Young Blood

"Mr. Ringrose!" cried Mrs. Bickersteth hastily.

Harry turned from the baleful yellow face in a paroxysm of contempt and loathing, and was next moment closeted with a trembling old woman whose pitiable agitation was another tribute to the terrible Scrafton.

Mrs. Bickersteth's observations were both brief and broken. She had just heard from Mr. Scrafton what indeed was not exactly new to her. The name was uncommon. Her sons had recalled the case on the arrival of Harry's application for the junior mastership. They had not painted the case quite so black as Mr. Scrafton had done, and they had all agreed that the – the sin of the father – should not disqualify the son. She had not meant to let Mr. Ringrose know that she knew (Harry thanked her in a heartfelt voice), but she had hoped that nobody else would know: and Mr. Scrafton knew for one.

"Do you want to get rid of me?" asked Harry bluntly.

The lady winced.

"Not unless you want to go. No – no – I have neither the inclination nor the right to take such a course. But if, after this, you would rather not stay, I – I would not stand in your way, Mr. Ringrose."

Harry saw how it was with Mrs. Bickersteth. She did not want to be unjust, she did not want to give in to Scrafton, but oh! if Mr. Ringrose would save the situation by going of his own accord!

"Will you give me the afternoon to think it over?" said he.

"Certainly," said Mrs. Bickersteth. "I wish you to consult your own feelings only. I wish to be just, Mr. Ringrose, and – and to meet your ideas. If you are going to town, any time before ten o'clock will be time enough for your return."

Harry expressed his gratitude, and said that in that case it would be unnecessary for him to absent himself before the close of afternoon school; nor did he do so; for he was not going to town at all.

He was going straight to Richmond Hill, to put the whole matter before Gordon Lowndes, and to beg the explanation he felt certain the other could give. Why should Scrafton have lost his colour and his temper at the bare mention of the name of Ringrose? Was it true that he knew that name already "to his cost"? Then how did he know it to his cost, and since when, and what was the subtle connection between Mr. Ringrose and this same Scrafton? Was Lowndes aware of any?

Yes, there was something that Lowndes knew, something that he had known on the Saturday afternoon, something to account for his surprise on learning to what school Harry had gone as master. He had indignantly denied all knowledge of Scrafton, but Harry could no longer accept that gratuitous and inexplicable repudiation. It was the very fact that he did know something about Scrafton, something which he wished to keep to himself, that had made him angrily disclaim such knowledge.

Harry was coming back to his old idea that Lowndes had been more deeply implicated in his father's flight than anybody supposed. He no longer suspected foul play – that was impossible in the face of the letter from Dieppe – but he did suspect complicity on the part of Lowndes. What if Lowndes had swindled wholesale in the ironmaster's name, and what if Scrafton were one of his victims?

What if Lowndes could tell him where his father lay in hiding abroad!

The thought brought a happy moment and an hour of bitterness; no, it were better they should never know; better still if he were dead. And the bitter hour that followed was the last and the loveliest of a warm September day; and Harry Ringrose spent it in walking across Ham Common and through Richmond Park, in the mellow sunset, on his way to Richmond Hill.

When he got there it was dusk, and two men were pacing up and down the little garden in front of Lowndes's house. Harry paused at the gate. The men had their heads close together, and were conversing so earnestly that they never saw him. They were Lowndes and Scrafton.

Harry stepped back without a sound. All his suppositions had been built upon the hypothesis that these two were enemies; it had never entered his head that they might be friends. To find them together was the last thing he had expected, and the discovery chilled him in a way for which he could not instantly account. He knew there was good reason for it, but in his first discomfiture he could not find the reason.

He stole back along the road, a shower of new suspicions sticking like arrows in his soul. The very vagueness of his sensations added to their sickening effect. His brain heaved as though with wine, and when he clapped a hand to his head it came back dripping. He was at the corner of the road before he knew what he was going to do, and there he spent minutes hesitating and considering. Unable to make up his mind, he crossed over and returned to reconnoitre from the other side. To and fro walked Lowndes and Scrafton, on the gravel path in front of the lighted window opposite; and faster than their feet, but lower than their footfalls, went their tongues.

