Jack Raymond

Spotty put up her head at last, to sniff timidly and recognised her only friend. She crawled up closer to him for comfort and licked his foot, whimpering softly. Then Jack sat down on the flags beside her, and sobbed with his head against her neck. He had not cried like that since he was quite a little thing.

He got through his preparation somehow before his uncle came in to tea. The Vicar always examined the lessons and was generally, with good reason, dissatisfied with them; but he found no fault to-day, though they were done even worse than usual. The evening dragged wearily on; it seemed to Jack that the clock would never strike nine. When bed-time came at last, he went up to his room, and sat down in the dark on the edge of his bed.

All the evening he had been watching his uncle's face, vainly trying to see in it again the face that he had seen in the stable yard. Now, sitting still, with a hand over his eyes, he could see it. It stood out of the darkness, the blunt mouth sharpened and quivering, the nostrils full of life, the eyes awake...

There was, then, one thing in the world that uncle really enjoyed. For it was pleas­ure that was in the face, not anger. He looked quite different when he was angry. He would look angry, for instance, when he should find out about the stolen knife...

Cold sweat broke out suddenly all over Jack's body. He put up both hands as a shield...

At last he rose, lit his candle and un­dressed. He lay down in his bed, and the forgotten candle guttered all away and went out with a trail of acrid smoke, while he stared up into the darkness, as still as though asleep.

As he lay, the horrible thing that had come upon him hammered itself down and burned itself in upon his understanding. When the theft of the knife should be discovered he too would be flogged. He would be handled as Spotty had been handled, and gloated over by that greedy mouth; he on whom no touch had been laid since the mavis flew away. As for all that had happened earlier, it was of no moment; he could look back indifferently on the self of a week ago, as on a stranger; he had lived just five days.

There was no escape; and no one would understand. No one, no one would ever understand that he was not the same now as last week; that the boy who had been flogged so often and had laughed at it was dead, and that the new Jack in his place had never yet been touched or shamed. There was no hope for this white, unspotted new self; only last Saturday it had begun to live, and now uncle would lay hands on it and it would die.

Awaking next morning he sat up in bed and wondered amazedly what it was that had happened to him yesterday. It seemed in­conceivable that he, Jack Raymond, of all boys in the world, had lain the whole evening and until late into the night, wideawake in the dark, telling himself over and over again, as if it were something new and terrible that he was going to be flogged. He shrugged his shoulders and jumped out of bed. "I must have gone daft!" he thought, and dismissed the subject from his mind, as fit for the consideration only of old women, girls, and molly-coddles generally.

As soon as he was dressed he went out into the yard to look after Spotty. He had rubbed her carefully with liniment yesterday, and made her bed as soft as possible; and she was now able to wag her tail feebly when he stroked her. "Never mind, old girl!" he said consolingly; "he's a beast,but I've got to put up with him too, and I don't care a hang!"

Having given Spotty what comfort he could, he went into the garden to see how the puppies were getting on. It was a lovely morning, fresh and dewy, andthe clean salt air seemed to sweep the remnants of last night's mawkishnessof his head.

The tool house, where the puppies lived, was almost hidden by a thick growth of tamarisk and fuchsia. As Jack stooped to lift up a fat and cheerful puppy, footsteps crunched the gravel on the other side of the bushes, and his uncle's voice sounded close against his ear: "Have you seen my nephew this morning, Milner?"

There was a tremendous hammer beating somewhere, beating so that the earth shook, so that the air was full of the sound. But that was only for a moment; before the post­man's footsteps had died away along the path, he realised that the hammer was beat­ing in his own pulses.

He leaned idly against the fuchsia hedge. It was all true, then, this dreadful fancy of last night. It was ridiculous, it was impos­sible, there was no understanding it; but it was true. He had changed, and the world had not changed with him. The things that were daily commonplaces to every one had become death and damnation to him.

But the day passed, and nothing hap­pened; evidently the Vicar had still not missed his knife. For three days Jack waited, hourly, momently, for the thunder­bolt to fall. Every sound.or movement in the house caught at his heart with a cold hand; the very lifting of his uncle's eyelids would bring the sweat out on his forehead. Once he got up in the night and dressed him­self, on fire to go into the Vicar's room and say: "Wake up! look in your desk. I have stolen your knife." Then, whatever should come, this suspense would be over. But when he opened his door, the silence of the dark house drove him back, chilled with fantastic dread. On Monday, the fourth morning, he came down to breakfast so pale and heavy-eyed that Mrs. Raymond was frightened.

"The boy is ill, Josiah; he looks like a ghost."

Jack assured her wearily that there was nothing wrong with him. Indeed, what was wrong with him he himself could not have told her, even had he dared to try.

"You had better not go to school to-day," said the Vicar kindly; he made a point of always being kind when anybody was unwell, and Jack hated him the more for it. "You can do a little Latin at home if you feel up to it; but not if it makes your head ache. Perhaps you were too much in the sun yester­day."

Jack went up to his room in silence. It was some time before he could get rid of his aunt; she fussed about with well-meant im­portunity, till at last a ringing of the front­door bell and a sound of voices in the hall sent her downstairs to see who had called at so unusual an hour. "To see the master on urgent business," Jack heard the servant answer. He shut the door and sat down, glad to be alone.

His Latin Reader was lying on the table, and he took it up listlessly; one had better be doing lessons, dull and unprofitable as they were, than brooding in idleness over a secret dread. He looked through the index; bits of Cicero, bits of Horace, bits of Tacitus — all duller one than another. At last he opened the book at random, and came upon the story of Lucrece.

He read it through, not for the first time, in the curious, detached way in which school­boys read the classics, as matter relating to the parts of speech, not to the lives of men and women. What was Lucrece to him, or he to Lucrece? Indeed, had the story been of his own time and race he still would not have understood much about it.

A country boy, brought up among dogs and cats and horses, he had perforce become familiar with a few elementary physiological facts; but to co

He was in the middle of parsing a sentence when the door opened and Mrs. Raymond came in. She stood looking at him, with parted lips, but quite silent, and he saw that her face was white and scared, as he remem­bered seeing it four years ago, when the tele­gram came to say that his father was drowned. He sprang up.