Chapter XXIII: Breaking in

Smaller matters must give way to greater. You have seen how that great problem of Carne came about, and how it perpetuated itself in the persons of Jack and Jim Carron, without any apparent likelihood of satisfactory solution, unless by the final intervention of the Great Solver of all doubts and difficulties.

To arrive at the end of our story within anything like reasonable limits, we must again take flying leaps across the years, and touch with no more than the tip of a toe such outstanding points as call for special notice.

Harrow was the most tremendous change their lives had so far experienced. Mr. Eager had indeed prepared them for it to the best of his power. But the change, when they plunged into it--first Jim and then Jack--went far beyond their widest imaginings.

With their fellows they shook down, in time, into satisfactory fellowship. But the rules of the school, written and unwritten, from above and from below, were for a long time terribly irksome and almost past bearing. They were something like tiger-cubs transferred suddenly from their native freedom to the strict rounds of the circus-ring. They were expected to understand and conform to matters which were so taken for granted that explanations were deemed superfluous. And they suffered many things that first term in stubborn silence, mask and cloak for the shy pride which would sooner bite its tongue through than ask the question which would make its ignorance manifest.

The milling-ground between the school and the racquet-courts knew them well, and drank of their blood, and proved the rough nursery of many a lasting friendship.

Jim used laughingly to say at home that he had seen the colour of the blood of every fellow he cared a twopenny snap for, on that trampled plot of grass by the old courts. If the colour was good, and the manner of its display in accordance with his ideas, good feeling invariably followed, and he soon had heaps of friends. That was doubtless because he had nothing whatever of the swot in him. He delivered himself over, heart and soul, to the active enjoyments of life, and found no lack of like temper and much to his mind.

Jack developed along somewhat wider and deeper lines. He had no great craving for knowledge simply as knowledge. But concerning things that interested him he was insatiable, and slogged away at them with as great a gusto as Jim did at his games.

Jack's ideas of a correct school curriculum, being based entirely on his own leanings, necessarily clashed at times with those of the higher powers, and both he and Jim passed under the birch of the genial Vaughan with the utmost regularity and decorum.

Neither, of course, ever uttered a word under these inflictions. Jack went tingling back to his own private preoccupation of the moment; and Jim went raging off to the playing-fields.

"It's not what he does," he would fume to his chums, "but the way he does it. If he'd get mad I wouldn't mind, but he's always as nice and smooth as a hairdresser, and talks as if it was a favour he was doing you."

"Oily old beast!" would be the return comment, and then to the game with extra vim to make up for time lost in the swishing.

Jim's greatest fight was an epic in the school for many a year after he had left. "Ah!" said the privileged ones--whether they had actually been present in the body on that historic occasion or not--"but you should have seen the slog between Carron and Chissleton! That _was_ a fight!"

It was the usual episode of the big bully, whom most public-schoolboys run up against sooner or later, and Chissleton was three years older and a good head taller than Jim. But Jim had the long years of the flats, and all the benefit of Mr. Eager's scientific fisticuffs, behind him. They fought ten rounds, each of which left Jim on the grass, his face a jelly daubed with blood, and his eyes so nearly closed up that it was only when the bulky Chissleton was clear against the sky that he could see him at all. But bulk tells both ways, and loses its wind chasing a small boy about even a circumscribed ring, and knocking him flat ten times only to find him dancing about next round, as gamely as ever, though somewhat dilapidated and unpleasant to look upon. So Jim wore the big one down by degrees, and in the eleventh round his time came. He hurled himself on the dim bulk between him and the sky with such headlong fury that both went down with a crash. But Jim was up in a moment daubing more blood over his face with the backs of his fists, and the big one lay still till long after the pæans of the small boys had died away into an interested silence.

"But didn't it hurt dreadfully, Jim?" asked Gracie, long afterwards, with pitifully twisted face.

"Sho! I d'n know. It was the very best fight I ever had."

The Little Lady found the days without the boys long and slow, in spite of her close friendship with Margaret Herapath.

Meg was everything a girl could possibly be. She was sweet, she was lovely, she was clever, she was a darling dear, she was splendid. She was an angel, she was a duck. She was Lady Margaret, she was dear old Meggums. And never a day passed but she was at the cottage or Gracie was over at Knoyle.

They rode and walked and bathed and read together. They slept together at times, and talked half through the night because the days were not long enough for the innumerable confidences that had to pass between them.

And Eager rejoiced in their close communion, for he had never met any girl whose friendship he would have so desired for Gracie. And he went about his duties, storming and persuading, fighting and tending, with new fires in his heart which shone out of his eyes, and his people all acknowledged that he was "a rare good un," even when he was scarifying them about manure-heaps and stinks, which they suffered as tolerantly as they did his vehemence, and as though such a thing as typhus had never been known in the land.

And what times they all had when the holidays came round!

