CHAPTER XX.
BIDING HIS TIME.
When Scrafton's knock thundered through the house on the morning afterHarry's adventure, Mrs. Bickersteth again rose hastily and bustled fromthe schoolroom; and for the next five minutes the ears of the juniormaster had some cause to tingle. When the schoolmistress returned shewould not look at Harry, who was well aware that she had secretlywished him to resign, and that conscience alone forbade her to send himaway in obedience to Scrafton's demands. That such demands had beenmade the day before, and reiterated this morning, Harry was as certainas though he had heard them; but the certainty only cemented hisresolve to stay where he was, to give not the smallest pretext for hisdismissal, and to watch Scrafton, patiently, steadily, day after day,for some explanation of his animus against himself and of hismysterious 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 roundthe school. It appeared that on Wednesday and Friday afternoons,throughout the summer, the boys played cricket in Bushey Park, and asit was still summer weather they were to do so this afternoon.
"Are you going to take us, sir?" asked Gifford, as they were changinginto flannels, under Harry's supervision, in their dormitory, afterdinner.
"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 hedetermined to go to Bushey Park and see the cricket for himself; andwhen 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. Hewas not allowed to play cricket. Harry was requested to take him for awalk instead; and, on inquiring whether there would be any objection totheir going to Bushey Park to watch the game, received permission to doso on the understanding that Woodman was not to sit on the grass or tostand about too long.
The wickets had just been pitched when they arrived, and Scrafton andthe biggest boy, kneeling behind either middle stump, were takingsights for a common block-hole which Scrafton proceeded to dig at greatdepth at either end. When the game began no player was allowed to takean independent guard; but meanwhile Scrafton had caught sight of Harryand his charge, and had borne down upon them with his blue eyesflashing 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 tellwhether the ambiguity was intentional or accidental. Scrafton glared atHarry for one eloquent moment; then his blue eyes fell and fastenedfuriously upon the little fellow at Harry's side.
"And you," he roared, flourishing his blackthorn over the small boy'shead, "what right have you here? A blockhead who can't say his firstdeclension has no right idling out o' doors. Take care, MasterWoodman--take very great care to-morrow!"
And with the grin of an ogre behind the lifted blackthorn, Mr. Scraftonturned on the heels of the shoes he wore next his skin, and rushed backto the pitch.
"I expect Mr. Scrafton's bark is worse than his bite," Harry could nothelp saying to the trembling child at his side. "The brute!" he criedin the same breath. He could not help that either. The blackthorn hadfallen heavily across the shoulders of a boy who had been throwingcatches 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 wouldbe. So Woodman and he walked to the far side of the ground, and onlywatched the game for a few minutes, from a safe distance; yet it leftas vivid an impression in Harry's mind as the finest cricket he hadever seen at Lord's. There stood Scrafton in his rusty suit, themurderous blackthorn tucked under an arm, his pocket-book and snuff-boxin one hand, the pencil with which he scored in the other. Never wasgame played in more sombre earnest, for neither side had the temerityto applaud, and the umpire and scorer was also judge and flagellator ofthe fielders, who pursued the ball slowly at the risk of beingthemselves pursued with the blackthorn. Just before Harry went he sawhis friend Gifford given out because the ball had rolled against thestumps without removing the bails. The boy had been making runs, and heseemed dissatisfied. Scrafton took a pinch of snuff, put his pencil inhis pocket, and advanced flourishing his blackthorn in a manner thatmade Harry turn his back on the game for good. But that night, when theboarders undressed, there was a long, lean bruise across Gifford'sshoulders.
The blackthorn remained in the umbrella-stand while Scrafton roared andblustered in the upper schoolroom. But when it was he who took the boysfor their walk, the blackthorn went too--and was busy. And on thechimney-piece upstairs there used to lie a long black ruler which wassaid to hurt even more, which Harry yearned to pitch into the middle ofthe Thames.
