it doesn’t know the Greek alphabet – no, not even if it was fifteen on its last birthday! That’s our system, and I support it through thick and thin; but it lays us open to worse types than escaped stable-boys.”
“This boy doesn’t look fifteen.”
“Nor is he – quite – much less the type I had in mind. He has a head on his shoulders, and something in it too. It appears that the vicar where he came from took an interest in the lad, and got him on as far as Cæsar and Euclid for pure love.”
“That speaks well for the lad,” put in Miss Heriot, impartially.
“I must say that it appealed to me. Then he’s had a tutor for the last six months; and neither tutor nor vicar has a serious word to say against his character. The tutor, moreover, is a friend of Arthur Drysdale’s, who was captain of this house when I took it over, and the best I ever had. That’s what brought them to me. The boy should take quite a good place. I should be very glad to have him in my own form, to see what they’ve taught him between them. I confess I’m interested in him; his mother was a lady; but you may almost say he never saw her in his life. Yet it’s the mother who counts in the being of a boy. Has the gentle blood been hopelessly poisoned by the stink of the stables, or is it going to triumph and run clean and sweet? It’s a big question, Milly, and it’s not the only one involved.”
Heriot had propounded it with waving pipe that required another match when he was done; through the mountain tan upon his face, and in the eager eyes behind the glasses, shone the zeal of the expert to whom boys are dearer than men or women. The man is rare; rarer still the woman who can even understand him; but here in this little room of books and antique lumber, you had the pair.
“I’m glad you told me,” said Miss Heriot, at length. “I fear I should have been prejudiced if you had not.”
“My one excuse for telling you,” was the grave rejoinder. “No one else shall ever know through me; not even Mr. Thrale, unless some special reason should arise. The boy shall have every chance. He doesn’t even know I know myself, and I don’t want him ever to suspect. It’s quite a problem, for I must keep an eye on him more than on most; yet I daren’t be down on him, and I daren’t stand up for him; he must sink or swim for himself.”
“I’m afraid he’ll have a bad time,” said Miss Heriot, picking a print from the water and blotting it as before. Her brother had seated himself at another bureau to write his letters.
“I don’t mind betting Carpenter has a worse,” he rejoined without looking up.
“But he’s so enthusiastic about everything?”
“That’s a quality we appreciate; boys don’t, unless there’s prowess behind it. Carpenter talks cricket like a Lillywhite, but he doesn’t look a cricketer. Rutter doesn’t talk about it, but his tutor says he’s a bit of a bowler. Carpenter beams because he’s got to his public school at last. He has illusions to lose. Rutter knows nothing about us, and probably cares less; he’s here under protest, you can see it in his face, and the chances are all in favour of his being pleasantly disappointed.”
Heriot’s quill was squeaking as he spoke, for he was a man with the faculty of doing and even thinking of more than one thing at a time; but though his sister continued mounting photographs in her album with extreme care, her mind was full of the two young boys who had come that night to live under their roof for good or ill. She wondered whether her brother was right in his ready estimate of their respective characters. She knew him for the expert that he was; these were not the first boys that she had heard him sum up as confidently on as brief an acquaintance; and though her knowledge had its obvious limitations, she had never known him wrong. He had a wonderfully fair mind. And yet the boy of action, in whom it was possible to stimulate thought, would always be nearer his heart than the thoughtful boy who might need goading into physical activity. She could not help feeling that he was prepared to take an unsympathetic view of the boy who had struck her as having more in him than most small boys; it was no less plain that his romantic history and previous disadvantages had already rendered the other newcomer an object of sympathetic interest in the house-master’s eyes. The material was new as well as raw, and so doubly welcome to the workman’s hand. Yet the workman’s sister, who had so much of his own force and fairness in her nature, felt that she could never like a sulky lout, however cruel the circumstances which had combined to make him one.
She felt a good deal more before the last print was in her album; in the first place that she would see really very little of these two boys until in years to come they rose to the Sixth Form table over which she presided in hall. Now and then they might have headaches and be sent in to keep quiet and look at the Punches; but she would never be at all in touch with them until they were big boys at the top of the house; and then they would be shy and exceedingly correct, of few words but not too few, and none too much enthusiasm, like all the other big boys. And that thought drew a sigh.
“What’s the matter?” came in an instant from the other bureau, where the quill had ceased to squeak.
“I was thinking that, after all, these two boys have more individuality than most who come to us.”
“One of them has.”
“Both, I think; and I was wondering how much will be left to either when we run them out of the mould in five years’ time!”
Heriot came to his feet like an exasperated advocate.
“I know where you get that from!” he cried with a kind of jovial asperity. “You’ve been reading some of these trashy articles that every wiseacre who never was at a public school thinks he can write about them now! That’s one of their stock charges against us, that we melt the boys down and run them all out of the same mould like bullets. We destroy individuality; we do nothing but reduplicate a type that thinks the same thoughts and speaks the same speech, and upholds the same virtues and condones the same vices. As if real character were a soluble thing! As if it altered in its essence from the nursery to the cemetery! As if we could boil away a strong will or an artistic temperament, a mean soul or a saintly spirit, even in the crucible of a public school!”
His breezy confidence was almost overwhelming; but it did not overwhelm his hearer, or sweep her with him to his conclusion. She had her own point of view; more, she had her own coigne of observation. Not every boy who had passed through the house in her time was the better for having been there. She had seen the weak go under – into depths she could not plumb – and the selfish ride serenely on the crest of the wave. She had seen an unpleasant urchin grow into a more and more displeasing youth, and inferiority go forth doubly inferior for the misleading stamp – that precious stamp – which one and all acquired. She loved the life as she saw it, perforce so superficially; it was a life that appealed peculiarly to Miss Heriot, who happened to have her own collegiate experience, an excellent degree of her own, and her own ideas on education. But from the boys in her brother’s house she held necessarily aloof; and in her detachment a clear and independent mind lay inevitably open to questionings, misgivings, intuitions, for which there was little time in his laborious days.
“But you admit it is a crucible,” she argued. “And what’s a crucible but a melting-pot?”
“A melting-pot for characteristics, but not for character!” he cried. “Take the two boys upstairs: in four or five years one will have more to say for himself, I hope, and the other will leave more unsaid; but the self that each expresses will be the same self, even though we have turned a first-rate groom into a second-rate gentleman. 'The Child,’ remember, and not the school, 'is father of the Man.’”
“Then the school’s his mother!” declared Miss Heriot without a moment’s hesitation.
Heriot
