Slegge, too, was the biggest and loudest there. He was looking very white, almost as white as Ramball’s bald head, but he said it was all a “jolly lark;” and then for want of something else to say to express how he was enjoying himself, he made the same remark again, and then laughed aloud. But it was the same sort of laugh as would be uttered by the victim of a practical joke who has suddenly sat down upon a tin-tack or a pin.
Mr Morris, too, grew braver and braver, and he smiled a ghastly smile which rather distorted his features as he addressed his pupils.
“Come along, boys,” he said. “This is a holiday indeed. We are going to search for the unknown quantity. An elephant hunt in the Doctor’s grounds! It is quite a novelty.”
“But it isn’t in the Doctor’s grounds now, sir,” said Burney.
This was meant to be facetious; but it turned Mr Morris’s smile into a glare, and brought down upon the boy’s head a rebuke from Slegge.
“Here, don’t you be so fast, youngster,” cried the latter, with the wisdom of a sage in his stern look. “Just remember whom you are talking to, if you please.” Then, to curry favour with the master, “I beg your pardon, Mr Morris, would this be an Indian or an African elephant?”
“Well, Mr Slegge,” said the mathematical master, with his ghastly smile coming back, “now if this were a question of a surd in a compound equation I should be happy to tell you; but as soon as the captive is taken again, and the ‘lark,’ as you call it, is over, I should recommend you to ask Mr Rampson. He’ll tell you, and give you some information as well respecting the Carthaginian army and the elephants with their towers that they marched against the Romans. My mathematical studies take up all my brain-power, and I never venture upon another master’s ground. By the way, who are those boys that we just saw walk through that fence with the show-people? Trespassers, of course. We don’t want any of the town boys here. No violence, mind; but I think you might give them a lesson and turn them out.”
“But they were the two new pupils, sir.”
“What! Severn and the Prince?”
“Yes, sir,” came in chorus.