Mr. Gordon’s face grew blacker and blacker. The deep undisguised pain which the discovery caused him was swallowed up in unbounded indignation. “Deceitful, dishonourable boys,” he exclaimed, “henceforth my treatment of you shall be very different. The whole form, except Russell and Owen, shall have an extra lesson every half-holiday; not one of the rest of you will I trust again. I took you for gentlemen. I was mistaken. Go.” And so saying, he motioned them to their seats with imperious disdain.
They went, looking sheepish and ashamed. Eric, deeply vexed, kept twisting and untwisting a bit of paper, without raising his eyes, and even Barker thoroughly repented his short-sighted treachery; the rest were silent and miserable.
At twelve o’clock two boys lingered in the room to speak to Mr. Gordon; they were Eric Williams and Edwin Russell, but they were full of very different feelings.
Eric stepped to the desk first. Mr. Gordon looked up.
“You! Williams, I wonder that you have the audacity to speak to me. Go—I have nothing to say to you.”
“But, sir, I want to tell you that—”
“Your guilt is only too clear, Williams. You will hear more of this. Go, I tell you.”
Eric’s passion overcame him; he stamped furiously on the ground, and burst out, “I will speak, sir; you have been unjust to me for a long time, but I will not be—”
Mr. Gordon’s cane fell sharply across the boy’s back; he stopped, glared for a moment, and then saying, “Very well, sir! I shall tell Dr. Rowlands that you strike before you hear me,” he angrily left the room, and slammed the door violently behind him.
Before Mr. Gordon had time to recover from his astonishment, Russell stood by him.
“Well, my boy,” said the master, softening in a moment, and laying his hand gently on Russell’s head, “what have you to say? You cannot tell how I rejoice, amid the vexation and disgust that this has caused me, to find that you at least are honourable. But I knew, Edwin, that I could trust you.”
“Oh, sir, I come to speak for Eric—for Williams.”
Mr. Gordon’s brow darkened again and the storm gathered, as he interrupted vehemently, “Not a word, Russell; not a word. This is the second time that he has wilfully deceived me; and this time he has involved others too in his base deceit.”
“Indeed, sir, you wrong him. I can’t think how he came to write the paper, but I know that he did not and would not use it. Didn’t you see yourself, sir, how he turned his head quite another way when he broke down?”
“It is very kind of you, Edwin, to defend him,” said Mr. Gordon coldly, “but at present, at any rate, I must not hear you. Leave me; I feel deeply vexed, and must have time to think over this disgraceful affair.”
Russell went away disconsolate, and met his friend striding up and down the passage, waiting for Dr. Rowlands to come out of the library.
“Oh, Eric,” he said, “how came you to write that paper?”
“Why, Russell, I did feel very much ashamed, and I would have explained it, and said so; but that Gordon spites me so. It is such a shame; I don’t feel now as if I cared one bit.”
“I am sorry you don’t get on with him; but remember you have given him in this case good cause to suspect. You never crib, Eric, I know, so I can’t help being sorry that you wrote the paper.”
“But then Graham asked me to do it, and called me cowardly because I refused at first.”
“Ah, Eric,” said Russell, “they will ask you to do worse things if you yield so easily. I wouldn’t say anything to Dr. Rowlands about it, if I were you.”
Eric took the advice, and, full of mortification, went home. He gave his father a true and manly account of the whole occurrence, and that afternoon Mr. Williams wrote a note of apology and explanation to Mr. Gordon. Next time the form went up, Mr. Gordon said, in his most freezing tone, “Williams, at present I shall take no further notice of your offence beyond including you in the extra lesson every half-holiday.”
From that day forward Eric felt that he was marked and suspected, and the feeling worked on him with the worst effects. He grew more careless in work, and more trifling and indifferent in manner. Several boys now got above him in form whom he had easily surpassed before, and his energies were for a time entirely directed to keeping that supremacy in the games which he had won by his activity and strength.
It was a Sunday afternoon, toward the end of the summer term, and the boys were sauntering about in the green playground, or lying on the banks reading and chatting. Eric was with a little knot of his chief friends, enjoying the sea-breeze as they sat on the grass. At last the bell of the school chapel began to ring, and they went in to the afternoon service. Eric usually sat with Duncan and Llewellyn, immediately behind the benches allotted to chance visitors. The bench in front of them happened on this afternoon to be occupied by some rather odd people, viz, an old man with long white hair—and two ladies remarkably stout, who were dressed with much juvenility, although past middle age. Their appearance immediately attracted notice, and no sooner had they taken their seats than Duncan and Llewellyn began to titter. The ladies’ bonnets, which were of white, trimmed with long green leaves and flowers, just peered over the top of the boys’ pew, and excited much amusement; particularly when Duncan, in his irresistible sense of the ludicrous, began to adorn them with little bits of paper. But Eric had not yet learnt to disregard the solemnity of the place, and the sacred act in which they were engaged. He tried to look away and attend to the service, and for a time he partially succeeded, although, seated as he was between the two triflers, who were perpetually telegraphing to each other their jokes, he found it a difficult task, and secretly he began to be much tickled.
At last the sermon commenced, and Llewellyn, who had imprisoned a grasshopper in a paper cage, suddenly let it hop out. The first hop took it to the top of the pew; the second perched it on the shoulder of the stoutest lady. Duncan and Llewellyn tittered louder, and even Eric could not resist a smile. But when the lady, feeling some irritation on her shoulder, raised her hand, and the grasshopper took a frightened leap into the centre of the green foliage which enwreathed her bonnet, none of the three could stand it, and they burst into fits of laughter, which they tried in vain to conceal by bending down their heads and cramming their fists into their mouths. Eric, having once given way, enjoyed the joke uncontrollably, and the lady made matters worse by her uneasy attempts to dislodge the unknown intruder, and discover the cause of the tittering, which she could not help hearing. At last all three began to laugh so violently that several heads were turned in their direction, and Dr. Rowlands’s stern eye caught sight of their levity. He stopped short in his sermon, and for one instant transfixed them with his indignant glance. Quiet was instantly restored, and alarm reduced them to the most perfect order, although the grasshopper still sat imperturbable among the artificial flowers. Meanwhile the stout lady had discovered that for some unknown reason she had been causing considerable amusement, and attributing it to intentional ridicule, looked round, justly hurt. Eric, with real shame, observed the pained uneasiness of her manner, and bitterly repented his share in the transaction.
Next morning Dr. Rowlands, in full academicals, sailed into the fourth-form room. His entrance was the signal for every boy to rise, and after a word or two to Mr. Gordon, he motioned them to be seated. Eric’s heart sank within him.
“Williams, Duncan, and LLewellyn, stand out!” said the Doctor. The boys, with downcast eyes and burning cheeks, stood before him.
“I was sorry to notice,” said he, “your shameful conduct in chapel yesterday afternoon. As far as I could observe, you were making yourselves merry in that sacred place with the personal defects of others. The lessons you receive here must be futile indeed if they do not teach you the duty of reverence to God, and courtesy