No; not quite empty. One young man sat on through the rain on the seat from which he had been watching the boys’ game. A shabby, almost ragged young man, with a disagreeable face and an almost contemptuous curl of the lips, as the rain, gathering force every second, buffeted him in the face and drenched him where he sat. There were a hundred seats more sheltered than that on which he sat, and by walking scarcely fifty yards he could have escaped the rain altogether. But he sat recklessly on, and let the rain do its worst, his eyes still on the empty football field, and his ears ringing still with the merry shouts of the departed boys.
My reader, had he chanced to pass down that deserted walk on this stormy afternoon, would hardly have recognised in the lonely occupant of that seat the John Jeffreys he had seen six months ago at Clarges Street. It was not merely that he looked haggard and ill, or that his clothes were ragged. That was bad enough, but the reader has seen him in such a plight before. But what he has not seen before—or if at all, only in passing moments—is the bitter, hard look on his face, changing it miserably. A stranger passing him that afternoon would have said—
“There sits a man who hates all the world.”
We, who know him better, would have said—
“There sits our poor dog with a bad name, deserted even by hope.”
And so it was.
Jeffreys had left Clarges Street smarting under a sense of injury, but still resolved to keep up the fight for his good name, in which for so many months past he had been engaged.
Not by appealing to Mr Rimbolt. Although he knew, had Mr Rimbolt been at home, all this would not have happened, his pride forbade him now to take a single step to reinstate himself in a house from which he had been so ignominiously expelled. No, not even when that house held within its walls Percy and Raby. The idea of going back filled him with horror.
On the contrary, he would hide himself from them, even though they sought to find him; and not till his name was as good as theirs would he see them again or come near them.
Which surely was another way of resolving never to see them again; for the leopard cannot change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin! A bad name is a stain which no washing can efface; it clings wherever you go, and often men who see it see nothing else in you but the scar.