Anxious to fend him, to ask what had happened, Mr Percival, leaving the room, caught sight of him pacing with hasty and uneven steps along a private garden walk which belonged to the masters.
“I hope nothing unpleasant has occurred,” he said, overtaking him.
“Oh, nothing, nothing,” said Mr Paton, with quivering lip, as he turned aside. And then, suppressing his emotion by a powerful effort of self-control, “It is only,” he said, “that the hard results of fifteen years’ continuous labour are now condensed into a heap of smut and ashes in the schoolroom fire.”
“You don’t mean to say that your Hebrew manuscripts are burnt?” asked Mr Percival in amazement.
“You know how I have been toiling at them for years, Percival; you know that I began them before I left college, that I regarded them as the chief work of my life, and that I devoted to them every moment of my leisure. You know, too, the pride and pleasure which I took in their progress, and the relief with which I turned to them from the vexations and anxieties of one’s life here. To work at them has been for years my only recreation and delight. Well, they were finished at last; I was only correcting them for the press; they would have gone to the printer in a month, and I should have lived to complete a toilsome and honourable task. Well, the dream is over, and a handful of ashes represents the struggle of my best years.”
Mr Percival knew well that his coadjutor had been working for years at a commentary on the Hebrew text of the Four Greater Prophets. It had been the cherished and chosen task of his life; he had brought to it great stores of learning, accumulated in the vigour of his powers, and the enthusiasm of a youthful ambition, and he had employed upon it every spare hour left him from his professional duties. He looked to it as the means of doing essential service to the church of which he was an ordained member, and, secondarily, as the road to reputation and well-merited advancement. And in five minutes the hand of one angry boy had robbed him of the fruit of all his hopes.
“If they wanted to display the hatred which I well know that they feel,” said Mr Paton bitterly, “they might have chosen any way, literally any way, but that. They might have left me, at least, that which was almost my only pleasure and object in life, and which had no connection with them or their pursuits.” And his face grew haggard as he stopped in his walk, and tried to realise the extent of what he had lost. “I would rather have seen everything I possess in the whole world destroyed than that,” he said slowly, and with strong emotion.
“And was it really Evson who did this?” asked Mr Percival, filled with the sincerest pity for his colleague’s wounded feelings.
“It matters little who did it, Percival; but, yes, it was your friend Evson.”
“The little, graceless, abominable wretch!” exclaimed Mr Percival with anger, “he must be expelled. But can’t you recommence the task?”