It is a sad moment in the life of a boy when he loses his natural protector, even although he may step into his father’s property. This desolation becomes intensified when, besides his father, the boy loses home, and, with what makes home attractive, all certainty of the future.
Fred Weldon felt now, for the first time, that he was no longer a passenger in life’s bark, but had been forced into the position of the formerly utterly trusted and lost pilot. He had now to steer where formerly he had left that responsibility to others.
It would have been a most wretched time, those last two weeks at Shebourne Academy, for poor Fred Weldon, but for the kindly sympathy of both teachers and fellow-pupils. These made him feel that misfortune has its compensations, when it brings out these traits of kindness and friendship.
The entire school united in showing to Fred how much he was cared for daring this period of grief and uncertainty.
But his two chums, Ned Romer and Clarence Raybold, did more, for they gripped the future with firm and energetic hands, and rendered it a definite plan. As long as man or boy can map out his course with definite lines, he has something worth living for. It is the groping through a damp and dark mistland after a formless ideal which rusts the mind and saps the vital forces. As long as we can trace a path, so we can follow it; as long as we know our direction, difficulties are almost pleasures. Without his two chums, Fred might have fallen into an inert condition and given way to despair. Without this sudden calamity befalling him, those three friends might have parted on that vacation and gone different ways, to idle and dream abortive things. Now it knitted their lives together, and while they discussed his affairs, they settled their own.
Fred had received his letter on a Friday. On Saturday afternoon the three friends were lying on the banks of the river near the bathing-pool.
Fred was in the centre, lying on his back and looking at the sky. His friends reclined on each side of him, resting on their elbows, and plucking daisies and buttercups aimlessly.
That was their way of exhibiting their sympathy. They would not look at him, for they instinctively felt that he would resent being watched just now. He could not help his eyes filling now and then, as he saw pictures of his lost Australian home with his father in that upper patch of dark blue sky, but he would have hated his chums to see him crying like a girl. So also would they have despised and detested themselves for watching these signs of weakness. To cry is human, and sometimes cannot be kept under—a man will own this with shame; but it is abominable to be seen at the pitiful game, and no real friend would ever own he had seen his chum at it. This is one of the sacred obligations of man-friendship.
“I say, Raybold,” cried Ned, speaking over the silent Fred, “I’ve been thinking lately of making my exploration ground Africa. Do you intend sticking to Johannesburg when you leave here?”
“Not likely, Ned; the pater wishes me to move about and see the country before I settle down.”