"Then do your duty by him," said Mrs. Courtenay. "You do it to others; do it also to him." And thenceforward, and until the day of his death, Mr. Tempest did his duty as he conceived it! never a fraction more, but never a fraction less.
John was put early to school. No one went down to see the place before he came to it. No one wrote anxiously about him beforehand, describing his health and his attainments in the Latin grammar. Mr. Goodwin, who was afterwards his tutor, long remembered the arrival of the little, square, bullet-headed boy with a servant, with whom he gravely shook hands on the platform. Mr. Goodwin had come to meet him, and Charles, the last link to home, was parted from in silence. The small luggage was handed over. Once as they left the station, John looked back, and Mr. Goodwin saw the little brown hands clench tightly. John had a trick of clenching his hands as a child, which clung to him throughout life, but he walked on in silence. He was seven years old, and in trousers. Pantalon oblige. Mr. Goodwin, a good-natured under-master fresh from college, with small brothers at home, respected his silence. Perhaps he divined something of the struggle that was going on under that brand new little great-coat of many pockets. Presently John swallowed ominously several times.
Mr. Goodwin supposed the usual tears were coming.
"Those are very large puddles," said John suddenly, with a quaver in his voice, "larger than——" The voice, though not the courage, failed.
"They are, Tempest," said Mr. Goodwin, "uncommonly large!"
And that was the beginning of a lasting friendship between the two. That friendship took a long time to grow. John was reserved with the reticence that in a child speaks volumes of what the home-life had been. He had not the habit of talking to anyone. He listened and obeyed. At first he held aloof from the other boys. Mr. Goodwin advised him to make friends, and John listened in silence. He had never been with boys before. He did not know how. The first half he was very lonely. He would have been bullied more than he actually was had he not been so strong and so impossible to convince of defeat. As it was, he took his share with a sort of doggedness, and would have started on the high road to unpopularity in his new little world if he had not turned out good at games. That saved him, and before many weeks were over long blotted accounts of football and cricket and racquets were written to Mitty and Charles. Mr. Goodwin noticed that the weekly letter to his father never contained any particulars of this kind.
There had been a difficulty at first about his correspondence, which—after long pondering upon the same—John had brought to Mr. Goodwin for advice.
"I want to send a letter to some one," he said one day, when Mr. Goodwin had asked him into his study. "Not father."
"To whom, then?"