“I will not live with her,” Jack repeated between his teeth. “I know I am a minor at present and that you can lock me up, and all that sort of thing, but if you make me live with her I will kill myself. A quite little boy, littler than I, killed himself the other day, only because his pensum was too hard. It was put in the papers. It is quite easy, and it doesn’t hurt—much.”
Hurstmanceaux was still silent. Other men would have seized the occasion to point out the unlawfulness of suicide, but he refrained from any rebuke. He saw that the boy was in that kind of mood when nothing which is said in censure can pierce through the heavy fog of a dull despairing sorrow: the fog can only be penetrated by the sunshine of sympathy.
“You don’t like me, do you, Jack?” he said at last.
Jack was silent through truthfulness and courtesy.
“If you did,” said Hurstmanceaux, “I would take you to live with me at Faldon, and give you an Oxford friend of mine for a tutor; I don’t like the man you have. This is of course subject to Lord Augustus’s approval. Would Faldon suit you, if he did not disapprove?”
“Yes,” said Jack rather coldly. “He told me to try and grow up like you; so I suppose he would have liked me to live with you.”
“Who said that?”
“He did—Harry.”
Hurstmanceaux felt an embarrassment which Jack was quick to perceive.
He moved a little nearer to his uncle with the first impulse of confidence he had ever shown in him.