Chapter Twenty Two.

Birds of a Feather.

What, man! I know them, yea,
And what they weigh even to the utmost scruple;
Scrambling, out-facing, fashion-monging boys,
That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander.
 
Much Ado about Nothing, act 5, scene 1.

Walter could not help hearing a part of this conversation, and he was pained and surprised that Kenrick, whom he had regarded as so fine a character, should show his worst side at home, and should speak and act thus unkindly to one whom he was so deeply bound to love and reverence. And he was even more surprised when he went downstairs again and looked on the calm face of his friend’s mother, so lovely, so gentle, so resigned, and felt the charm of manners which, in their natural grace and sweetness, might have shed lustre on a court. All that he could himself do was to show by his own manner to Mrs Kenrick the affection and respect with which he regarded her. When he hinted to Kenrick, as delicately and distantly as he could, that he thought his manner to his mother rather brusque, Kenrick reddened rather angrily, but only replied, “Ah, it’s all very well for you to talk; but you don’t live at Fuzby.”

“Yet I’ve enjoyed my visit very much, Ken; you can’t think how much I love your mother.”

“Thank you, Walter, for saying so. But how would you like to live always at such a place?”

“If I did I should do my best to make it happy.”

“Make it happy!” said Kenrick; and as he turned away he muttered something about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Soon after he told Walter some of those circumstances about his father’s life which we have recently related. When the three days were over the boys started for Saint Winifred’s. They drove to the station in the pony-chaise before described, accompanied, against Kenrick’s will, by his mother. She bore up bravely as she bade them good-bye, knowing the undemonstrative character of boys, and seeing that they were both in the merriest mood. She knew, too, that their gaiety was natural: the world lay before them, bright and seductive as yet, with no shadow across its light; nor was she all in all to Harry as he was to her. He had other hopes, and another home, and other ties; and remembering this she tried not to grieve that he should leave her with so light a heart. But as she turned away from the platform when the train had started, taking with it all that she held dearest in the world, and as she walked back to the lonely home which had nothing but faith—for there was not even hope—to brighten it, the quiet tears flowed fast over the fair face beneath her veil. Yet as she crossed over her lonely threshold her thoughts were not even then for herself, but they carried her on the wings of prayer to the throne of mercy for the beloved boy from whom she was again to be separated for nearly five long months.

The widowed mother wept; but the boy’s spirits rose as he drew closer to the hills and to the sea, which told him that Saint Winifred’s was near. He talked happily with Walter about the coming half—eager with ambition, with hope, with high spirits, and fine resolutions. He clapped his hands with pleasure when they reached the top of Bardlyn Hill and caught sight of the school buildings.

Having had a long distance to travel they were among the late arrivals, and at the great gate stood Henderson and Power ready to greet them and the other boys who came with them in the same coach. Among these were Eden and Bliss.

“Ah, Eden,” said Henderson, “I’ve been writing a poem about you—

“I’m a shrimp, I’m a shrimp of diminutive size,
Inspect my antennae and look at my eyes;
Quick, quick, feel me quick, for cannot you see
I’m a shrimp, I’m a shrimp, to be eaten with tea?”

“And who’s this?—why,” he said clasping his hands and throwing up his eyes in mock rapture, “this indeed is Bliss!”

“I’ll lick you, Flip,” said Bliss, only in a more good-humoured tone than usual, as he hit at him.

“I think I’ve heard that observation before,” said Henderson, dodging away. “Ah, Walter, how do you do, my dear old fellow? I hope you’re sitting on the throne of health, and reclining under the canopy of a well-organised brain.”

“More than you are, Flip,” said Walter laughing. “You seem madder than ever.”

“That he is,” said Power; “since his return he’s made on an average fifteen thousand bad puns. You ought to be grateful, though, for he and I have got some coffee going for you in my study. Come along; the Familiar will see that your luggage is all right.”

“Yes; and I shall make bold to bring in a shrimp to tea,” said Henderson, seizing hold of Eden.

“All right. I meant to ask you, Eden,” said Power, shaking the little boy affectionately by the hand; “have you enjoyed the holidays?”

“Not very much,” said Eden.

“You’re not looking as bright as I should like,” said Power; “never mind; if you didn’t enjoy the holidays you must enjoy the half.”

“That I shall. I hope, Walter, you’ll be in the same dormitory still. What shall I do if you’re not?”

“O, how’s that to be, Flip?” asked Walter; “you said you’d try to get some of us put together in one dormitory. That would be awfully jolly. I don’t want to leave you, Eden, and would like you to be moved too; but I can’t bear Harpour and that lot.”

“I’ve partly managed it and partly failed,” said Henderson. “You and the shrimp still stay with the rest of the set in Number 10, but as there was a vacant bed I got myself put there too.”

