He took a few hurried steps in the direction of the voices, and was even making up his mind to run, when it suddenly occurred to him, “What if, after all, their story had been true, and the calling of them back should be a greater mistake even than the letting of them off?”
This awkward doubt drove him back once more to his study, where, shutting the door, he flung himself into his chair in a state of abject despondency and shame.
Twenty times he determined to go to the doctor at once, and refuse for an hour longer to play the farce of being captain of Willoughby. And as often another spirit kept him back, and whispered to him that it was only the cowards who gave in at a single failure.
From these unpleasant reflections the summons to first school was a welcome diversion, and he gladly shook off the captain for an hour, and figured in his more congenial part of a scholar. But even here he was not allowed wholly to forget his new responsibilities. Nearly all those around him were fellow-monitors, who had just come smarting from the doctor’s summary rejection of their petition; and Riddell could tell by their angry looks and ill-tempered words that he, however innocent, was the object of their irritation. He had never been a favourite before, but it certainly was not pleasant to have to learn now by the most unmistakable signs that he was downrightly unpopular and disliked by those from whom he should have had his warmest backing up.
And yet, strange to say, it was this sense of his own unpopularity which more than anything nerved him to a resolution to stick to his post, and, come what would of it, do his best to discharge his new unwelcome tasks. If only he could feel a little more sure of himself! But how was it likely he could feel sure of himself after his lamentable failure of the morning?
But the lamentable failure of the morning, as it happened, was nothing to other failures speedily to follow on this same unlucky day.
Scarcely was Riddell back in his study after first school, hoping for a little breathing space in which to recover his fluttered spirits, when Gilks entered and said, “I say, there’s a row going on in the Fourth. You’d better stop it, or the doctor will be down on us.”
And so saying he vanished, leaving the captain about as comfortable with this piece of intelligence as he would have been with a bombshell suddenly pitched into his study.
A row in the Fourth! the headquarters of the Limpets, each one of whom was a stronger man than he, and whom Wyndham himself had often been put to it to keep within bounds!
With an ominous shiver Riddell put on his cap and sallied out in the direction of the Fourth. A man about to throw himself over a precipice could hardly have looked less cheerful!