During the first half of the term he never saw the inside of that roomunder Scrafton's terrific rule; but his roaring voice could be heardall over the house; and now and then, when Harry had occasion to passthe door, he would pause to listen to the words.
"Look at the sweat on my hand," was what he once heard. "Look at thesweat on my hand! It's sweating to give Master Murray what hedeserves!"
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 swollenfor 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, sincewhat he heard at odd times must be heard morning after morning by somemember of the household. The explanation dawned upon him by degrees.Scrafton had been there so many years that he had gained an almostcomplete ascendency over every adult in the establishment. The oneinstance in which Harry knew Mrs. Bickersteth to stand firm was that ofhis own continuance in the school. The one member of the Bickerstethfamily whom he ever heard breathe a syllable against Scrafton was thegood-hearted, golden-haired Baby. Harry once met her face to face onthe stairs when a roaring and a thumping and a sobbing were going onbehind that terrible closed door. Harry looked at her grimly. MissBickersteth reddened to the roots of her yellow hair.
"It does sound dreadful," she admitted. "But--but Mr. Scrafton's kinderthan you think; he sounds worse than he is. And he teaches them sowell; 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 hadfallen, and then a boy. Indeed it was a common thing to hear the boyswhispering that so-and-so had been knocked down that day. But the fiendwas clever enough to keep his fist for their bodies, his flat hand fortheir faces; the wretched little victims were never actuallydisfigured.
That he was a clever teacher Harry did not doubt. With quick receptivematerial he was probably something more, and there were one or two boyswhom that baleful face, that ready hand, and that roaring voice did notinstantly daze and stupefy, and who were consequently getting onremarkably well under Mr. Scrafton. With his repulsive personality, andhis more repulsive practices, the man had yet a touch of genius. Hewrote the boys' names in their Latin Grammars in the most perfect andbeautiful copperplate hand that Harry had ever seen. And those quickerboys would show him sums worked out by no recognised rule, but withhalf the figures expended in the "key": for Scrafton had a shorter andbetter rule of his own for every rule in arithmetic.
Weeks went by
before Harry and this man exchanged another word; butdaily they met and looked each other in the face, and daily the youngerman became surer and surer that the look those blue eyes shot at himwas instinct with a special venom, a peculiar malice, only to beexplained by the unravelment of that mystery which he was as far asever from unravelling. And every night of all these weeks he lay awakewondering, wondering; yet every day the daily duties claimed andabsorbed his whole attention; and he took no step because he had foundno clue, and was still determined to find one; also because there werecertain cogent reasons for his keeping this mastership, for its ownsake, for one term at least. Mrs. Ringrose was still at the seasidewith the Walthews. She wrote to tell Harry how kind they were to her;when they returned she was to remain with them until he rejoined her.Meanwhile the flat was costing nothing but its rent, and Harry was notonly earning his board, lodgings, and ten pounds for the term, but fromten to fifteen shillings a week from the excellent and munificent_Tiddler_. If he chose to throw up the mastership at Christmas, theywould be able to start the New Year on a much sounder financial basisthan would have been possible had he never obtained it.
So October wore into November, and the autumn tints became warmer andricher in Bushey Park, and Harry grew fond of his walks with the boys,and very fond of the boys themselves. Somehow his discovery on RichmondHill came to seem less significant than it had appeared at the time.The idea grew upon Harry Ringrose (who was fully alive to the defectsof his own imaginative quality) that very likely there was a muchsimpler explanation of Lowndes's lie than he had suspected at the time:and though he loathed Scrafton for his brutality to the boys, and neverfailed to meet that baleful eye as though he saw through its bloodshotblue into the brain beyond, the look became a mechanical part of hisday's routine, and it was only in the long nights that the oldsuspicions haunted him. So it was when the clash came between HarryRingrose and "I, Jeremiah Scrafton" (as the harpy loved to call himselfto the boys); and with the clash, not suspicion any more, but the direconviction of some rank and nameless, yet undiscovered, villainy.