“Hurrah!” said Walter and Eden both at once; “that’s capital.”

“Let me see,” said Walter; “there are Jones and Harpour—brutes certainly both of them; and Cradock—well, he’s rather a bargee, but he’s not altogether bad; and Anthony, and Franklin, who are both far jollier than they used to be; indeed I like old Franklin very much; so with you and Eden we shall get on famously.”

The first few days of term passed very pleasantly. The masters met the boys in the kindliest spirit, and the boys, fresh from home and with the sweet influences of home still playing over them, did not begin at once to reweave the ravelled threads of evil school tradition. They were all on good terms with each other and with themselves, full of good resolutions, cheerful, and happy.

All our boys had got their removes. Walter had won a double remove and was now under his friend Mr Percival. Kenrick was in the second fifth, and Power, young as he was, had now attained the upper fifth, which stands next to the dignity of the monitors and the sixth.

The first Sunday of term was a glorious day of early spring, and the boys, according to their custom, scattered themselves in various groups in the grounds about Saint Winifred’s School. The favourite place of resort was a broad green field at the back of the buildings, shaded by noble trees, and half encircled by a bend of the river. Here, on a fine Sunday, between dinner and afternoon school, you were sure to find the great majority of the boys walking arm in arm by twos and threes, or sitting with books on the willow trunks that overhung the stream, or stretched out at full length upon the grass, and lazily learning Scripture repetition.

It was a sweet spot and a pleasant time; but Walter generally preferred his beloved seashore; and on this afternoon he was sitting there talking to Power, while Eden, perched on the top of a piece of rock close by, kept murmuring to himself his afternoon lesson. The conversation of the two boys turned chiefly on the holidays which were just over, and Power was asking Walter about his visit to Kenrick’s house.

“How did you enjoy the visit, Walter?”

“Very much for some things. Mrs Kenrick is the sweetest lady you ever saw.”

“But Ken is always abusing Fuzby—isn’t that the name?”

“Yes; it isn’t a particularly jolly place, certainly, but he doesn’t make the best of it; he makes up his mind to detest it.”

“Why?”

“O, I don’t know. They didn’t treat his father well. His father was curate of the place.”

“As far as I’ve seen, Fuzby isn’t singular in that respect. It’s no easy thing in most places for a poor clergyman to keep on good terms with his people.”

“Yes; but Ken’s father does seem to have been abominably treated.” And Walter proceeded to tell Power the parts of Mr Kenrick’s history which Kenrick had told him.

When he had finished the story he observed that Eden had shut up his book and was listening intently.

“Hallo, Arty,” said Walter, “I didn’t mean you to hear.”

“Didn’t you? I’m so sorry. I really didn’t know you meant to be talking secrets, for you weren’t talking particularly low.”

“The noise of the waves prevents that. But never mind; I don’t suppose it’s any secret. Ken never told me not to mention it. Only, of course, you mustn’t tell any one, you know, as it clearly isn’t a thing to be talked about.”

“No,” said Eden; “I won’t mention it, of course. So other people have unhappy homes as well as me,” he added in a low tone.

“What, isn’t your home happy, Arty?” asked Power.

Eden shook his head. “It used to be, but this holidays mamma married again. She married Colonel Braemar—and I can’t bear him.” The words were said so energetically as to leave no doubt that he had some grounds for the dislike; but Power said—

“Hush, Arty, you must try to like him. Are you sure you know your Rep. perfectly?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s take a turn till the bell rings.”

While this conversation was going on by the shore, a very different scene was being enacted in the Croft, as the field was called which I above described.

It happened that Jones, and one of his set, named Mackworth, were walking up and down the Croft in one direction, while Kenrick and Whalley, one of his friends, were pacing up and down the same avenue in the opposite direction, so that the four boys passed each other every five minutes. The first time they met, Kenrick could not help noticing that Jones and Mackworth nudged each other derisively as he passed, and looked at him with a glance unmistakably impudent. This rather surprised him, though he was on bad terms with them both. Kenrick had not forgotten how grossly Jones had bullied him when he was a new boy, and before he had risen out of the sphere in which Jones could dare to bully him with impunity. He was now so high in the school as to be well aware that Jones would be nearly as much afraid to touch him as he always was to annoy any one of his own size and strength; and Kenrick had never hesitated to show Jones the quiet but quite measureless contempt which he felt for his malice and meanness. Mackworth was a bully of another stamp; he was rather a clever fellow, set himself up for an aristocrat on the strength of being second cousin to a baronet, studied “De Brett’s Peerage,” dressed as faultlessly as Tracy himself, and affected at all times a studious politeness of manner. He had been a good deal abroad, and as he constantly adopted the airs and the graces of a fashionable person, the boys had felicitously named him French Varnish. But Mackworth was a dangerous enemy, for he had one of the most biting tongues in the whole school, and there were few things which he enjoyed more than making a young boy wince under his cutting words. When Kenrick came to school, his wardrobe, the work of Fuzbeian artists, was not only well worn—for his mother was too poor to give him new clothes—but also of a somewhat odd cut; and accordingly the very first words Mackworth had ever addressed to Kenrick were—

“You new fellow, what’s your father?”

