CHAPTER XV
TONY PLAYS THE PART OF A GUARDIAN ANGEL
Mr. Roylston put his policy with regard to Tony into rigorous effect. From that day, except when it was obviously necessary to speak with them about their classroom work, he ignored Deering and his friends. He treated them with an icy courtesy that was far more effective in subduing their high spirits than his sarcasm had ever been. Lawrence and Wilson, particularly the latter, were restive under the process, and often threatened, though they never attempted, open rebellion. Tony, on the other hand, was more sensitive to this peculiar method of revenge, and it was probably due to his recognition of this sensitiveness that Mr. Roylston had adopted it. Deering knew that he had been guilty of ungentlemanly conduct and he was not happy so long as his whole-hearted apology was not accepted in the spirit in which it was given. But there seemed no way in which he could improve the situation. He tried to prove his sincerity by doing specially good work in Mr. Roylston’s class, but no word of commendation ever fell from the master’s lips.
In truth Mr. Roylston had been wounded more deeply than he had ever been before in a long career that had been marked, too, by much open hostility. But unfortunately he was not the type that could perceive that his difficulties largely lay in his own fundamental lack of sympathy with boy nature; and, resenting what he felt was the boys’ unjust attitude toward him, he had not it in his soul then to forgive such an offense as Tony had been guilty of. As he looked back over their four or five years at Deal, the incident of The Spectacle seemed to him but the culmination of a long series of systematic attempts on the part of that particular “crowd” to belittle and annoy him. That the Head had practically required him to give up the gating penalty, that he had perhaps a lurking feeling that that penalty had been unjustly imposed, added to the bitterness he felt for our young friends.
And mixed up in all this affair of Deering and his “crowd,” there was in Mr. Roylston’s mind a sense, not clear but keen, that Finch was somehow concerned. He genuinely believed that Doctor Forester had made a mistake in taking Finch at Deal, and the passage of words with Morris on the occasion of the boy’s arrival, had irritated him intensely. He knew, and was sometimes ashamed of the fact, that he had let that irritation affect his treatment, in little ways, of the boy himself. He had always disliked Morris, and quite sincerely thought Morris’s unaffected good nature and genial optimism with regard to boys was a pose. The incident of Finch’s hazing, wherein he had punished the rescuers instead of the hazers, increased his uncomfortable feeling about the whole situation. But the discomfort did not increase his humility. He knew that in much he was wrong, but he was so accustomed to the idea of supposing himself to be right, that he argued away the accusations of his conscience.
On Finch he therefore continued to vent a good deal of his spleen. And on Finch the old sledge-hammer method of sarcasm was an effective weapon. The boy bore the master’s reproofs with a little less outward wincing than of old, but inwardly they racked his very soul. Mr. Roylston’s attitude affected him very differently from the way it affected Deering. He could not work in his class. A shaft of sarcasm, an expression of patient suffering on the master’s face as the boy blundered through his recitation, altogether confused him. Day after day he would fail in a lesson which he had spent hours in preparing. From a sense of duty Mr. Roylston now and then would see the delinquent outside of the classroom, and make an attempt to clear up his difficulties. But on these occasions Finch seemingly was more completely bereft of his senses than during a recitation. Mr. Roylston mistook this confusion for willful refusal to understand, and in time treated him accordingly.
“What the deuce is the matter with you, Jake?” Tony asked once, after a trying period in Latin, wherein Finch had floundered about in absurd fashion. “You know a heap more Latin than I do, but you go in before Gumshoe and act as if he were asking you questions in Sanscrit.”
“I know—I know,” Finch answered, miserably. “But I can’t help it. I just can’t get my wits before him. Every idea flies out of my head when he asks me a question. I am doing all right in other subjects.”