Jack Raymond

"Aunt Sarah!.."

She spoke at last, in a quick, terrified voice.

"Go down. Your uncle wants you; in the study."

There was a rushing noise in his ears as he went downstairs; something seemed to catch and hold him by the throat. He opened the study door. By the window, with their backs to him, stood the curate and Mr. Hewitt, talking earnestly together in undertones. The Vicar sat at his writing desk, his grey head bent, his face buried in both hands.

Jack looked from one to another. The fanciful terrors of the last days had slipped entirely out of his mind; evidently some dreadful news had come, and his thoughts flew, as a Cornish lad's will, to wrecks and disasters by sea. But the weather had been so fine lately, it could not be that; perhaps some one was dead. He went up to the Vicar, forgetting, for once, the long feud be­tween them.

"Uncle, what is it?"

Mr. Raymond lifted up his face, with a look upon it that Jack had never seen before. He rose, brushing tears away from his eyes with an angry gesture, and turned slowly to the curate and schoolmaster.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I have to ask your pardon for this weakness: I have loved my flock for all these years, and if I have failed in my duty, God knows I am heavily pun­ished."

"No one can blame you, sir," said the curate; "how could you or any one sus­pect?"

"If any one is to blame," Mr. Hewitt put in, "it is I, who am so constantly with the boys."

"We are all to blame," the Vicar answered sternly: "and I most of all. I have not kept guard over Christ's lambs, and they have strayed and fallen into the pit."

He took up the Bible from his desk.

"At least, gentlemen, I will do my duty now, and sift the tares from the wheat, as is commanded in God's Word. You may rest assured that I will probe this matter to the bottom, not sparing my own flesh and blood."

As the two men went silently out, he closed the door behind them and turned to his nephew with a terrible face.

"Jack," he said; " I know all."

Jack stared at him blankly; the words con­veyed no meaning to his mind.

"Mr. Hewitt kept his suspicions from me," the Vicar went on, in the same hard, monoto­nous voice, "until he had proof. This morning he held an enquiry at the school, and several of your accomplices have already confessed. As soon as we know all the de­tails, the boys found to be guilty will be ex­pelled. As for the man you dealt with, he has been arrested and is now in Truro jail. How long have you been spreading this poison among your schoolfellows?"

Jack put up a hand to his forehead.

"I... I don't understand," he said at last.

"You don't understand..." The Vicar broke off, and opened a drawer in his desk. "If it will save you from adding to your damnation by useless lies, there is the knife you stole and sold, and there is what you bought with it."

He flung the bishop's knife on the table, and beside it a large envelope. "You see," he added with a kind of dreary scorn, "you may as well confess at once."

Until now Jack's mind had been an utter blank; but here, at least, was something definite and tangible. He picked up the envelope; its contents, whatever they might be, would show him of what he was accused.

He drew out of it first a little book, villain­ously printed on bad paper, and glanced at the title. It was in English, but might as well have been in Chinese, for all he under­stood of it. Shaking his head, with a hope­less sense of living in a nightmare, he took out the remaining contents of the envelope, a set of coloured photographs. He looked them over, one by one, first in sheer amaze­ment, then, as some conception of their mean­ing gradually forced itself upon his under­standing, with speechless, breathless horror; and suddenly flung them down in a panic of furious disgust.

"What is it? Uncle, I don't understand. Oh, what are they all for?"

The Vicar's smothered rage blazed up uncontrollably. He wheeled round in a flash, and sent the boy staggering backwards with a violent blow in the face.

"Is this a play-house?" he cried. "Am I to have hypocrisy and lying here as well as harlotry?"

He let his hand fall by his side and unclench itself slowly; then turned away and sat down with a bitter little laugh.

"I congratulate you, my boy; you're clever at acting — like your mother."

Jack was standing still, both hands spread out against the wall, as he had put them instinctively to save himself from falling. His face was as white as paper.

"I can't understand," he repeated help­lessly. "I can't understand..."

"You'll understand presently," said the Vicar in a quiet voice. "Come here and sit down."

Jack obeyed silently; the room was begin­ning to heave and sway, and he was glad to sit still for a moment, whatever was going to happen next. He did not think of resenting the blow or the words which had followed it; they all seemed part of the nightmare. The Vicar leaned on the table, shading his eyes with one hand. When he spoke there was a stony hopelessness about his voice which made his words sound in the boy's ears like a death sentence.

"I may as well tell you at once how many of your secrets have come out. We know all about the gambling, and the circulating of this sort of filth, and the practices that have been going on in the cave by Treva

He paused. Jack was looking straight before him, his lips a little parted, his great eyes wide and blank. There was no place left in his mind even for amazement; he seemed to have fallen into a world of spectres at cross purposes, a hollow, ghostly world, where he, and his uncle, and everyone wandered through fantastic evolutions, like dancing shadows in a fire-lit room, void of all form and meaning,

"Probably," the Vicar went on, "it is one of yourolder schoolfellows who has ruined thegirl; but there can be no doubt that the ruin of the little boys lies chiefly on your head. Thompson has confessed, and Greaves, and Polwheal; and their statement implicates you directly, apart from the evi­dence of the knife."

"The knife..." Jack repeated, catching at thefirst word which brought up a definite image in this ghastly confusion of dreams.

"It was found in the possession of the agent who sold you the books and — other things. He acknowledged to the police that he had received it in part payment of a debt for his wares from a Porthcarrick schoolboy, who had been dealing with him for some time. No boy but you knew where the knife was kept."

After a moment he rose to leave the room; but paused and looked back with his hand on the door.

"Jack," he said, "when your father died I took you and your sister in for his sake; but I did it with a heavy heart, for you have in you the blood of a harlot. I have fed and clothed you and dealt with you as if you had been my own; and now I have my reward. You have brought the abomination of deso­lation into my house and the pit of hell before my door; you have made me ashamed among my neighbours, and blackened my face in the eyes of my congregation. I thank God that your father is dead."

He turned and went out.

Jack slowly lifted his head and looked round him. A few images had begun to shape themselves, more or less distinctly, out of the chaos of his mind. One thing, at least, was quite plain: he was being made the scape-goat for some one; perhaps for the whole gang, but certainly for Billy Greggs, and for Thompson and Greaves and Pol-wheal. "Of course," he told himself wearily, "they knew uncle would believe anything against me." It was simple enough; he had been leader in mischief to all these boys; again and again he had taken things upon himself to shield them, accepting, for his part, as a faithful captain should, the smallest share of booty and the largest of punish­ment; and all the while they had been dab­bling in black secrets, and laughing at him for a fool behind his back. Now they had turned and sold him to his enemy to save their own skins.