“My father is dead,” said Kenrick in a low tone.

“Then what was he?”

“He was curate of Fuzby.”

“Curate was he; a slashing trade that,” was the brutal reply. “Curate of Fuzby? are you sure it isn’t Fusty?”

Kenrick looked at him with a strange glowing of the eyes, which, so far from disconcerting Mackworth, only made him chuckle at the success of his taunt. He determined to exercise the lancet of his tongue again, and let fresh blood if possible.

“Well, glare-eyes! so you didn’t like my remark?”

Kenrick made no answer, and Mackworth continued—

“What charity-boy has left you his off-cast clothes? May I ask if your jacket was intended to serve also as a looking-glass? and is it the custom in your part of the country not to wear breeches below the knees?”

There was a corrosive malice in this speech so intense that Kenrick never saw Mackworth without recalling the shame and anguish it had caused. Fresh from home, full of quick sensibility, feeling ridicule with great keenness, Kenrick was too much pained by these words even for anger. He had hung his head and slunk away. For days after, until, at his most earnest entreaty, his mother had incurred much privation to afford him a new and better suit, he had hardly dared to lift up his face. He had fancied himself a mark for ridicule, and the sense of shabbiness and poverty had gone far to crush his spirit. After a time he recovered, but never since that day had he deigned to speak to Mackworth a single word.

He was surprised, therefore, at the obtrusive impertinence of these two fellows, and when next he passed them, he surveyed them from head to foot with a haughty and indignant stare. The moment after he heard them burst into a laugh, and begin talking very loudly.

“It was the rummiest vehicle you ever saw,” he heard Jones say; “a cart, I assure you—nothing more or less, and drawn by the very scraggiest scarecrow of a blind horse.”

He caught no more as the distance between them lessened, but he heard Jones bubbling over with a stupid giggle at some remark of Mackworth’s about glare-eyes being drawn by a blind horse.

“How rude those fellows are, Ken,” said Whalley; “what do they mean by it?”

“Dogs!” said Kenrick, stamping angrily, while his face was scarlet with rage.

“If they’re trying to annoy you, Ken,” said Whalley, who was a very gentle, popular boy, “don’t give them the triumph of seeing that they succeed. They’re only Varnish and White-Feather—we all know what they’re like.”

“Dogs!” said Kenrick again; “I should like to pitch into them.”

“Let’s leave them, and go and sit by the river, Ken.”

“No, Whalley. I’m sure they mean to insult me, and I want to hear how, and why.”

There was no difficulty in doing this, for Jones and his ally were again approaching, and Jones was talking purposely loud.

“I never could bear the fellow; gives himself such airs.”

“Yes; only fancy going to meet his friends in a hay-waggon! What a start! He! he! he!”

“It’s such impudence in a low fellow like that...” and here Kenrick lost some words, for, as they passed, Jones lowered his voice; but he heard, only too plainly, the words “father” and “dishonest parson”—the rest he could supply with fatal facility.

For half an instant he stood paralysed, his eyes burning with fury, but his face pale as ashes. The next second he sprang upon Jones, seized with both hands the collar of his coat, shook him, flung him violently to the ground, and kicked his hat, which had fallen off in the struggle, straight into the river.

“What the deuce do you mean by that?” asked Jones, picking himself up. “I’ll just give you—fifth-form, or no fifth-form—the best licking you ever had.”

“You’ll just not presume to lay upon him the tip of your finger,” said Whalley, who was quite as big as Jones, and was very fond of Kenrick.

“Not for flinging me down and kicking my hat into the water?”

“No, Jones,” said Whalley, quietly. “I don’t know what you were talking about, but you clearly meant to insult him, from your manner.”

“What’s the row? what’s up?” said a number of boys, who began to throng round.

“Only a plebeian splutter of rage from our well-bred friend there,” said Mackworth, pointing contemptuously at Kenrick, who stood with dilated nostrils, still heaving with rage.

“But what about?”

“Heaven only knows apropos of just nothing.”

“You’re a liar,” said Kenrick impetuously. “You know that you told lies and insulted me; and if you say it again, I’ll do the same again.”

“Only try,” said Jones, in a surly tone.

“Insulted you?” said Mackworth in bland accents. “We were talking about a dishonest parson, as far as I remember. Pray, are you a dishonest parson?”

