St. Winifred's Part 35

Sall.u.s.t.

And now, gentle or ungentle reader, we must imagine that two whole years have pa.s.sed since the conclusion of those summer holidays, before we again meet our young friends of Saint Winifred's.

The two years--as what years are not?--have been full of change. Walk across the court with me, and let us discover what we can about the present state of things.

The first we meet are Walter and Power--taller and manlier looking than they were, but otherwise little changed in appearance. Walter, with his dark hair and blue eyes, his graceful figure and open face, is still the handsome, attractive-looking boy we used to see. Power, too, has the same refined, thoughtful look, the same delicate yet n.o.ble features, the same eyes, which we recognise at once as the clear and bright index of a beautiful and unstained soul.

And neither of these boys has failed in their promise of their earlier days, and the warm friendship with which they regarded each other has done much to bring about this result. Each in his own way has rejoiced in his youth, has pa.s.sed an innocent and happy boyhood, stored with pleasant reminiscences for after days, filled with high hopes and manly principles, with habits well-regulated, and that fine self-control which had taught them--

"Rapt in reverential awe, To sit, self-governed in the fiery prime Of youth, obedient at the feet of law."

They have enjoyed the gifts of early years without squandering them in wasteful profusion; they have felt and known that the purest pleasures were also the sweetest and the most permanent. Their minds are well cultivated, their bodies are in vigorous health, their hearts are glowing with generous impulse and warm enthusiasm; and if sorrow should ever darken their after years, it can never drive them to despair, for they have wandered in the pleasant paths of wisdom, they have drunk the pure cup of innocence, they will carry out of the torrid zone of youth clear consciences, unremorseful memories, and unpolluted minds.

Who is this who saunters across the playground, talking in loud, self-confident tones with two or three fellows round him, his hands in his pockets, his air haughty and nonchalant, and his cap a little on one side? He is still pleasant looking, his face still shows the capabilities for good and great things, but we are obliged to say of him:

"Quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore!"

Yes, Kenrick--for it is he--is altered for the worse. Something or other has left, in its traces upon his face, the history of two degenerate years. His cheek does not look as if it were capable any longer of an ingenuous blush, and there is a curl about his lip and nostril which speaks of perpetual unhealthy scorn, that child of mortified vanity and conceit, which brazens out the reproaches of self-distrust and self-reproach. See with what a careless, almost patronising, air he barely notices the master who is pa.s.sing by him. He has just flung a slight nod to Power, studiously taking care not to notice Walter at all. Look, too, at the boys who are with him; they are not boys with whom we like to see him; they are an idle lot, precocious only in folly and in vice. And that little fellow, who seems to be his especial favourite, is not at all to our taste; he seems the coolest of them all. For during the last few years Kenrick has entirely lost his balance; he has deserted his best friends for the adulation of younger boys, who fed his vanity, and the society of elder boys, who perverted his thoughts, and vitiated his habits. He has slackened in the career of honourable industry, he has deflected from the straight paths of integrity and virtue. Already the fresh eagerness of youth has palled into satiety, already some of its sparkling-wine for him is bitter as vinegar; with him already pleasure has become hectic fever instead of a healthy glow. Alas! he is not happy. Within these two years he has lost--and his countenance betrays the fact in its ruined beauty--he has lost the true joys of youth, and known instead of them the troubles of the envious, the fears of the cowardly, the heaviness of the slothful, the shame of the unclean. He has lost something of the instinctive shrinking, even in thought, from all that is vile and base, the loathing of falsehood, the kindness that will not willingly give pain, the humility which has lowly thoughts of its own worth; he has lost his joy in things lovely, and excellent, and of good report; he has changed them for the mirth of fools, which is like crackling thorns--changed them for the feet that go down to death, for the steps that lay hold of h.e.l.l. It is a mean price for which he has sold his peace of conscience--"the sweetness of the cup that is charged with poison, the beauty of the serpent whose bite is death."

Eden, who is seated reading on one of the benches by the wall, has recovered from his illness, but he is not, and never will be, what, but for Harpour's brutality, he might have been. He is a nervous, timid, intellectual boy. No game, unfortunately, has any attraction for him.

