“How very angry he looks!” thought Jack, and was glad when he had got away and changed his riding-clothes, and run upstairs to Boo. It was not very often now that he was allowed to scamper up to the children’s tea and daub himself with honey and marmalade, and pile sugar on hot buttered toast. The servants called him “sir,” and Boo’s governess called him “M. le Duc.” It was all deadly dull, and Jack envied the hall-boy.
“You will have a great stake in the country,” said his tutor.
“A beefsteak?” said saucy Jack, and was set to write out a line fifty times, which was very hard work to a little man who could only move a pen with extreme slowness and stiffness in letters an inch high, for his education had been extremely neglected.
He admired his uncle Ronald because Hurstmanceaux was the kind of man whom boys always do admire; but he was afraid of him, and he sighed for his beloved Harry. There was nobody like Harry in all the wide world, and where had his idol gone?
“Not ever to write!” said Jack to himself, with tears in his eyes. He did not say anything about his anxiety even to Boo, for Boo was at no time sympathetic, and was at this moment delirious with town joys, having gone to a morning performance, some tableaux vivants, and a water-color exhibition all in one day, wearing a marvelous picture-hat and a new bracelet-watch.
Except by Jack, Brancepeth was wholly forgotten, consigned to that oblivion which society spreads like a pall over even the memories of the absent. His father and mother heard from him at intervals; no one else. He was one of the many who have gone too fast, who pull up perforce, and drop off the course: such non-stayers interest no one. The men with whom he had gone out to the South Pole, and later to the Cape, returned, and said they had left him there. That was all. He had spoken of exploration. They supposed that meant he had gone “on the make.” He had been a very popular man, but popularity is a flame which must be kept alight by the fuel of contact and of conversation: absence extinguishes it instantly.
Jack thought about a great many things, especially when he was shut up for his sins all alone, an event which occurred frequently.
The sum of his thoughts were not favorable to his mother.
“Mother has driven Harry away,” he said to himself.
Why?