“Um! You women-folk think yourselves wonderfully clever. But come, I can’t waste my time here.” (Joshua had heard all he went for.) “Give me quarter-a-pound of humbugs; I threw half the other things away,” said he.
“I don’t think it’s much you’ll throw away, Jotty,” replied the old confectioner, with independent familiarity, as she weighed and parcelled the sweets, for which this time he put down the money.
“It’s much you know about it, Mother Clowes,” he jerked out, as if throwing the words at her over his shoulder, as he turned to leave the shop, putting the package in one of the large pockets of his long flap waistcoat as he went.
His own house, not more than three hundred yards away, adjoined the Grammar School; a red-brick building, with stone quoins, now darkened by time and smoke, one gable of which overhung the Irk; the other, pierced for four small-paned windows, almost confronting the antique Sun Inn, at the acute angle of Long Millgate, and quite overlooking an open space, flanked by the main entrance to the College. From this, the east wing of the College, it is separated by a plain iron gateway and palisades on the Millgate side, and by a wall which serves as a screen from the river on the other side; and the enclosed space between rails, wall, College, and the front of the school served as a playground for such scholars as were willing to keep within bounds. It was divided into upper, middle, and lower schools, the last being in the basement, and designed for elementary instruction. The high and middle schools together occupied the same long room above this. Joshua Brookes, as second master, presided over the middle school, and surely never M.A. had so thankless an office. He was placed at a terrible disadvantage in the school, not altogether because he had risen from its lowest ranks—not altogether because a drunken foul-mouthed cripple interfered with their sports, or went reeling to his son’s domicile next door—not because he was unduly severe; other masters were that—but because his own eager thirst for knowledge as a boy had made him intolerant towards indolence, incredulous of incapacity; and his constitutional impatience and irritability made his harsh voice seem harsher when he reproved a dullard. He lost his self-command, and with that went his command over others. Meaning to be affable to the poor, from whose ranks he sprang, he became familiar; and they reciprocated the familiarity so fully as to draw down the contempt of his confreres. He was a man to be respected, and they slighted him; a man to be honoured, and they snubbed him. What wonder, then, that eccentricities grew like barnacles on a ship’s keel, or that the boys failed in obedience and respect to a master when their elders set them the example?
This defence of a misunderstood man has not taken up a tithe of the time he gave to his refractory class, to whom he went straightway from the confectioner’s, whose “humbugs” had melted considerably, not wholly down his own throat, before the hour when the boys closed their Latin Grammars and Greek Lexicons, and poured as if they were mad down the steps, and through the gate, to the road. Yet even the sweets he gave to the attentive did not conciliate; they only made the intractable more defiant; and even the recipients felt they were bribed.
Warned by the uproar of a large school in motion, as well as by the long-cased clock, Tabitha, his one servant, had her master’s tea ready for him the instant he came in from the school, as he generally did, fagged and jaded, with the growl of a baited bear.
That day he simply put his head into the house, and bawled, “Tea ready, Tab?” and without waiting for an answer, went on, “Keep it hot till I get back;” then, closing the door, took his way eastwards down Long Millgate. His journey was not a long one. It ended at the bottom of a yard where a sad pale-faced young woman was switching monotonously at a mass of downy cotton, and listening at the same time to the equally monotonous drawl of a youngster in the throes of monosyllabic reading.
“Get larning, lad!—get larning! Larning’s a greät thing. Yo’ shan read i’ this big picture-book when you can spell gradely,” had been Simon’s precept and inducement; and Jabez, to whom that big pictorial Bible was a mysterious unexplored crypt, did try with all his little might.
“J-a-c-k—Jack, w-a-s—was, a g-o-o-d—good, b-o——”
“And I hope you’re a good boy, as well as Jack,” said Joshua Brookes abruptly, as he put his head into the room, and put a stop to the lesson at the same time. “But, hey-day” (observing the swollen nose and bruised forehead), “You’re been in the wars. Good boys don’t fight.”