The large liquid eyes, swimming sometimes with strange l.u.s.tre, and often varying in colour, the delicate flush which any pulse of emotion drives glowing into the somewhat pale face, give to him an almost girlish aspect, and tell the tale of a weakened const.i.tution. Eden's development has been quite altered by his fright; most of the vivacity and playfulness of his character has vanished; and although it flashes out with pleasant mirth when he is alone with his few closest friends, such as Walter and Power, his manner is, for the most part, very quiet and reserved. Yet Eden has a position of his own in the school; and un.o.btrusive as he is, his opinion is always listened to with kindness and respect. When he came into school again after his recovery he was received, as I have said already, with almost brotherly affection by all the boys, who felt how much he had been wronged. He became the child and protege of the school, and any cruelty to _him_ would, after this, have been violently resented. Devoting himself wholly to work and reading, he became very successful in his progress, and is now in the second fifth. But what chiefly marks him is his extreme gentleness, and the eager way in which he strives to help all the younger and most helpless boys. Experience of suffering has given him a keen sympathy with the oppressed, and young as he is he is still doing a useful work.

There is Harpour playing rackets, and he is playing remarkably well. He is now nineteen, and a personage of immense importance in the school, for he is head of the cricket eleven, Walter being head of the football.

Harpour is quite unchanged, and if he was doing mischief when we knew him two years ago, he is doing twice as much mischief now. His influence is unmitigatedly pernicious. With just enough cunning skill to escape detection, he yet signalises himself by complicity in every form of wrong which goes on in the school, and some new wrongs he introduces and invents. But nothing delights him so much as to instigate other boys to resist the authority of the masters. They know him to be a nucleus of disorder and wickedness, but he has acted with such consummate ingenuity as to avoid even laying himself open to any distinct proof of his many offences.

He is just now stopping for a minute in his game to talk to those three boys, who have been strutting up and down the court arm in arm, and whom we easily recognise. The one with the red puffy face, with an enormous gold pin in his cravat, a bunch of charms hanging to his chain, and a ring on his hand, which he loses no opportunity of displaying, is our friend Jones, with vulgarity as usual stamped on every feature, and displayed in every movement which he makes; the tall slim fellow, with an air of feeble fastness, an indecisive mouth, a habit of running his hand through his light-coloured hair, and a gaze which usually settles in fixed admiration on his faultless boots, can be no one but Howard Tracy; the third, a fellow with far more meaning and strength in his face, betrays himself to be Mackworth, by the insinuating plausibility and Belial-like grace of his manner and aspect. A dangerous serpent this; one never sees him, or hears him speak, or observes the dark glitter of his eye, without being reminded of a cerastes lythely rustling through the dry gra.s.s towards its victim.

And there at last--I thought we should never see him--is our dear young joker of jokes, the same unaltered Flip whom we know, running down the school steps. His face is overflowing with mirth and fun, and now he is stopping and holding both his sides for laughter, while, with little touches of his own, he retails some of the strange blunders which Bliss has made in the _viva voce_ examination that morning; to which his friend Whalley listens with the same good-humoured smile which he had of old. Henderson is a perfect mimic, but never uses his powers of mimicry in an ill-natured spirit; and his imitation of Bliss's stolid perplexity and Dr Lane's comments are very ludicrous. While he is in the middle of this narrative, Bliss himself appears on the scene and relieves his feelings by delivering the only pun he ever made in his life, and observing, in a solemn tone of voice--

"Flip, don't be flippant;" a remark which he has subst.i.tuted for the "I'll lick you, Flip," of old days.

"You dear old Blissidas, I _think_ I've heard that pun once or twice before," observes Henderson, calmly pulling undone the bow of Bliss's necktie, and running off to escape retaliation, followed at his leisure by Whalley, who knows Bliss to be much too lazy to pursue the chase very far.

Let us come and hear--for we have put on our cap of darkness and are invisible, coming and going where we like, un.o.bserved--what our four fast friends at the racket-court are talking about.

"We shall have lots of larks this half," observes Harpour, leaning on his racket.

"Yes; such fun, old boy," answers Jones.

"I declare this dull old place was getting quite lively before last holidays," says Mackworth; "we shall soon get things all right here."

"Fancy that fellow Power head of the school," said Harpour, bursting into a roar of scornful laughter, echoed in faint sn.i.g.g.e.rings by Jones and Tracy.

"Might as well have a jug of milk and water head of the school," sneered Mackworth.