Harry had not heard a word before. At this distance it was impossible for him to catch a syllable, and he was glad of it. He would watch his men and bide his time. It might be his best policy to do nothing, to say nothing, for the present; but he would keep an eye on the house while he thought it over.

The difficulty was for the observer himself to escape observation. The road was so quiet that if he strolled up and down, those other saunterers in the garden could not fail to have their attention attracted to him sooner or later. It was so narrow that they had only to look up in order to see him leaning against the paling of the opposite house. This house, however, was unoccupied, and behind the paling, in the segment of a circle formed by the shortest of suburban carriage drives, grew a clump of laurels which tempted Harry to do a very foolish thing. He crept into the garden of the unoccupied house, and from a point of vantage among the laurels he watched the two men in the garden over the way.

Up and down they walked, backward and forward, and their low voices never ceased; backward and forward, up and down; and now the light of a lamp made oval flames of Lowndes's glasses, now the taller Scrafton's cormorant profile was stamped for an instant on the lighted blinds, while the loathsome sound of his snuff-taking came again and again across the quiet road.

So these men were friends: and Lowndes had carefully implied that they were not even acquainted. Why should he have gone out of his way to do that? He had flown into a temper when that careful implication was inadvertently ignored; and had afterwards so feared the tell-tale effect of this unguarded outbreak that he had gone all the way to Teddington with elaborate apologies and ingenious explanations.

Stay: no: he had gone to Teddington with an ulterior motive, which only this instant dawned upon Harry Ringrose. Now he thought of it, there had been an obvious absence of premeditation about both the apology and the explanation; in fact, he had never before heard the fluent Lowndes hesitate so often for a word. Why? Because he had gone to Teddington that morning with quite another object, and at last Harry saw what it was.

He remembered Mrs. Bickersteth's announcement that this term Mr. Scrafton was coming half-an-hour earlier than formerly. He remembered how cleverly Lowndes had contrived to discover that Scrafton was already in the house. He had never forgotten Scrafton's face on hearing the new master's name. The thing was plain as daylight, and Harry only wondered how and why he had not seen it at once. Gordon Lowndes had gone to Teddington simply and solely to intercept his friend Scrafton, and to warn him that he was about to meet a son of the missing Henry Ringrose.

But why warn him? What had Harry's father been to Scrafton, or Scrafton to Harry's father? The lad's blood ran hot with suspicion, ran cold with surmise: there were the two men who could tell him the truth, there within twenty yards of him: he heard their every footfall in the gravel, heard one taking snuff, and the other talking, talking, talking in an endless whisper. Yet he could not walk boldly across the road and challenge them to tell him the truth! He was not sure that it would be a wise thing to do, but it galled him to feel that he could not do it. Lowndes loved a scene as much as he hated one, but Harry felt he could have stood up to Lowndes alone. Scrafton was a loathly being, but he would not have daunted Harry by himself. It was the two together, the coarse bully and the keen-witted man of the world, strong men both, whom the lad could not bring himself to challenge in cold blood. He had, indeed, too much sense; but, in an agony of self-upbraiding consciousness, he kept blaming and hating himself for having too little pluck. He thought of the motto on his bedroom wall at home. He would have it down; it was not for him. It was only for those who had some pluck to lose.

And as he cowered in the garden of the empty house, a white face among the leaves, impotent, bewildered, self-tormenting, the front door opened across the road, and a supple, strong figure stood so straight in the mouth of the lighted passage, a silhouette crowned with gold by the lamp within. For an instant Harry's heart seemed to stop, and the next instant to rush from his keeping to that lighted door. He had forgotten the existence of Fanny Lowndes.

"Dinner is ready," she said. Harry heard the words distinctly: there was no reason to lower that honest voice. But he thought that he detected an unwonted note of fear – one of disgust he could swear to – and instantly his mind was going over every conversation he had ever had with the girl, hunting for that unwonted note which was yet not entirely unfamiliar. He felt certain that he had heard it before.

"One moment," replied Lowndes; and his voice sank once more, and so continued volubly for some minutes: then the pair went in.