“You’d better take care,” said Kenrick with fierce energy.

“Take care of what? We didn’t ask you to listen to our conversation; listeners hear no—”

“Bosh!” interposed Whalley; “you know you were talking at the top of your voices, and we couldn’t help hearing you.”

“And what then? Mayn’t we talk as loud as we like?—I assure you, on my word of honour,” he said, turning to the group around them, “we didn’t even mention Kenrick’s name. We were merely talking about a certain dishonest parson who rode in hay-carts, when the fellow sprang on Jones like a tiger-cat. I’m sure, if he’s any objection to our talking of such unpleasant people we won’t do so in his hearing,” said Mackworth, in an excess of venomous politeness.

“French Varnish,” said Whalley, with honest contempt, moved beyond his wont with indignation, though he did not understand the cause of Kenrick’s anger. “I wonder why Kenrick should even condescend to notice what such fellows as you and Jones say. Come along, Ken; you know what we all think about those two;” and, putting his arm in Kenrick’s, he almost dragged him from the scene, while Jones and Mackworth (conscious that there was not a single other boy who would not condemn their conduct as infamous when they understood it) were not sorry to move off in another direction.

But when Whalley had taken Kenrick to a quiet place by the river side, and asked him “what had made him so furious?” he returned no answer, only hiding his face in his hands. He had indeed been cruelly insulted, wounded in his tenderest sensibilities; he felt that his best affections had been wantonly and violently lacerated. It made him more miserable than he had ever felt before, and he could not tolerate the wretched thought that his father’s sad history, probably in some distorted form, had been, by some means or other, bruited about among unsympathising hearers, and made the common property of the school. He knew well indeed the natural delicacy of feeling which would prevent any other boy, except Jones or Mackworth, from ever alluding to it even in the remotest way. But that they should know at all the shameful charge which had broken his father’s heart, and brought temporary suspicion and dishonour on his name, was gall and wormwood to him.

Yet, by what possible means could, this have become known to them? Kenrick knew of one way only. He thought over what Jones had said. “A cart and blind horse—ah! I see; there is only one person who could have told him about that. So, Walter Evson, you amuse yourself and Jones by making fun of our being poor, and by ridiculing what you saw in our house; a very good laugh you’ve all had over it in the dormitory, I’ve no doubt.”

Kenrick did not know that Jones had seen them from the window of the railway-carriage, and that as he had been visiting an aunt at no great distance, he had heard there the particulars of Mr Kenrick’s history. He clutched angrily at the conclusion, that Walter had betrayed him, and turned him into derision. Naturally passionate, growing up during the wilful years of opening boyhood without a father’s wise control, he did not stop to inquire, but leapt at once to a false and obstinate inference. “It must be so; it clearly is so,” he thought; “yet I could not have believed it of him;” and he burst into a flood of bitter and angry tears.

The fact was that Kenrick, though he would hardly have admitted it even to himself, was in a particularly ready mood to take offence. He had observed that Walter disapproved of his manner towards his mother, and his sensitive pride had already been ruffled by the fact that Walter had exercised the moral courage of pointing out, though in the most delicate and modest way, the brusquerie which he reprobated. At the time he had said little, but in reality this had made him very, very angry; and the more so because he was jealous enough to fancy that he now stood second only, or even third, in Walter’s estimation, and that Power and Henderson had deposed him from the place which he once held as his chief friend; and that Walter had also usurped his old place in their affections. This displeased him greatly, for he was not one who could contentedly take the second place. He could not have had a more excellent companion than the manly and upright Whalley; but in his close intimacy with him he had rather hoped to pique Walter, and show him that his society was not indispensable to his happiness. But Walter’s open and generous mind was quite incapable of understanding this unworthy motive, and with feelings far better trained than those of Kenrick, he never felt the slightest qualm of this small jealousy.

“Never mind, my dear fellow,” said Whalley, patting him on the back; “why should you care so much because two such fellows as White-feather and Varnish try to be impudent. I shouldn’t care the snap of a finger for anything they could say.”

“It isn’t that, Whalley, it isn’t that,” said Kenrick proudly, drying his tears. “But how did those fellows know the things they were hinting at? Only one person ever heard them, and he must have betrayed them to laugh at me behind my back. It’s that that makes me miserable.”

“But whom do you mean?”

“The excellent Evson,” said Kenrick bitterly. “And mark me, Whalley, I’ll never speak to him again.”

“Evson,” said Whalley, “I don’t believe he’s at all the fellow to do it. Are you certain?”

“Quite. No one else could know the things.”

“But surely you’ll ask him first?”

“It’s no use,” answered Kenrick, gloomily; “but I will, in order that he may understand that I have found him out.”