"Or a bottle of French polish, I should think," casually suggests Henderson, who, _en pa.s.sant_, has heard the last remark.

"d.a.m.n that fellow," says Mackworth, stamping, "by Jove, I'll be even with him some day."

"Is he one of the new monitors?" asks Jones.

"Yes," says Tracy, "and Evson's another;" and at Walter's name the faces of all four grew darker; "and Kenrick's a third."

"O, Kenrick is, is he? that's all right. Jolly fellow is Ken," observes Harpour, approvingly. "Yes, quite up to snuff," adds Jones; "and a thorough gentlemanly chap," a.s.sents Mackworth; for, amazing to relate, Kenrick is on good terms with these fellows now, though he has never spoken to Walter yet.

"Of good family, too, on the mother's side," drawls Tracy, with his hand lifting his locks.

"I say, old fellows," says Harpour, with many knowing looks and winks, and poking of his friends in the ribs. "I say, stunning tap at Dan's, you know, eh? I say;" whereupon the others laugh, and Belial Mackworth observes, "And let those monitors try to peach if they dare. We'll soon have _them_ under our thumb."

After which, as their conversation is supremely repulsive, let us go and take a breath of delicious pure sea air, and seat ourselves by Walter and Power on the sh.o.r.e. Walter is in good, and even gay spirits, being fresh from Semlyn, but Power seems a little grave and depressed.

"Look, Walter," he says, shying a round stone at a bit of embedded rock about twenty yards before them, but missing it; "I believe it was that identical rock--"

"_That_ identical rock," said Walter, taking a better shot, and hitting it; "well, what about it?"

"--On which you were standing one autumn evening three years ago, when the tide was coming in--"

"And to save me wet trousers you took off your shoes and stockings, and carried me in on your back," said Walter. "I remember it well, Rex; it was a happy day for me. I recollect I'd been very miserable; it was after the Paton affair, you know, and every one was cutting me. Your coming to speak to me was about the last thing in the world I expected and the best thing I could have hoped. I'd often wanted to know you, longed to have you as a friend; but I used to lock up to you as such a young swell in those days that I never thought we should meet each other."

"Pooh!" said Power; "but wasn't it good now of me to break the ice and speak first? I declare, I think I've never done it with any one else.

_You'd_ never have done it--now confess? Only fancy, we mightn't have known each other till this day."

"I shouldn't have done it at _that_ time," said Walter, "because I was in Coventry; but--well, never mind, Rex, we understand each other. I was looking at some porpoises, I remember."

"Yes; happy days they were after that. I wish the time was back again!

Fancy you a monitor, and me head of the school!"

"Fancy! we've got up the school so much faster than we used to expect."

"Yes; but I wish we could change places, and you be head and I sixth monitor as you are. You'll help me, Walter, won't you?"

"You don't doubt that, Rex, I'm sure; _all_ the help _I_ can give is yours."

"If it weren't for that, I think I would have left, Walter. I don't think, somehow, I've influence enough for head. I'm not swell enough at the games."

"You play though now, and enjoy them; and I don't half believe you, Rex, when you talked of having wished to leave. That would have been cowardice, you know, and you're not the boy to leave your post."

"Here I am then in my place, armour on, visor down, determined not to fly, like the Roman soldier whose skeleton was found in the sentry box at Pompeii," said Power, playfully getting up and a.s.suming a military att.i.tude.

"And here am I," said Walter, laughing, as he stood beside him with one foot advanced--"I, your sixth Hyperaspistes."

"The sixth!--the _first_ you mean," said Power. "The four monitors, between you and me, won't, I fear, help us much. Browne is very short-sighted, and always shutting up with a headache; Smythe is a mere book-worm, and a regular b.u.t.t even among the little fellows--worse than useless--no dignity or anything else; Kenrick (for Kenrick had so far kept the advantage of his original start that, much as he had fallen off in work, Walter had not yet got above him)--well, you know what Ken is!"

"Yes, I know what Ken is now--_Hespemor en phthimenoir_--he's our chief danger--a doubtful general in the camp. Hullo, Flip, _you_ here?" said he, as Henderson came up and joined them.

"Myself, O Evides; who's the doubtful general in the camp?--not I, I hope."

"You, Flip? no; but Kenrick. We're talking about the monitors."