“What, Holt?”
“Yes, Holt. I fancy the thought in his mind at this moment is that you are the most unjust person at Crofton.”
“I! Unjust!”
“Yes; so he thinks. When you first came, you and he were companions. You found comfort in each other while all the rest were strangers to you. You were glad to hear, by the hour together, what he had to tell you about India, and his voyages and travels. Now he feels himself lonely and forsaken, while he sees you happy with a friend. He thinks it hard that you should desert him because he owes you a shilling, when he was cheated quite as much as you.”
“Because he owes me a shilling!” cried Hugh, starting to his feet, “as if—”
Once more he had nearly fallen from his perch. Firth caught him; and then asked him how Holt should think otherwise than as he did, since Hugh had been his constant companion up to that Saturday afternoon, and had hardly spoken to him since.
Hugh protested that the shilling had nothing to do with the matter; and he never meant to take more than sixpence from Holt, because he thought Lamb was the one who ought to pay the shilling. The thing was, he did not, and could not, like Holt half so well as Dale. He could not make a friend of Holt, because he wanted spirit—he had no courage. What could he do? He could not pretend to be intimate with Holt when he did not like him; and if he explained that the shilling had nothing to do with the matter, he could not explain how it really was, when the fault was in the boy’s character, and not in his having given any particular offence. What could he do?
Firth thought he could only learn not to expect, anywhere out of the bounds of home, what he thought justice. He must, of course, try himself to be just to everybody; but he must make up his mind in school, as men have to do in the world, to be misunderstood—to be wrongly valued; to be blamed when he felt himself the injured one; and praised when he knew he did not deserve it.
“But it is so hard,” said Hugh.
“And what do people leave home for but to learn hard lessons?”