Chapter VII

Happy places have grown holy;
If we went where once we went,
Only tears would fall down slowly
As at solemn sacrament.

MRS. BROWNING.

It is not my intention to trace in detail Tim’s career at school, which, after all, presents few points of interest. His first two years were certainly not a period of unmixed enjoyment; but other boys before and after him have gone through much the same experience without taking much harm from it. And after a time boys get tired of persecution, as of other pursuits. It is not worth their while to continue to bully, unless there is some special reason for it, and in Tim’s case there was none; his offences were all purely negative, sins of omission, absence of qualities decreed to be necessary to salvation by the _Vehm-gericht_ of collective boyhood through many generations.

Villidge was right to a certain extent in his prophecy of the good effects likely to spring from the patronage of Tommy. There is little or no doubt that Tim’s ultimate admission to a recognised social standing owed its first small beginnings to his intimacy with that eccentric youth. Boys go in flocks; and if it is the fashion to treat one of their number with unkindness, while the active throw each his little stone, the passive turn aside and stop their ears to the victim’s groans. We are not all thieves, and are in the habit of returning thanks for that fact, but when a fellow-traveller has fallen in with a band of these gentry, the proportion of Samaritans to priests and Levites is not large, and nowhere smaller than among boys. But when the tide turns, and some one with more character than the rest picks up the wounded comrade and gives him a word of encouragement, pronouncing him ‘not such a very bad lot,’ the rest veer round, and peace is restored. It is impossible to fix the exact date of the change; the deliverance is as intangible as the persecution. To Tim it came far more slowly than Villidge, with his happy knack of establishing coincidence between his wishes and probability, had foretold for the comfort of Darley’s uneasy conscience.

It is true that Weston was popular among his contemporaries, but at the time of the Ditton expedition he was still in Fourth Form, and the Remove little boys, though they frequented him freely and to a certain extent admired him, would not have accepted his opinion of a third person where it differed in any way from their own. But a young man who had been for almost two years in Fifth Form could not be expected to recollect these subtle distinctions of lower-boy life.

The leaven was working surely, however. Tommy stuck staunchly to his protégé, as they mounted the lowest rungs in the ladder together, and by Tim’s third summer-half, when he had been two years at Eton, had learnt to keep his fingers freer from ink, and to wear hats that fitted him, he stood firmly on a platform from which he could look back with tolerable equanimity on his past troubles. This half Fifth Form would open its portals to him, and he would cease to be a lower boy; but, alas! this was also Carol’s last half at school, and little as had come of his dreamed-of companionship, that was a thought on which Tim could hardly trust himself to dwell. He had made a few little acquaintanceships since it had become the fashion to find good in him, and was no longer desolate, but he did not make friends readily, and these new connections with the world around him left quite untouched the old ruling devotion of his life whose roots were very deep in him indeed. Carol was almost more his hero than ever. The very separateness of their respective positions served to enhance his devotion. It seemed quite right and natural that Carol should be a king among men, should stand at the corner of the street with other godlike beings, his peers--yet how immeasurably below him in the estimation of his faithful admirer--should carry a cane (badge of the greatest honour!) at football matches in the winter, and play cricket for the eleven in summer. His walls were decorated with caps of many colours--the eleven, the ‘Field,’ the house cap, and many more. Pewter cups won in athletic contests occupied little carved brackets over his chimney-piece, and the rules of ‘Pop’ framed in pale blue ribbon sprawled over half the available space on one side of his little room. In short, he was the typical ‘swell’ or successful public-school boy, and a very kindly, gentle, magnanimous fellow into the bargain, as became his greatness.

Tim used to trot off to the playing-fields in those long hot days, and lie there under the trees, watching the light athletic figure clad in white flannel springing hither and thither in the game, till the other boys, knowing his indifference to their sports, wondered sometimes at the regularity of his attendance at all the cricket matches.

It was Saturday after-twelve, and Tim was occupying his usual corner, with his rug spread on the edge of the shadow, and a half-eaten bag of cherries beside him. The first innings was just over, and Carol, released from his duties in the field, came sauntering round the ground arm-in-arm with another magnificent young cricketer like himself. Tim was turning his attention, no longer claimed by the game, to the firm red fruit, when he heard his name spoken in the voice that never failed to make his nerves thrill.

‘Hulloa, Ebbesley!’ said his lord and fag-master loftily, but not unkindly, ‘what are you up to? Wasting your time as usual, eh?’

‘I was looking at you,’ answered the little boy simply and truthfully, wholly unaware that his reply partook of the nature of repartee. Carol flushed and looked a little annoyed; then he laughed.

‘That’s one for me, anyhow,’ he said, as he resumed his walk.

‘Who’s your young friend?’ asked his companion.

‘My fag; he’s one of the queerest little beggars I ever saw; I know him at home, and am supposed to look after him. I’ve been trying for two years to discover the meaning of the term, and the duties connected with it.’

