Loman in Luck.
While we have been talking of Oliver and Wraysford, and of the manner in which the results of the Nightingale examination affected them and the class to which they belonged, the reader will hardly have forgotten that there was another whose interest in that result was fully as serious and fully as painful.
Loman had been counting on gaining the scholarship to a dead certainty. From the moment when it occurred to him he would be able to free himself of his money difficulties with Cripps by winning it, he had dismissed, or seemed to dismiss, all further anxiety from his mind. He never doubted that he in the Sixth could easily beat the two boys in the Fifth; and though, as we have seen, he now and then felt a sneaking misgiving on the subject, it never seriously disturbed his confidence.
Now, however, he was utterly floored. He did not need to wait for the announcement of the results to be certain he had not won, for he had known his fate the moment his eyes glanced down the questions on the paper on the morning of examination.
At his last interview with Cripps that memorable Saturday afternoon, he had promised confidently to call at the Cockchafer next Thursday with the news of the result, as a further guarantee for the payment of the thirty pounds, never doubting what that result would be. How was he to face this interview now?
He could never tell Cripps straight out that he had been beaten in the examination; that would be the same thing as telling him to go at once to the Doctor or his father with the document which the boy had signed, and expose the whole affair. And it would be no use making a poor mouth to the landlord of the Cockchafer and begging to be forgiven the debt; Loman knew enough by this time to feel convinced of the folly of that. What was to be done?
“I shall have to humbug the fellow some way,” said Loman to himself, as he sat in his study the afternoon after the announcement of the result. And then followed an oath.
Loman had been going from bad to worse the last month. Ever since he had begun, during the holidays, regularly to frequent the Cockchafer, and to discover that it was his interest to make himself agreeable to the man he disliked and feared, the boy’s vicious instincts had developed strangely. Company which before would have offended him, he now found—especially when it flattered him—congenial, and words and acts from which in former days he would have shrunk now came naturally.
“I shall have to humbug the fellow somehow,” said he; “I only wish I knew how;” and then Loman set himself deliberately to invent a lie for Mr Cripps.
A charming afternoon’s occupation this for a boy of seventeen!