“What! you here again?” he said with chilling scorn, as he passed the seat where Walter sat writing. “After what has happened, I should have been ashamed to be sent here, if I were you.”
After his days and nights of toil, after his long, manly, noble struggle to show his penitence, after his heavy and disproportionate punishment, it was hard to be so addressed by one whom he respected, in the presence of all the idlest in the school, and in consequence of a purely accidental and isolated failure. Walter looked up with an appealing look in his dark blue eyes; but Mr Percival had passed on, and he bent his head over his paper with the old sense that the past could never be forgotten, the recollection of his disgrace never obliterated. No one was observing him; and as the feeling of despair grew in him, a large tear dropped down upon his paper; he wiped it quietly away, and continued writing, but another and another fell, and he could not help it. For Mr Percival was almost the only master whose goodwill he very strongly coveted, and whose approval he was most anxious to attain.
When next Mr Percival stopped and looked at Walter, he saw that his words had wounded him to the heart, and knew well why the boy’s lines were blurred and blotted, when he showed them up with a timid hand and downcast look.
He was touched. “I have been too hard on you, Evson,” he said; “I see it now. Come to tea with me after chapel this evening; I want to speak with you.”
Chapter Eleven.
Happier Hours.
“Sir, you are one of those that will not serve God if the devil bid you.”
Othello, act 1, scene 1.
When chapel was over, Walter, having brushed his hair, and made himself rather neater and more spruce than a schoolboy usually is at the middle of a long half, went to Mr Percival’s room. Mr Percival, having been detained, had not yet come in; but Henderson, Kenrick, and Power, who had also been asked to tea, were there waiting for him when Walter arrived, and Henderson, as usual, amusing the others and himself with a flood of mimicry and nonsense.