“Oh, shouldn’t I!” cried the boy; “just to see him go down, and turn over on his face, and clinch his hands. Do they always do that, I wonder? You see them in the pictures all with their fists clinched, clawing at the ground. Well,” he added, with magnanimity, “he needn’t quite die, you know; I’d like him only to be badly hurt, as bad as if he were killed, and then to get better. I dare say,” said the child, “Charles got better, you know, after Orlando threw him. It isn’t said that he was regularly killed.”
“Is it a pretty story you’ve been reading, dear?” said Lucy, sweetly, altogether ignorant of Orlando. And she was not ashamed of her ignorance, nor did Jock know that she had any reason to be ashamed.
“That’s the best bit,” he said, impartially. “The rest is mostly about girls. It was the Duke’s wrestler, you know, a big beast like—oh, I don’t know anybody so big—a drayman,” said Jock, as a big wagon lumbered by, laden with barrels, with one of those huge specimens of humanity (and beer) moving along like a clumsy tower by its side. “Like him; and Orlando was quite young, you know, not so very big—like me, when I am grown up.”
“You don’t know what you will be when you are grown up, you silly little boy. Perhaps you will never grow up at all,” said Lucy, somewhat against her conscience improving the occasion.
Jock stood for a moment with wide open eyes. Then resumed:
“I sha’n’t be big or fat like that fellow—when I am about seventeen, or perhaps twenty-two, and never taught to box or anything. I would have gone in at him,” cried Jock, throwing out his poor arm, with a very tightly clinched woolen glove at the end of it, “just like Orlando, just like this; and down he’d go, like, like—” But imagination did not serve him in this particular. “Like Charles did,” he concluded, with a dropping of his voice, which betrayed a consciousness of the failure, not in grammar, but in force of metaphor. Jock’s experience did not furnish any parallel incident.
“You must never fight when you grow up,” said Lucy. “Gentlemen never do; except when they are soldiers, and have to go and fight for the queen.”
“Does the queen want to be fighted for?” said Jock. “If any fellow was to bully her or hit her—”
“Oh,” cried Lucy, horrified, “nobody would do that, but people sometimes go against the country, Jock, and then the people that are fighting for England are said to be fighting for the queen.”
Jock’s mind, however, went astray in the midst of this discourse. There passed the pair in the road a very captivating little figure—a small boy, much smaller even than Jock, with long fair locks streaming down his shoulders, in the most coquettish of dresses, mounted upon a beautiful cream-colored pony, as tiny as its rider. What child could pass this little equestrian and not gaze after him? The children sighed out of admiration and envy when they saw him, for he was a very well-known figure about Farafield; but the elders shook their heads and said, “Poor child!” Why should the old people say “Poor child!” and the young ones regard him with such admiring eyes? It was little Gerald Ridout, the son of the circus proprietor. Nobody was better known. As he rode along, the most daring little rider, on his pretty little Arab, which was as pretty as himself, with his long flowing curls waving, there could have been no such attractive advertisement. The circus traveled for a great part of the year, but its home was in Farafield, and everybody knew little Gerald. Jock fixed his glistening eyes upon him from the moment of his appearance—eyes that shone with pleasure and sympathy, and that wistful longing to be as beautiful and happy, which is not envy. There was nothing of the more hateful sentiment in little Jock’s heart, but because he admired he would have liked to resemble, had that been within his power. He followed the child with his eyes as long as he was visible. Then he asked, “Do people who are rich have ponies, Lucy?” with much gravity and earnestness.