“It was practically over then,” her husband interrupted, and added with a slightly literary turn of speech he sometimes adopted: “That was only the afterglow.”
But it is worth recording that, from that time, Douglas, although he was naughty enough in other ways, never robbed the larder again.
Nine years passed before Douglas’s great gift was once more manifested.
There was undoubtedly something unusually charming about the boy that protected him from punishment; and as he had been spoilt by his father at home, so was he also treated rather too leniently at school. But Dr. Watson, his headmaster, came at last to the end of his weakness. Douglas was becoming a bad influence in the school. His careless evasions of discipline set an example of insubordination that was all too readily followed by the other boys.
Dr. Watson braced himself to the inevitable. In his heart he regretted the necessity, but he knew that Douglas must be sacrificed for the good of the school. He had been warned and mildly punished a hundred times. Now he must pay the full penalty.
The choice lay between expulsion and a public flogging, and when Douglas chose the latter, Dr. Watson resolved that the flogging should be of unusual severity. When the whole school was assembled, he made a very earnest and moving speech, deploring the causes that had given rise to the occasion, and showing how inevitable was the disgraceful result.
Douglas, white and terrified, made ready in a trembling silence, then, turning his back on the tensely expectant audience, he faced his headmaster.
Arthur Coburn, Douglas’s humanitarian house-master, was so upset by these preliminaries that for one moment he was tempted to leave the hall. Corporal punishment had always seemed to him a horrible thing, but never had it seemed quite so revolting as on this occasion. Yet he fought against the feeling. He knew that his chief was neither a stern nor a cruel man, and had been driven into the present position by the sheerly impudent persistence of Douglas’s disobedience. By way of alleviating as far as possible his own nervous distress, therefore, Coburn took up a position with his back to the rostrum, and faced the great crowd of just perceptibly intimidated boys.
And waiting, much as Douglas’s mother had waited in shamed anxiety some nine years before, Coburn was amazed to see a sudden and incomprehensible change in the massed faces before him. The tensity, the look of half eager, half apprehensive expectation strangely relaxed. A wave of what looked like relief ran back in a long ripple of emotion from the front to the back of the many ranks of watching boys. In one instant everyone was wearing a faint smile of almost holy serenity.