‘You’ve some cheek, answering Darley like that,’ said the stout Sawnders, who, too lazy to bring down a rug, and having neither money nor credit wherewith to obtain cherries, had decided to bestow his company on Tim in return for a share of those luxuries.

‘I didn’t mean to be cheeky,’ said Tim, aghast; ‘do you suppose he was angry?’

‘I don’t believe he half liked it, before another swell; he got very red.’

‘Oh dear me!’ said Tim wearily, ‘I seem always to say the wrong thing.’

‘Well, you’d better come back to my tutor’s now, anyway,’ said Sawnders; ‘it’s a quarter to two, and they won’t begin the next innings before dinner.’

As they went towards College, Tim, whose mind was busy with the thought that he had offended Carol, felt himself taken by the scruff of the neck, and turning to expostulate, found himself in the grasp of his tutor, who regarded him with keen friendly eyes. ‘Well, little boy,’ he said, ‘have you been looking at the match?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘All after twelve?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you mean to come back after four?’

‘Yes, I think so, sir.’

‘Have you done all your work?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then I think you had much better come out with me. You don’t care a rap about cricket, I know, and only come here to loaf. Mr. ---- and I are going to drive to Burnham Beeches this afternoon, and walk back after tea. You and Sawnders can come too, and when you see Weston, you may request the pleasure of his company, if his engagements in Sixpenny and his numerous punishments will permit.’

‘Oh, thank you, sir; that will be jolly!’

So the little boys scudded off in search of Tommy, whom they found with his head in a basin of water, preparing for dinner. They communicated their tutor’s message, while he sputtered in his towel. Tommy was already relatively for his age a celebrity in the cricketing world, and doubted if a whole after-four could be spared from that game.

‘As to the pœnas, to-morrow’s Sunday, and I shall have lots of time to do them. I’ve only got the eleven o’clock lesson to write out and translate four times, and a hundred lines, and three copies of extra work. Well, hang Sixpenny for once; I’ll devote this afternoon to the beauties of nature.’

‘I like tea at that cottage,’ said Sawnders meditatively. ‘They have such good bread and butter, and real cream, and I shouldn’t wonder if tutor took a cake.’

‘Sawnders, you’re a white hog,’ said Tommy; ‘Skinny and I are above such trifles. I hope there’ll be jam.’

It was a lovely afternoon in the late hay-harvest, and the drive was delightful. The last of the wild roses still lingered in the hedges, and the little grass that remained uncut was starred with great white field daisies. The boys on the back seat of the fly, in change coats and straw hats, were in a holiday mood, and full of silly talk. Tommy had mounted the box, and sat beside the driver, of whom he was an old friend, and it was not till the vehicle very nearly carried away the gate-post on Dorney Common that he was discovered to be in possession of the reins.

‘We had better leave Eton by the quiet way,’ his tutor had said; ‘there are so many of the authorities who have just claims on Weston’s leisure, that we shall never get him safe out of the place if we attempt to drive through College.’

Of this delightful man’s pleasant relations with his pupils I have spoken elsewhere. Mr. Ebbesley, who had been brought up at a private school, and in the good old days when boys regarded their schoolmaster as their natural enemy, had looked forward, not, it is to be feared, with unmixed dissatisfaction, to the idea that his son would turn to him for sympathy and help in the inevitable scrapes which official severity was apt to magnify into crimes. He had made his first visit to Eton after Tim’s admission prepared of course to uphold authority and do all that was right and proper, but determined not to be too severe with the boy for his transgressions of the rigid letter of school law; he was going to be very large-minded and understanding. And behold! there had been nothing to sympathise about; above all, nothing to condone. The little boy was so law-abiding that he could have lived without transgression under a far stricter code, and whereas he had been cold and somewhat uncommunicative on several other points, he kindled into something very like enthusiasm when he spoke of his tutor’s kindness to him. Mr. Ebbesley told himself that he was very glad it was so, but it seemed to him hard to be the only person without the power of awakening his son’s affection.

Is it not significant that this chapter, which is the happiest in my story, should be one of the shortest? This was a day in Tim’s life in which birds sang and flowers bloomed for him, and for twelve hours the murmur of the sad undercurrent that flows all through his history had faded from the ear. For my part, I am so glad to think of this afternoon’s pleasure that he had, that I cannot refrain from leaving it on record, though it does not advance the action of my drama, a consideration which I am well aware a writer is bound to respect. I have been to Burnham at all seasons of the year, from earliest spring, when there is hardly a wash of green on the noble trees, to latest autumn, when the ground is ankle-deep in glorious colour, and it would be hard to say when there is most beauty there. I have never visited the spot in midwinter, but I am quite sure that if one did the familiar glades would have some appropriate charm for his delight, so regularly does each season lend its own especial gifts to deck that favoured place. At Tim’s age, as a rule, a love of nature for her own sake is a rare possession; it is a compensation kept to console older people for the loss of so many other enjoyments that then made the world bright to them. But perhaps it was because his young life was so lacking in the ordinary elements of boyish happiness, that this gift of later age was vouchsafed to our little lad. Certainly the sunlight on the smooth gray trunks, and the peculiar dappled shadows on the sward that only beech-leaves can cast, had a secret to tell him on this blest half-holiday, which would have been Hebrew and Greek to his two playmates. I think it must have been this knowledge of the country as the anodyne for bruised hearts, which made _As You Like It_ his favourite play, for Tim read Shakespeare, in Mr. Bowdler’s edition with which his father had taken care to provide him. Burnham was Tim’s Ardennes, and it would hardly have surprised him to come on the cousins walking in the wood while Touchstone lay hard by among the bracken.

