He went along the remainder of the way, which was not long, in silence, and it was only at his own door that he spoke.
‘John,’ he said, ‘that’s such a spectacle as the Spartans, don’t you remember, gave to their boys.’
‘It was awfully cruel, sir,’ cried John, ‘they made the Helots drink—and then—it wasn’t the fault of the poor brutes. I would rather go without the lesson than have it like that.’
‘And I’d rather you had gone without this lesson. I’d rather you knew nothing about it. But we can’t abstract ourselves from the world, and we can’t live in the world without seeing many horrible things. I wonder now whether there was a bit of faithfulness and human feeling at the bottom of all that? Heaven knows!—or it might be the reverse—an attempt to get something out of some poor decent woman to cover her shame. Did you ever hear the name of May about here?’
‘No,’ said John, ‘never;’ and then he paused for a moment. ‘I seem to know something about the name; but I’m sure there’s no one called May here.’
‘Not down by Feather Lane?’ said the curate, thoughtfully. ‘I must speak to Miss Summers about it. She will know. Now, here we are at my door, and I shouldn’t have let you come so far. Go quickly home, my dear boy.’
John obeyed, yet did not obey, this injunction. He went home without lingering, but he did not go quickly. Why there should be a particular pleasure in lingering out of doors in the dark in a world unseen, where there is nothing to please either mind or eye, it would be difficult to say. But that there is, every imaginative spirit must have felt. The boy strolled along in a meditative way, dangling his lantern at his cold fingers’ end, throwing stray gleams upon the road, which gave him a fantastic half-conscious amusement but no aid, though, indeed, he did not require that, in seeing his way. The landlord of the ‘Green Man’ was still outside discoursing upon the hardship of being compelled to take a drunken brute fresh out of prison into his respectable house.
‘We’ll maybe wake up in the morning all dead corpses,’ he said, unconscious of the warrant of Scripture for the words, ‘all along of a clergyman as just fancies things.’
‘Put him in the barn,’ said one of the loungers about, slow spirits excited by the stir of something happening, who had returned and hung about the door discussing it after the curate had passed. ‘Put him in the stable, that’s good enough for the likes of him.’
‘I’ll put him in the loft and turn the key upon him, so as he’ll do no harm,’ said the landlord. The man, as John made out with a gleam of his lantern, was still seated on the edge of the pathway, supported against the wall, his red handkerchief showing in the light. He was muttering on in a long hoarse monologue, in which there was still audible from time to time the name of May.