The Vicar rose from his chair with a smothered cry.
The Bible fell open on the floor. Jack was kneeling upright on the couch, with one hand clenched upon the foot-board, and looking straight into his uncle's eyes. Molly began to cry suddenly.
"Thank you," said Jack, lying down again. "Uncle will let me go to school."
CHAPTER VII
Accordingly, at the opening of the term, Jack went to school. His point once gained, he had been quite docile about all minor questions. Mr. Raymond's choice had fallen upon a good middle-class school near London; and Jack, when told of the decision, had acquiesced with the passivity of utter indifference. On the last morning, when it was time to start for the train, the Vicar called him into the study.
"I think it right to tell you," he said, "that in giving Dr. Cross the necessary particulars, I made no mention of what I have found out about you. If I had done so, he would certainly have refused to accept you; and I have some doubt whether I am not doing him wrong by letting him take you in ignorance. But my chief reason for choosing his school is that I have heard he exercises a close supervision over the conduct of his boys; you will, I hope, have no opportunity to injure your schoolfellows. You start, therefore, with a clean record, and it rests with yourself to live down the past. But you must understand clearly that this is the last chance I can give you. If Dr. Cross sends you back to me, you will go to a reformatory."
Jack stood still and listened, his eyes on the floor. As he did not speak, the Vicar added in a lower voice:
"I suppose it is useless to appeal to any natural feeling of affection in you, or I would ask you not to break your aunt's heart, and not to bring shame on your sister. But for your own sake I beg you to think before it is too late. From the reformatory to the convict prison is only one step."
There was still no answer He rose, sighing.
"I had hoped you would repent and confess at last. Jack, this is the turning point of your life; have you nothing to tell me before you go?"
Jack slowly raised his eyes from the floor.
"Yes, one thing."
He was grave, but quiet and gentle. "Whether you send me to a reformatory or not, I suppose I shall live, somehow, and grow up. You've got Molly here, and I can't take her away from you, because you're stronger than I am. When I'm a man I shall be stronger than you; and if you've been unkind to her I shall come back, and kill you. As for Spotty, she's safe enough; I drowned her this morning. That's all; good-bye."
He soon settled down into the routine of school life, and plodded through the first half term, making neither friends nor enemies. No one was unkind to him; nothing ever happened; he was not even acutely miserable. "I'm getting accustomed," he thought, with dull self-contempt; a creature that could placidly go on living after such violation of body and soul seemed to him not worth hating. Probably his nerves were blunted.
Of the old wilfulness not a trace remained. From the naughtiest boy within twenty miles round, he had changed into a model of docility; yet he was as little liked by the masters as by the boys. His schoolfellows, on the whole a very fair average set of lads, had at first made friendly advances to him, and had been repulsed, not angrily, but with sullen indifference. He no longer cared at all for any sports or games; yet there was nothing studious about him; he performed the tasks set him, but made no pretence of taking any interest in them. The one thing for which he seemed to crave was sleep. He would have slept, if it had been allowed, for fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. Masters and boys alike gradually came to regard him as a dull, apathetic boor, with neither intellect enough for scholarship nor energy enough for mischief. They thought him a coward, too. Before Christmas all the boys were called up to have their teeth examined; and Jack, who had been so brave, trembled and turned white when the dentist told him that a tooth wanted filling.
His uncle had asked that arrangements should be made for him to spend the Christmas and Easter holidays at the school, and go home only for the summer vacation.
The journey, he had said in his letter, was too long to be worth taking for short holidays. Dr. Cross, though somewhat surprised at this request, in an age of cheap and easy railway travelling, had raised no objections; and so, at Christmas-time, while his schoolfellows were merry-making at their homes, Jack wandered about the deserted play-grounds, and slept alone in the big, empty dormitory. It was at this time that he began to think.
The process of thinking was to him a laborious and difficult one. His mind had never been trained to such exercise; nor had he the external familiarity with it which comes of living among thoughtful persons. Probably no member of the Vicarage household had ever thought, individually, at all; family opinions and beliefs, none the less sincere for that, were inherited, like the family plate, and profiles, and virtues. The Raymonds lived, as other Raymonds had lived before them, and never asked of Providence: "Why?" But Jack, left alone, sat down among the ruins of his shattered childhood and contemplated a tremendous question-stop.
He began to see the world as it had been a huge fish pond, where the big fish eat the little ones, only to be dragged up with a hook through their gills and eaten in their turn by a fearsome two-legged monster whose name is Death. Seeing that from this final dread there is no escape, he judged it a point of wisdom to keep the eyes turned away from that direction, and to fix them upon dangers which can be avoided.
His uncle had been bigger and stronger than he, just as Tarquin had been bigger and stronger than Lucrece; that, in itself, was sufficient explanation of all that had befallen him last summer. There was no ground for reproach, or bitterness, or anger; it was all quite natural. Like Caliban's god Setebos, the stronger creature had done as pleased him. For the weaker, one course remained: to harden his muscles and expand his chest, that when next a predatory entity should cross his path the balance of strength might not be as it had been. Thus, when his schoolfellows came back after the holidays, they found a change in Jack; he was as surly, as reserved, as passively obedient to authority as ever, but he seemed to be waking out of his sleepy apathy, and now took an interest in at least one subject: physical training.
"Boys," said Dr. Cross on the first evening, "I want you older ones to keep an eye on a new boy that's coming to-morrow, and see he doesn't get bullied. He's a little foreigner, a widow's only son, and supposed to be a bit of a musical genius. He's only eleven, and I daresay has been rather coddled up at home, especially as he's not very strong. Of course he must learn to rough it now; but let him down gently, like good fellows."
Jack shrugged his shoulders as the headmaster went out So the school was to be turned into a nursery for cry-babies and pet lap-dogs now.
The first sight of the new boy aroused in him a certain cold and secret animosity. The broken English and the violin were bad enough; but he would have managed to put up with them somehow. What he could not stand was the child's personal appearance. The seraphic little face with its yellow aureole of curls, its great, startled, solemn blue eyes, set all his teeth on edge. This child, apparently, had always had "mothers and things" to stand between him and Setebos.
Dr. Cross was popular with the boys, and his wishes were usually respected, so on the whole the "kid," as the new boy was nicknamed, suffered less persecution than might have been expected. Nevertheless, when the monitors were out of sight, a certain amount of rather ferocious teasing went on; and the child's first weeks at school were scarcely happy ones. He was evidently afraid of all the big, boisterous creatures who alternately snubbed and patronised him, and bewildered at these strange, new surroundings, so different from the esoteric world where he had grown from babyhood among shadows of his mother's endless grief and dim echoes of far-off tragedies. For a month he drifted between quicksands of practical jokes and whirlpools of ridicule, a solitary little figure, uncomplaining and very desolate, clinging tightly to his violin, and waiting for the glorious day when his mother should come to see him.