Once behind the rocks he sat down and sobbed, even as he did so wondering when he had cried before. The Duke did not “blub”—never—he considered tears unworthy of a man, “of an officer and a gentleman,” had not the father whose memory he adored once said to him: “Curse if you like, old man, but never cry.” So the Duke never cried, though his language on occasions would have surprised his mother by its forcible variety. Before ladies, though, “gentlemen do not swear,” so Mary remained in blissful ignorance of her son’s proficiency in certain forms of objurgation.
Now, however, the Duke sobbed, great tearing, dreadful sobs that racked his slender body with a pain that was almost physical.
The colonel had done his work. As he walked across the green to enlighten Duke, he had said to himself: “I’ll make it hot for Mrs. Burton, haughty minx; the boy’s a tartar.”
Mary had found it necessary to snub the colonel on more than one occasion; so he no longer called her “a monstrous fine woman.” A fancied slight rankles in the mean and narrow soul; revenge is doubly sweet if one near and dear to the offender can be made the instrument of punishment.
The Duke sat behind the rocks and sobbed until he felt sick and stupid. Had he not heard of that horrible institution called a stepfather? Had he not read only last holidays a book called “David Copperfield,” wherein the iniquities of such an one were set forth with terrible distinctness.
He was not a religious child. Mary was not dogmatic in her teaching, she influenced more by her example and her mental attitude than by conscious effort. Yet here and now the boy felt that circumstances were too strong for him, and he prayed in a hopeless, muddled fashion that if his mother did this thing, God would take him to join the father she seemed to have forgotten.
It is a mistake to think that children never come face to face with despair. They do, more often than the superior, omniscient grown-ups themselves. There is a finality about every sorrow for children, they cannot realize that such pain as they feel can pass; they do not believe it. That saddest of all poets must have thought of sorrowing children when he wrote:
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless, who had most believed.
What matter if the grief be short, its poignancy while it lasts is none the less acute.