the monitors directly after breakfast.”
“Hanged if I do,” answered Harpour, with a sulky laugh.
“Well, I daresay you will be hanged in the long-run,” was the contemptuous reply; “but come, or else take the consequences.”
“Tracy,” said Henderson, “I saw you throw a snowball which knocked off Power’s hat. It was a hard one too. You come before the monitors with Harpour.”