The Blow falls.
“My good friend,” said Monsieur Lablache, “you are in a great trouble. I am sorry for you.”
Monsieur had looked in as he sometimes did to breakfast in his friend’s study.
The two men, one strong, the other weak, still clung to one another in an odd sort of friendship. Railsford’s protection had improved monsieur’s position in the school not a little. The boys of his own house were more tolerant of his foreign peculiarities; and some of the other masters, taking to heart the chivalrous example of their junior colleague, had begun to think better of the unpopular detention master, and to recognise good qualities in him to which hitherto they had been blind.
If monsieur could only have got it out of his head that he was a born diplomatist, there would not have been a more harmless master in Grandcourt.
“I am sorry for you, my good friend,” repeated he. “But you will be brave.”
“Really, Lablache, you don’t give a man an appetite for breakfast. Things don’t look very cheerful, I know; but what special cause for lamentation have we?”
“Bad lies will be told of you at the masters’ meeting to-night,” said the Frenchman, “but take courage, mon ami, I shall be there.”
“Have you any idea what the lies are to be?” asked Railsford, who perhaps was not as jubilant as he might have been at this last cheering promise.
“Meester Beekaire, so I have heard, desires to accuse you of having assaulted him. It is absurd. But no; I overhear him say to Meester Rogers in the masters’ hall that he has evidence, he has evidence—ho! ho! it is absurd.”