When the match was over, Loman tried his best to slip away unobserved by his respectable town acquaintances; but they were far too polite to allow him.
“Well,” cried Mr Cripps, coolly joining the boy as he walked with the other players back to the school—“well, you do do it, you do. Bless me! I call that proper sport, I do. What do you put on the game, bobs or sovereigns, eh? Never mind, I and my pals we wanted a dander, so we thought we’d look you up, eh? You know Tommy Granger here? I heard him saying as we came along he wondered what you’d stand to drink after it all.”
All Loman could do was to stand still as soon as this talk began, and trust his schoolfellows would walk on, and so miss all Mr Cripps’s disgusting familiarities.
“I say,” whispered he, in an agitated voice, “for goodness’ sake go away, Cripps! I shall get into an awful row if you don’t.”
“Oh, all serene, my young bantam,” replied Cripps, aloud, and still in the hearing of not a few of the boys. “I’ll go if you want it so particular as all that. I can tear myself away. Only mind you come and give us a look up soon, young gentleman, for I and my pals ain’t seen you for a good while now, and was afraid something was up. Ta! ta! Good-day, young gentlemen all. By-bye, my young Nightingales.”
Loman’s feelings can be more easily imagined than expressed when Cripps, saying these words, held out his hand familiarly to be shaken. The boy did shake it, as one would shake hands with a wolf, and then, utterly ashamed and disgraced, he made his way among his wondering schoolfellows up to the school.
Was this his luck, after all? A monitor known to be the companion and familiar friend of the disreputable cad at the Cockchafer! The boy who, if not liked, had yet passed among most of his schoolfellows as a steady, well-conducted fellow, now suddenly shown up before the whole school like this!
Loman went his way to his study, feeling that the mask was pretty nearly off his face at last, and that Saint Dominic’s knew him almost as he really was. Yet did they know all?
As Loman passed Greenfield’s study he stopped and peeped in at the door. The owner was sitting in his armchair, with his feet upon the mantelpiece, laughing over a volume of Pickwick till the tears came. And yet the crime Oliver was suspected of was theft and lying? Was it not strange—must it not have struck Loman as strange, in all his misery, that any one under such a cloud as Greenfield could think of laughing, while he, under a cloud surely no greater, felt the most miserable boy alive!