Hora had silenced him with a sign at the time, but later, when they were alone, he had explained.
"They are all men who have been trying to play the game of stealing and have lost," he said. "If you were to get caught, you would be taken away and shut up at night in a cell all alone, and dressed in ugly clothes, and when you went out men with guns would be set to watch you so that they should shoot you if you tried to run away."
"Have you ever been caught, father?" Guy asked.
Hora had never replied to that question. His face had grown so dark that Guy had forborne to press for an answer, and the memory of the singular expression which had passed over his countenance had been sufficient to prevent Guy ever repeating the enquiry.
After the visit to the convict establishment, Guy had been timorous at playing his new game, but Hora had chaffed him, advised him, stood beside him, protected him, until he became exceedingly dexterous in a variety of forms of petty larceny. He was never allowed at this time to mix with other boys. Hora had him always under his own eye, educating him according to a system which was a fair sample of the average boy's education as regards matter, but differing vastly from the average boy's education as regards the application of the knowledge imparted to him.
Cæsar was never to him a mere handbook by which the intricacies of a dead language were revealed, but a wonderful history of a man who played the game of stealing in a great way. Hora made quite clear to the boy's mind that there was only a difference in degree between the stealing of oranges and the stealing of kingdoms, but that if one wanted to steal kingdoms it was just as well to begin early and learn the principles of the art by stealing oranges. He explained, too, that the world looked with very different eyes upon the theft of a crown and the theft of an orange or an apple. The man who annexed an empire was an emperor whom men acclaimed and set on a throne in a garb of purple, while the man who stole a loaf of bread to assuage his hunger was a petty thief at whom the world hurled opprobrium and thrust into a prison, garbed in mud-coloured clothes and covered over with broad arrows.
Guy began to comprehend what Hora intended him to comprehend, that there was something mean about petty theft, and he no longer found pleasure in his game, but turned instead to the weaving of romances of magnificent depredations.
Even the fiction which was supplied by Hora for the boy's amusement was insidiously utilised for the inculcation of the same perverted morality. With Robinson Crusoe, for instance, it was easy for a man of Hora's equipment to make fun of Crusoe's naïve dependence upon Providence and his exhibition of piety in moments of stress. Hora pointed out that Crusoe's prayers were mere expression of the terror of an uneducated mind when confronted with personal danger—of a mind which had been trained in youth to rely upon supernatural agencies for relief and comfort. He pointed out that Crusoe really secured his own safety through the exercise of his own constructive and observatory powers, and through no other agency.
As Guy grew older, Hora sedulously built upon the foundation of disbelief which he laid down as the basis of the boy's education. Guy was taught that religion was merely the means by which a priestarchy levied toll upon the body corporate by playing upon inherited superstitions—while history supplied him with plenty of illustrations. History supplied him, too, with plenty of examples to point the arguments with which he supported what was in effect a complete criminal philosophy. Guy was not taught only that atheism was the hope of humanity. Hora had read much of Nietzsche, and he skilfully adopted the Nietzschean philosophy to his purpose. A particular appeal to Guy's mind was to be found in Hora's definition of virtue, as a thirst for danger and courage for the forbidden. As translated by Hora, both in precept and in practice, the highest virtue was to be found in the breaking of laws. He imbibed the doctrines with avidity, for Hora had a persuasive tongue. He learned at the same time to keep them to himself, for, as Hora explained, if sheep knew as much as men, men would have no mutton.
Until eighteen, Guy's education progressed under his father's tuition, and then, feeling sure of him, Hora thought it time to launch him on the world. Guy went to Oxbridge to make acquaintance with his fellows, to survey the flock of sheep which were to supply him with mutton in the future. The time then passed pleasantly enough, and plenty of active exercise supplied him with a vent for his energies. He did not shear any of the sheep, for Hora had bidden him stay his hand. A blameless university career would, he knew, be of great value in the future.