“Sir, you ought to know better. Your sense of justice will lead you, I hope, to apologise to that man”.
He did not wait to see the effect of this public reproof, which was heard by a hundred people, but struck his mare hastily on the shoulder, called Clayton, and rode away. Cradock, who now had the ball in his hands, threw it a hundred feet high.
“Catch it who will”, he said; “I shall bowl no more to–day. Farmer Blackers, I apologise to you; I did not know you were so tender”.
Feeling far more tender himself (for all that was the youthʼs bravado), he went away, doubting right and wrong, to his own little room on the ground floor. There he would smoke his pipe, and meditate, and condemn himself, if the verdict were true. That young fellowʼs sense of justice was larger, softer, more deeply fibred, than any Sir Cradock Nowellʼs.
CHAPTER XIV.
Men of high culture and sensitive justice, who have much to do with ill–taught workmen, lie under a terrible disadvantage. They fear to presume upon the mere accident of their own position, they dread to extract more dues from another than they in his place would render, they shrink from saying what may recall the difference betwixt them, they cannot bear to be stiff and dogmatic, yet they know that any light word may be taken in heavy earnest. True sympathy is the only thing to bring master and man together; and sympathy is a subtle vein, direct when nature hits it, but crooked and ungrammatical to the syntax of education. Cradock Nowell often touched it, without knowing how; and hence his popularity among the “lower classes”. Clayton hit upon it only in the softer sex. Bull Garnet knew how to move it deeply, and owed his power to that knowledge, even more than to his energy.
Cradock was pondering these things in the pipe of contemplation, when a pair of keen eyes twinkled in at the window, and a shrewd, shrill voice made entry.