A little shyness, of course, at first, while the various parties took stock of the changes in one another. For Gracie was growing so tall--"quite the young lady," as Mrs. Jex said; and such a change from the fellows at school, as Jack and Jim acknowledged to themselves.

Girls--as girls--were somewhat looked down upon at school, you know. But this was Gracie, and quite a different thing altogether.

When the first shyness of these meetings wore off she was apt to be somewhat overwhelmed by their effusive worship. They were her slaves, hers most absolutely, and their only difficulty was to find adequate means for the expression of their devotion.

For their first home-coming, each of them, unknown to the other, had saved from the wiles of the tuck-shop such meagre portion of pocket-money as strength of will insisted on, and brought her a present; Jack, a small volume of Plutarch's Lives, the reading of which gave himself great satisfaction; and Jim, a pocket-handkerchief with red and blue spots, which seemed to him the very height of fashion, and almost too good for ordinary use by any one but a princess--or Gracie.

"You _dear_ boys!" said the Little Lady, and opened Plutarch and sparkled--although for Plutarch, simply as Plutarch, she had no overpowering admiration; and put the red and blue spots to her little brown nose in the most delicate and ladylike manner imaginable. "But you really shouldn't, you know!" And they both vowed internally that they would do it again next time and every time, and each time still better.

And, so far, the fact that they were two, and that there was only one Gracie, occasioned them no trouble whatever.

Each time they came home Sir Denzil and Eager looked cautiously for any new developments pointing to the solution of the puzzle, and found none. Developments there were in plenty, but not one from which they could deduce any inference of weight. Was Jim more dashing and heedless and headstrong than ever?--all these came to him from his father. Was Jack developing a taste for study, of a kind, and along certain very definite lines of his own choosing?--could that be cast up at him as an un-Carronlike weakness due to the Sandys strain, or should it not rather be credited to the strengthening admixture of red Lee blood?

Those were the broader lines of divergence between the two, and the most striking to the outward observer, but it must not be supposed therefrom that Jack had foresworn his birthright of the active life. He revelled in the freedom of the flats as fully as ever, rode and bathed and ran, and held his own in cricket and hockey; but, at the same time, the habit of thought had visibly grown upon him, and it made him seem the older of the two.

Time wrought its personal changes in them all, but brought no great variation from these earlier characteristics. Gracie grew more beautiful in every way each time the boys came home; Jack more deliberative; Jim remained light-hearted and joyously careless as ever, enjoying each day to its fullest, and troubling not at all about the morrow. His devotion to the playing-fields gave him by degrees somewhat of an advantage over Jack in the matter of physique and general good looks. His healthy, browned face, sparkling black eyes, and the fine supple grace of his strong and well-knit body were at all times good to look upon.

Charles Eager, who had a searchingly appreciative eye for the beauties of God's handiwork in all its expressions, when he sped across the sands behind the corded muscles playing so exquisitely beneath the firm white flesh, or lay in the warm sand and watched the rise and fall of the wide, deep chest on which the salt drops from the tumbled mop of black hair rolled like diamonds, while up above the clean-cut nostrils went in and out like those of a hunted stag, said to himself that here was the making of en unusually fine man.

He doubted if Jim's brain would carry him as far as Jack's, but all the same he could not but rejoice in him exceedingly.

"Here," he mused, "is heart and body. And there is heart and brain,"--for at heart these two were very much alike still, open-handed, generous, and, by nature and Eager's own good training, clean and wholesome,--"which will go farthest?"

And, following his train of thought to the point of speech, one day when he and Jim were alone, he said:

"God has blessed you with a wonderfully fine body, lad. Where is it going to take you?"

"Into the thick of the fighting, I hope, if ever there is any more fighting," said Jim, with a hopeful laugh.

"One fights with brains as well as with brawn"--with an intentional touch of the spur to see what would come of it.

"Oh, Jack's got the brains--and the brawn too," he added quickly, lest he should seem to imply any pre-eminence on his own part in that respect. "He'll die a general. I'll maybe kick out captain--if I'm not a sergeant-major,"--with another merry laugh. "I'd sooner fight in the front line any day than order them from the rear."

"God save us from the horrors of another war," said Eager fervently. "I can just remember Waterloo. Every friend we had was in mourning, and sorrow was over the land."

"And there is another Napoleon in the saddle," said Jim.

"Ay; a menace to the world at large! An ambitious man, and somewhat unscrupulous, I fear. To keep himself in the saddle he may set the war-horse prancing."

"I'm for the cavalry myself," said Jim, and Eager smiled at the characteristic irrelevancy. "I shall try for Sandhurst. Jack's for Woolwich."

"Even Sandhurst will need some grinding up."

"Oh, I'll grind when the time comes "--somewhat dolefully. "You can get crammers who know the game and are up to all the twists and turns. If I can only crawl through and get the chance of some fighting, I'll show them!"