She had arranged to come once every month, this being the most she could afford. She was too poor to travel oftener, and too feeble in health to live near the school. She had a tiny cottage in Shanklin, and an income just big enough to live upon and give her child a good education. Everything that she could save out of her personal expenditure, or earn by painting fans and fire-screens, was laid aside for his future.
Qn the occasion of her first visit Jack happened to pass through the hall as she entered, and glanced round carelessly at the slim black figure. "Theo!"he heard her call; then the child rushed past him in a whirlwind of tempestuous joy, and he turned and went out, that he might not see them kiss. His heart was bitter in him against this darling of the unfair gods, dowered so richly with beauty, and talent, and a mother. "Molly's two years younger than that wax doll," he thought; "and she's got to grow up in uncle's house, with no one to take her part but Aunt Sarah."
Two days afterwards he was sitting alone in one of the playing fields, reading. Several of his schoolfellows were at play on the other side of the hedge, and their shouts and laughter sounded in his ears without arousing him. The game they had chosen was not one which develops the muscles, so for him it had no interest; he took part in games for training, not for amusement.
"I don't know what you mean!" a piteous voice cried out suddenly. "And I — I want to go and practise."
Jack looked up. At a little distance from him, by the gateway leading from one field into the other, stood a big boy named Stubbs, holding Theo by the arm. The scared face of the child roused Jack from his preoccupation. He laid down his book and sat watching. Neither of the boys had noticed his presence.
"Don't be such a little fool," he heard Stubbs say. "I don't want to hurt you..."
The remaining words were too low to hear; but Jack had understood by the expression of the big boy's face. He thought of Greaves, and Thompson, and Robert Polwheal; and looked on with cold malevolence. So much for a mother's protection! Surely the gods are just indeed, and mete out ruin with equal hands to loved and unloved alike; to this end comes innocence too weak for self-defence. "You don't know what it all means," he thought. "You're clean, and your mother comes and kisses you. Next time she comes you won't be so clean."
"I don't know what you mean," Theo cried out again; and, wrenching his arm free, he dashed towards the gate.
"You're wonderfully innocent," Stubbs called after him, "for a jail-bird."
Theo stopped short, stared at him silently for a moment, and burst into despairing sobs.
Jack had risen and was standing by the hedge. Something leaped out of darkness before his eyes: Trevanna glen, and the sunset, and the mavis... Then everything was blurred and dim, with a roaring noise that filled his ears and quick lights flashing in a mist; and he was kneeling on the chest of something that gasped and writhed, and strangling it with both hands.
His fit of mad fury was over in a moment He found himself in the middle of a crowd, evidently called in from the other field by the cries of Stubbs. Three boys were on the ground, and a fourth, one of the monitors, was saying in a breathless, injured voice: "Well, Raymond, you do know how to use your fists, anyway!"
Jack looked round him helplessly; at Stubbs, spluttering and choking in a corner; at another boy whose nose was bleeding; at Theo, white-faced and scared. He put both hands up to his head; he was still dizzy, and felt, somehow, as if he were back in Porthcarrick.
"I'm... sorry," he said at last. "I lost my temper..."
He went slowly away, his head bent, his feet dragging in the grass. The puzzled boys looked at each other.
"There, stop sniffling!" said the monitor sharply to Stubbs. "And you, young shaver," he added, turning to Theo, "run after Raymond and give him his book; he's forgotten it."
As Theo ran off with the book, the monitor turned back to Stubbs.
"Look here! Raymond didn't start throttling you for nothing. The next time I catch you hanging about and bullying any of the little chaps, I'll punch your head myself. Now be off; we don't want cads here."
Stubbs slipped away, meekly enough. "Dirty little beast!" muttered the monitor.
After this incident Jack waked up to find that his position in the school was changed. He had been so indifferent to his surroundings that he only now saw how universally Stubbs had for long been disliked and mistrusted by the boys. If the masters heard anything of what had occurred, they kept silence; but Jack began slowly to realise that his unexpected championship of Theo had won for him both the goodwill of his schoolfellows and the impassioned adoration of the small creature's self.
Theo trotted after him, indeed, like a "pet lap-dog," often grievously embarrassing his idol by the ways in which his affection expressed itself. Jack would find his nightshirt carefully smoothed and folded, new laces threaded into his boots, the right page turned down in his lesson books, and early primroses laid on his plate at breakfast. This last attention, however, was too much for his patience; and he snubbed the child so unmercifully that the monitors, disinclined as they were to tolerate friendships between little boys and big ones in the school, shrugged their shoulders and refrained from interfering. "The kid" was nothing worse than a blithering idiot, they decided, and Raymond was quite capable of putting him down.
But Theo's devotion was proof against a good deal of snubbing. "Little duffer!" Jack would mutter angrily when the child's name was mentioned; yet he submitted in time, though with a very bad grace, and grad ually came to be regarded as Theo's official protector and champion. "You'd better not bully the kid," one boy would say to another; "or Raymond'll cut your head open." As for Theo, once freed from persecution and satisfied as to the two prime necessities of his nature, a god for his worship and peace for violin practice, he flourished and expanded beyond all expectations, and even blossomed out into the use of English slang and the possession of a huge clasp-knife, fortunately too stiff for his small fingers to open.
His letters to his mother were filled with the praises of Jack. She could gain no definite idea as to the cause of the fight with Stubbs, for Theo, happily, had understood too little himself to be able to explain. On her next visit, however, she obtained from him an account, given in all innocence without any comprehension of its meaning, of what Stubbs had said to him. That afternoon Dr. Cross came into the classroom and said to Jack: "Raymond, I want you to go downstairs; Mirski's mother would like to speak to you before she goes."
Jack obeyed, with a scowling face. As if things were not bad enough already, he had got to go and be jawed at by the other fellow's mother now.
He found her sitting alone, her thin hands folded on her lap. As he came in she looked up; and he stopped short and dropped his eyes, with a sudden rush of jealous hatred against her child. What right had Theo to have a mother like that, when other people had nothing? "Nothing, nothing," he repeated to himself with dolorous insistence, He had never realised how lonely he was till he saw the face of the "other fellow's mother," Her eyes were like the deep, still water in the shadowy pools of Trevanna glen.