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      I looked over my shoulder. Archie’s wish to get up became irresistible, and my resolve to go on with him vanished altogether.

      I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and purple silk and fur and shining dark things; they had walked up through the Warren, while the horses took the hill easily, and so had come upon us. Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge, and stood beside and a little behind them. We both rose dejectedly. The two old ladies were evidently quite dreadfully shocked, and peering at us with their poor old eyes; and never had I seen such a tremblement in Lady Drew’s lorgnettes.

      “You’ve never been fighting?” said Lady Drew.

      “You have been fighting.”

      “It wasn’t proper fighting,” snapped Archie, with accusing eyes on me.

      “It’s Mrs. Ponderevo’s George!” said Miss Somerville, so adding a conviction for ingratitude to my evident sacrilege.

      “How could he DARE?” cried Lady Drew, becoming very awful.

      “He broke the rules” said Archie, sobbing for breath. “I slipped, and – he hit me while I was down. He knelt on me.”

      “How could you DARE?” said Lady Drew.

      I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight ball, and wiped the blood from my chin, but I offered no explanation of my daring. Among other things that prevented that, I was too short of breath.

      “He didn’t fight fair,” sobbed Archie.

      Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and without hostility. I am inclined to think the modification of my face through the damage to my lip interested her. It became dimly apparent to my confused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playing with me. That would not be after the rules of their game. I resolved in this difficult situation upon a sulky silence, and to take whatever consequences might follow.

      The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary mess of my case.

      I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy did, at the age of ten, betray me, abandon me, and lie most abominably about me. She was, as a matter of fact, panic-stricken about me, conscience stricken too; she bolted from the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth, from the faintest memory of kissing; she was indeed altogether disgraceful and human in her betrayal. She and her half-brother lied in perfect concord, and I was presented as a wanton assailant of my social betters. They were waiting about in the Warren, when I came up and spoke to them, etc.

      On the whole, I now perceive Lady Drew’s decisions were, in the light of the evidence, reasonable and merciful.

      They were conveyed to me by my mother, who was, I really believe, even more shocked by the grossness of my social insubordination than Lady Drew. She dilated on her ladyship’s kindnesses to me, on the effrontery and wickedness of my procedure, and so came at last to the terms of my penance. “You must go up to young Mr. Garvell, and beg his pardon.”

      “I won’t beg his pardon,” I said, speaking for the first time.

      My mother paused, incredulous.

      I folded my arms on her table-cloth, and delivered my wicked little ultimatum. “I won’t beg his pardon nohow,” I said. “See?”

      “Then you will have to go off to your uncle Frapp at Chatham.”

      “I don’t care where I have to go or what I have to do, I won’t beg his pardon,” I said.

      And I didn’t.

      After that I was one against the world. Perhaps in my mother’s heart there lurked some pity for me, but she did not show it. She took the side of the young gentleman; she tried hard, she tried very hard, to make me say I was sorry I had struck him. Sorry!

      I couldn’t explain.

      So I went into exile in the dog-cart to Redwood station, with Jukes the coachman, coldly silent, driving me, and all my personal belongings in a small American cloth portmanteau behind.

      I felt I had much to embitter me; the game had and the beginnings of fairness by any standards I knew… But the thing that embittered me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiated and fled from me as though I was some sort of leper, and not even have taken a chance or so, to give me a good-bye. She might have done that anyhow! Supposing I had told on her! But the son of a servant counts as a servant. She had forgotten and now remembered.

      I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do not recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great magnanimity…

      Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell, and I am not sorry to this day.

      CHAPTER THE SECOND

      When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then thought for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a fully indentured apprentice, to my uncle Ponderevo.

      I ran away from the care of my cousin Nicodemus back to Bladesover House.

      My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street – a slum rather – just off that miserable narrow mean high road that threads those exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I must admit, a shock to me, much dominated by a young, plump, prolific, malingering wife; a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark man with flour in his hair and eyelashes, in the lines of his face and the seams of his coat. I’ve never had a chance to correct my early impression of him, and he still remains an almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetent simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile tradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes and dressing up wasn’t “for the likes of” him, so that he got his wife, who was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular intervals, and let his nails become disagreeable to the fastidious eye; he had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. “Your uncle,” said my mother – all grown-up cousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class – “isn’t much to look at or talk to, but he’s a Good Hard-Working Man.” There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour was to rise at or before dawn, and then laboriously muddle about.

      It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good Hard-Working Man would have thought it “fal-lallish” to own a pocket handkerchief. Poor old Frapp – dirty and crushed by, product of, Bladesover’s magnificence! He made no fight against the world at all, he was floundering in small debts that were not so small but that finally they overwhelmed him, whenever there was occasion for any exertion his wife fell back upon pains and her “condition,” and God sent them many children, most of whom died, and so, by their coming and going, gave a double exercise in the virtues of submission.

      Resignation to God’s will was the common device of these people in the face of every duty and every emergency. There were no books in the house; I doubt if either of them had retained the capacity for reading consecutively for more than a minute or so, and it was with amazement that day after day, over and above stale bread, one beheld food and again more food СКАЧАТЬ