Any ordinary reformer would have been satisfied with the week’s work he had already accomplished. But Mr Frampton added yet another blow at the very heart of the dry-rot before the week was out.
On the day before the football match Bolsover was staggered, and, so to speak, struck all of a heap by the announcement that in future the school tuck-shop would be closed until after the dinner hour!
Fellows stared at one another with a sickly, incredulous smile when they first heard the grim announcement and wondered whether, after all, the new head-master was an escaped lunatic. A few gifted with more presence of mind than others bethought them of visiting the shop and of dispelling the hideous nightmare by optical demonstration.
Alas! the shutters were up. Mother Partridge was not at the receipt of custom, but instead, written in the bold, square hand of Mr Frampton himself, there confronted them the truculent notice, “The shop will for the future be open only before breakfast and after dinner.”
“Brutal!” gasped Farfield, as he read it. “Does he mean to starve us as well as drown us?”
“Hard lines for poor old Mother Partridge,” suggested Scarfe.
This cry took. There was somehow a lurking sense of shame which made it difficult for Bolsover to rise in arms on account of the injury done to itself. Money had been wasted, appetites had been lost, digestions had been ruined in that shop, and they knew it.
If you had put the question to any one of the boys who crowded down, hungry after their bath, to breakfast on the day of the football match, he would have told you that Frampton was as great a brute as ever, and that it was a big shame to make fellows play whether they liked it or not. For all that, he would tell you, he was going to play, much as he hated it, to avoid a row. And if you had pressed him further he would have confided to you that it was expected the School would beat the Sixth, and that he rather hoped, as he must play, he would get a chance at the ball before the match was over. From all which you might gather that Bolsover was reluctantly coming round to take an interest in the event.
“Fortune favours the brave,” said Mr Steele, one of his assistants, to the head-master at dinner-time. “You have conquered before you have struck, mighty Caesar.”
Mr Frampton smiled. He was flushed and excited. Two days ago he had seemed to be committed to a desperate venture. Now, a straight path seemed to open before him, and Bolsover, in his enthusiastic imagination, was already a reformed, reinvigorated institution.