But Harry lingered among his laurels, strongly impelled to go incontinently with his questions and his suspicions to the one friend of whose sympathy he felt sure, of whose truth and honour there was no question. Yet to that one friend he could never go, for was she not also the only child of Gordon Lowndes?

And what then was his wisest course? Should he do nothing, for the present, but return to Teddington, continue in the school, and watch this Scrafton from day to day? Or should he wait until Scrafton was gone, and then confront Lowndes with an uncompromising demand for explanations? Prudence advised one course, gallantry another; but the question was to receive a sufficiently sensational solution. It so happened that the burglary season had set in early that autumn in the Thames valley, and the Richmond police in particular were already greatly on their mettle. A certain young constable, at once desirous of his stripes and yet not a little alarmed by his own enterprise, had obtained leave to go on his beat in noiseless boots, and he came into Greville Road about the time that Lowndes and Scrafton went indoors. Not a sound came from his muffled feet, but that only seemed to make his heart beat the louder; for it was a very human young constable, and the majority of the recent burglaries had taken place at this very hour, while the families were at dinner.

Suddenly the young policeman stood still and all but shaking in his soundless boots: for a few feet from his nose, where he least expected it, in the garden of an empty house, was a pale face among the laurels, with dark eyes upon the house across the road. A palpable burglar choosing his window. A desperate fellow, judging by his face, and yet one to be taken single-handed if he were alone.

Harry did not hear the hand feeling for the truncheon, nor yet the leather tongue leaping from the brass button; but he smelt the dark lantern burning about a second before the light was flashed in his face.

"Wad-you-doing-there?"

The low voice was drunken in its excitement.

Harry recoiled among the laurels, guiltily enough, for he was horribly startled.

"Come-out-o'-that!" growled the young constable through his teeth to prevent their chattering, and with his words still running together. "Come-out-o'-that; you've-got-to-come-along-with-me!"

"Why?" cried Harry, frightened into self-possession on the spot.

"You know why! Think I didn't see you watching that house? Out you come!"

The constable also was becoming master of his nerves. Harry, indeed, neither looked nor spoke like a very desperate person.

"Look here, officer," said he, "you're making a mistake. Do I look a burglar?"

"Come out and I'll tell you."

"Well, but look here: you're not going to run me in if I do?"

"I'm not so sure about that."

"You can't!" cried Harry, losing his temper. "What charge have you to bring against me?"

"Trespassing with intent! You may satisfy the sergeant, and if you do he won't detain you. But I've got to do my dooty, and if you won't come out I'll make you, but if you take my advice you'll come quietly."

"Oh, I'll come quietly," said Harry, "if I've got to come."

His tone was one of unaffected resignation. To be haled before the police was a new and most grotesque experience, at which he could have laughed outright but for the dread lest his superior officers might prove as crass as this callow constable. That he would have to go, however, appeared inevitable; and though the thought of calling Lowndes to vouch for his respectability did occur to him, it was instantly dismissed, and that of resistance never occurred to him at all. Harry was a very peaceable person, but he was also very excitable and impulsive, and what he now did was done without a moment's thought. He had opened the gate, which was wide and heavy, with the kind of latch which allows a gate to swing past the post on either side, and on the pavement stood a young police man with his lantern and something glittering in its light. It was a pair of handcuffs, and the sight of them was responsible for what followed. Instead of passing through the gate, as he seemed in the act of doing, Harry clapped both hands to the bar and rushed at the policeman with the gate in front of him. Every bar struck a different section of the man's body: his lantern fell with a clatter, his handcuffs with a tinkle, and he himself was hurled heavily into the road, along which Harry was scampering like a wild thing. At the corner he stopped to look back, because no footsteps were following and no whistle had been blown. The lantern had not gone out, for a jet of light spouted from the pavement half-way across the road, where it ran into a dark-blue heap. Otherwise the little road was quite deserted.

Some minutes later, when the whistles began to blow, the man they blew for just heard them from the heights of the hill; but he had had the presence of mind to walk up to the park gates, and through them at a pace almost leisurely; and long before ten o'clock he was sitting over little Woodman's fire in his room at the Hollies, Teddington, and wondering whether it was he or another who had been through the adventures of the evening.

