"Go to your room, sir, and remain there till you are sent for."
Under this unjust treatment the boy became sullen and resentful; thus, when a little pool he had constructed in the garden, to hold a shoal of minnows, by her order was emptied and filled up, he revenged himself by poodling her favourite Persian cat, the gift of her aunt, Mrs. Rookleigh, and for this she resolved to inflict condign punishment, with great form and ceremony.
She armed herself with her riding switch (for Greville now kept a pretty pad for her) and desired the groom to bring Master Derval to the stable, and as she did so, in her silly malignity, her very handsome face had a very tiger-like expression, and she grasped the jewelled handle of the switch resolutely in her large white hand.
"Lock the door on the inside," said she when Derval was brought before her. "Off with his jacket and tie up his hands to the knob on that heelpost."
And almost before Derval could realise the situation, he found himself a prisoner, denuded of his jacket, a halter-rope looped round his wrists, and himself "seized up," for deliberate punishment, standing almost on tip-toe, and with considerable tension.
"Will that do, mum?" asked the groom, who thought the situation an amusing one, "a rum start," as he afterwards said in the kitchen, adding that he never thought so "handsome a lady could be so downright savage."
Derval turned his head half round with an appealing expression on his sweet boyish face—a look that reminded her of the expression of Mary's eyes in her banished portrait,—but at that instant she swung the elastic switch round, and it fell with a smart and stinging thud upon his shoulders, which had no protection now save his little shirt. Derval winced, but set his teeth firmly together, determined to die rather than give her the satisfaction of hearing him cry out or supplicate for mercy.
With steady and regular sweep the switch descended on Derval's quivering shoulders again and again; but not a cry escaped him, and enraged anew by his fortitude, or "obstinacy," as she deemed it, Mrs. Hampton exerted herself afresh, and Derval, while clenching his teeth and breathing hard, boy-like, thought of the cruel enchantress who used to whip the bare back of the helpless young king of the Black Isles in the Arabian Nights, and longed for some such punishment to fall on his tormentor as fell on that remarkable lady.
We know not how many strokes were administered, but Mrs. Hampton was becoming somewhat breathless, and the tension of the rope that bound her victim to the heelpost seemed as if dragging his arms out of their sockets.
"Do stop, please mum, the little lad is fainting," exclaimed the groom.