By this time, however, he knew too much to communicate such fancies as these to his companions. The three ran down steep places, jumped off banks into heaps of last year’s leaves that still lay piled in some of the hollows, and climbed the trees, on one of which Tommy, who was certainly very unlike Orlando in other respects, inscribed his own initials and those of the party, including his tutor, who is ignorant to this day of the liberty taken with his signature.

Tim ran, climbed, and shouted like the others, and enjoyed himself amazingly. He and Sawnders entrenched themselves in a hollow tree which Tommy was to carry by assault armed with a long stick he had found; but the game had to be abandoned on account of Sawnders’s not unnatural objection to being hit really hard, which Tommy treated with the most withering scorn.

‘It isn’t funny to hurt people,’ said the injured defender of the tree, ruefully caressing his wounded member; and this led to a discussion on the nature of true wit, which lasted till their tutor came to call them to tea, and inform them parenthetically that they had made themselves look ‘even more disgusting objects than usual.’

Then for the first time Tim noticed with some surprise how tired he felt; indeed for a few moments he was so white that the other master who accompanied them, observing him, thought he was going to faint.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said Tim; ‘I suppose I’ve done more than usual to-day. I didn’t feel tired till we stopped.’

Sawnders at once discovered that he was quite used up too, but was promptly snubbed by his tutor.

‘That little Ebbesley does not look at all strong,’ said the other master, when the two men were for a little out of earshot of their young companions; ‘are you not anxious about him?’

‘He is certainly delicate,’ Tim’s tutor answered thoughtfully; ‘but I hope he may outgrow it in time,’ and on the homeward drive he was very careful of Tim.

So happy had the boy been in the guileless amusements of the afternoon that for the time he actually forgot to think of Carol. But as they neared Eton on their return the recollection of their encounter of the morning and the possibility that he had offended him came back with a sudden pang to his mind--a pang which was proved to be quite superfluous the very next day.

It was Sunday morning, an ideal bright summer Sunday, and Carol was standing at his tutor’s door in rather a chastened frame of mind. The bells were ringing for service, and from out the houses the boys were issuing, each in his best clothes and with a generally brushed-up appearance. The sun shone upon the house opposite, and made little silver shields of the leaves of the magnolia that was trained against it. Carol was thinking regretfully how few more Sundays he should sit in the dear familiar chapel, a boy among boys; and looking back across the happy years of his school-life,--hardly a cloud had dimmed their brightness;--in retrospect they seemed one unbroken march of friendliness, gaiety, pleasure, and modest triumph. Eton had treated him very kindly, and he was sorry to leave. Just then who should come out but little Tim. He had recovered to some extent from his fatigue of the day before, and had refused to stay out, though his tutor had suggested the legitimacy of such a course if he were so inclined.

As it chanced, the two were alone. Carol laid a kind hand upon him and called him ‘Tim.’ The old nickname brought a quick flush of pleasure into the colourless face; at Eton Carol always called him ‘Ebbesley.’

‘It’s a great pity, Tim,’ the big boy was saying, ‘that we’ve seen so little of one another; that’s the worst of this place, everything goes in layers. If a fellow isn’t in your division, with the best will in the world you can never see anything of him.’

‘You’ve always been very good to me, Darley,’ Tim answered gratefully.

‘You won’t have to call me “Darley” any more now I’m leaving. I say, Tim, will you write to me sometimes next half and tell me all about the old place? All my friends of my own standing are leaving too; and after all, you know, you are really the oldest friend of them all.’

‘Oh, Carol, may I?’ cried Tim; but just then an eruption of other boys occurring from the narrow doorway, he departed to chapel without expressing himself further. He trod upon air; Carol had called him by his old name, and bade him do the like by him, had spoken of their long friendship, had asked him to write to him. And he had been thinking he had offended him! Tim offered up genuine thanksgivings in the old chapel, where so many generations of boys have knelt on the threshold of life, as he and Carol were kneeling then.

It happened that morning that the first lesson was the beautiful lament of David over his dead friend Jonathan; and Tim, listening to the history of those two friends long ago, felt his love for his friend almost a religion to him. ‘Thy love to me was wonderful,’ said the voice of the reader, ‘passing the love of woman.’ ‘What woman could ever love him as I do?’ thought Tim, as he looked naturally to the seat where Carol sat. At that moment a sunbeam from some hole high in the roof fell on the golden curly head which seemed transfigured; and as Tim’s hungry eyes rested on the face of his friend, he turned towards him and smiled upon him in his place.