He had decided to remain at the school, and Mrs. Bickersteth had accepted his decision without comment. The schoolmistress little dreamt to whom a paragraph referred which caught her eye in the next issue of the Surrey Comet: —

RICHMOND BURGLARSASSAULT ON THE POLICE

As Constable John Tinsley, Richmond division, Metropolitan Police, was on his rounds on Monday evening last, he noticed a man lurking in the garden of an empty house on the hill, and, on demanding an explanation, was savagely assaulted and left senseless in the road. There can be little doubt, from the bruises on Tinsley's body, that the ruffian felled him with some blunt instrument, and afterwards kicked him as he lay insensible. Tinsley is now on duty again, but considers he has had a lucky escape. He describes his assailant as a thick-set and powerful young fellow of the working class, and has little doubt that he was one of the brutal and impudent thieves who are at present a pest of the neighbourhood.

Harry Ringrose would not have recognised himself had he not been on the look-out for some such item: when he did, he breathed more freely, though not freely enough to show himself unnecessarily on Richmond Hill. The paragraph he cut out and treasured for many years.

CHAPTER XX

BIDING HIS TIME

When Scrafton's knock thundered through the house on the morning after Harry's adventure, Mrs. Bickersteth again rose hastily and bustled from the schoolroom; and for the next five minutes the ears of the junior master had some cause to tingle. When the schoolmistress returned she would not look at Harry, who was well aware that she had secretly wished him to resign, and that conscience alone forbade her to send him away in obedience to Scrafton's demands. That such demands had been made the day before, and reiterated this morning, Harry was as certain as though he had heard them; but the certainty only cemented his resolve to stay where he was, to give not the smallest pretext for his dismissal, and to watch Scrafton, patiently, steadily, day after day, for some explanation of his animus against himself and of his mysterious relations with Gordon Lowndes.

It chanced that the middle of that September was as warm as midsummer, and on the first Wednesday of the term a whisper of cricket went round the school. It appeared that on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, throughout the summer, the boys played cricket in Bushey Park, and as it was still summer weather they were to do so this afternoon.

"Are you going to take us, sir?" asked Gifford, as they were changing into flannels, under Harry's supervision, in their dormitory, after dinner.

"Not that I know of," said Harry. "Who generally does?"

"Mr. Scrafton, and he doesn't know the rules – "

"Read 'em through once, years ago – "

"And thinks he understands the game – "

"And scores and umpires – "

"And gives two men out at once!"

Here, duty compelled Harry to administer a general snub; but he determined to go to Bushey Park and see the cricket for himself; and when the day-boys had assembled in flannels also, and Mr. Scrafton, flourishing a long blackthorn, had marched them all off in double file, the junior master had his chance. Little Woodman was left behind. He was not allowed to play cricket. Harry was requested to take him for a walk instead; and, on inquiring whether there would be any objection to their going to Bushey Park to watch the game, received permission to do so on the understanding that Woodman was not to sit on the grass or to stand about too long.

The wickets had just been pitched when they arrived, and Scrafton and the biggest boy, kneeling behind either middle stump, were taking sights for a common block-hole which Scrafton proceeded to dig at great depth at either end. When the game began no player was allowed to take an independent guard; but meanwhile Scrafton had caught sight of Harry and his charge, and had borne down upon them with his blue eyes flashing suspicion and animosity.

"What have you come for?" he thundered in Harry's face.

"To – watch you," replied Harry, watching him very calmly as he spoke.

"Who gave you leave?"

"Mrs. Bickersteth. Do you dislike being watched?"

So mild was the look, so bland the tone, that it was impossible to tell whether the ambiguity was intentional or accidental. Scrafton glared at Harry for one eloquent moment; then his blue eyes fell and fastened furiously upon the little fellow at Harry's side.

"And you," he roared, flourishing his blackthorn over the small boy's head, "what right have you here? A blockhead who can't say his first declension has no right idling out o' doors. Take care, Master Woodman – take very great care to-morrow!"

And with the grin of an ogre behind the lifted blackthorn, Mr. Scrafton turned on the heels of the shoes he wore next his skin, and rushed back to the pitch.

"I expect Mr. Scrafton's bark is worse than his bite," Harry could not help saying to the trembling child at his side. "The brute!" he cried in the same breath. He could not help that either. The blackthorn had fallen heavily across the shoulders of a boy who had been throwing catches without leave. Little Woodman never said a word.

After this Harry could not trust himself to remain without interfering, and he knew only too well what the result of such interference would be. So Woodman and he walked to the far side of the ground, and only watched the game for a few minutes, from a safe distance; yet it left as vivid an impression in Harry's mind as the finest cricket he had ever seen at Lord's. There stood Scrafton in his rusty suit, the murderous blackthorn tucked under an arm, his pocket-book and snuff-box in one hand, the pencil with which he scored in the other. Never was game played in more sombre earnest, for neither side had the temerity to applaud, and the umpire and scorer was also judge and flagellator of the fielders, who pursued the ball slowly at the risk of being themselves pursued with the blackthorn. Just before Harry went he saw his friend Gifford given out because the ball had rolled against the stumps without removing the bails. The boy had been making runs, and he seemed dissatisfied. Scrafton took a pinch of snuff, put his pencil in his pocket, and advanced flourishing his blackthorn in a manner that made Harry turn his back on the game for good. But that night, when the boarders undressed, there was a long, lean bruise across Gifford's shoulders.

The blackthorn remained in the umbrella-stand while Scrafton roared and blustered in the upper schoolroom. But when it was he who took the boys for their walk, the blackthorn went too – and was busy. And on the chimney-piece upstairs there used to lie a long black ruler which was said to hurt even more, which Harry yearned to pitch into the middle of the Thames.

During the first half of the term he never saw the inside of that room under Scrafton's terrific rule; but his roaring voice could be heard all over the house; and now and then, when Harry had occasion to pass the door, he would pause to listen to the words.

"Look at the sweat on my hand," was what he once heard. "Look at the sweat on my hand! It's sweating to give Master Murray what he deserves!"

With that Scrafton could be heard taking a tremendous pinch of snuff; but Harry was still on the stairs when a couple of resounding smacks, followed by a storm of sobs, announced that Master Murray (aetat. 11) had received his alleged deserts. The boy's ears were red and swollen for the rest of that day.

At first Harry could not understand how a religious woman like Mrs. Bickersteth could countenance and keep such a flagrant bully, since what he heard at odd times must be heard morning after morning by some member of the household. The explanation dawned upon him by degrees. Scrafton had been there so many years that he had gained an almost complete ascendency over every adult in the establishment. The one instance in which Harry knew Mrs. Bickersteth to stand firm was that of his own continuance in the school. The one member of the Bickersteth family whom he ever heard breathe a syllable against Scrafton was the good-hearted, golden-haired Baby. Harry once met her face to face on the stairs when a roaring and a thumping and a sobbing were going on behind that terrible closed door. Harry looked at her grimly. Miss Bickersteth reddened to the roots of her yellow hair.

"It does sound dreadful," she admitted. "But – but Mr. Scrafton's kinder than you think; he sounds worse than he is. And he teaches them so well; and – and he has been here so many years!"

Harry thought there was a catch in her voice as she brushed past him; for one thump had sounded louder than the rest; and first a slate had fallen, and then a boy. Indeed it was a common thing to hear the boys whispering that so-and-so had been knocked down that day. But the fiend was clever enough to keep his fist for their bodies, his flat hand for their faces; the wretched little victims were never actually disfigured.

That he was a clever teacher Harry did not doubt. With quick receptive material he was probably something more, and there were one or two boys whom that baleful face, that ready hand, and that roaring voice did not instantly daze and stupefy, and who were consequently getting on remarkably well under Mr. Scrafton. With his repulsive personality, and his more repulsive practices, the man had yet a touch of genius. He wrote the boys' names in their Latin Grammars in the most perfect and beautiful copperplate hand that Harry had ever seen. And those quicker boys would show him sums worked out by no recognised rule, but with half the figures expended in the "key": for Scrafton had a shorter and better rule of his own for every rule in arithmetic.