WILLIAM JORDAN, JUNIOR

NEW NOVELS. 6s. each.

DELICIA, and other Stories never before collected. By Marie Corelli.

[Third Impression.

NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA By Kate Douglas Wiggin. With Illustrations by F. C. Yohn.

THE FIGHTING CHANCE By Robert W. Chambers. With Illustrations by Fred Pegram.

[Fifth Impression.

THE HELPMATE By May Sinclair.

[Second Impression.

WILLIAM JORDAN, JUNIOR By J. C. Snaith.

CONFLICT By Constance Smedley.

THE GOOD COMRADE By Una L. Silberrad.

[Second Impression.

THE SQUARE PEG By W. E. Norris.

DOCTOR PONS By Paul Gwynne.

THE ‘WIDDA-MAN’ By T. Kingston Clarke.

BACHELOR BETTY By Winifred James.

[Third Impression.

MARCUS HAY By Stanley Hyatt.

THE THREE COMRADES By Gustav Frenssen.

THE MEASURE OF THE RULE By Robert Barr.

REED ANTHONY, COWMAN By Andy Adams.

A WALKING GENTLEMAN By James Prior.

THE PRICE OF SILENCE By M. E. M. Davis. With Illustrations by Griswold Tyng.

WILLIAM JORDAN
JUNIOR

By
J. C. SNAITH
Author of
“Broke of Covenden,” “Henry Northcote,” etc.

LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. Ltd.
1907

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

WILLIAM JORDAN, JUNIOR

I

It had been raining all day in London. The beating of water, cold, monotonous and heavy upon the streets, had now acquired mystery from the darkness of a November night. The vague forms floating here and there through the haze of the lamps, which a few hours ago were easy to define, were full of strangeness, while the noise of the water as it gurgled into the sewers, and slopped from the spouts over the dark fronts of the shops had a remote significance. Now and again odd shapes would emerge from the curtain of the shadows: a wet policeman, a dog, a bedraggled walker of the streets, a sullen cabman, a lame horse. Over and above, round and about these phantasmal appearances, was the sound of continual water falling upon the great roar of London.

In one of the narrow purlieus leading from the City to the eastern wilderness, night had erased the actual like a wet cloth drawn across writing in chalk upon a board. Two rows of sopping shuttered walls were only able to emit an occasional smear of lamplight, by which the pageant of the individual consciousness could embody itself. Here and there a signboard would be half-disclosed over some deserted shop; and in the middle of a long and very dismal thoroughfare was one that seemed to take a quality from the fact that a faint gleam of light was stealing through a chink in the shutters of a door. Above this door, in faded letters which the film of shadows rendered barely visible, was the legend, “Second-hand Bookseller.” It seemed to be centuries old. The light, however, frail as it was, somehow appeared to make it memorable. Yet the source of this talisman was not the shop itself, but a little room that lay behind.

This small shop in which a thousand and one volumes huddled, like corpses in a chasm, seemed almost to form an intermediary between the real on the one hand, and the chimerical on the other. On its shelves, in a limbo of darkness and neglect, lay the dead, the dying, and the imperishable. Buried in dust and decay, in covers that could hardly hold together, were pregnant annotations upon the human comedy. On the upper shelves were tomes whose destiny it had been to hold back the hands of time, and had duly fulfilled it. Below these were a thousand formulas which had proved disconcerting to man. Still, however, as in the sodden and shadow-fraught chimera beyond the shutters, even here darkness did not reign inviolate. There were tiny lamps on this shelf and that: like those in the street without the power to offer more than a flicker of light, yet able to suggest that the blackest night is susceptible of challenge. A candle shone here and there in the gloom, faint yet invincible, like a will-o’-the-wisp that hops about the mounds in a cemetery.

Opening out of the shop was a little inner room. It was from this that the thread of light proceeded. This tiny chamber, some twelve feet by sixteen, had little furniture. In the centre was a quaint old table. A curious tome of yellow parchments was spread open upon it. Built into the outer wall was a cupboard. Its heavy oak door was studded with nails and strongly secured. In the grate the fire was bright; the bare floor and walls were spotless; and from the low ceiling depended a lamp in the form of a censer whose light was soft yet clear.

The room had two occupants: a man whose hair was almost white and a boy. Each was immersed in a book: the man in the tome outspread on the table, whose yellow leaves, venerable binding, and iron clasps, gave it a monastic appearance; the boy was reading in the ancient authors.

The countenance of each was remarkable. The eyes of the man were those which age does not darken; yet his cheeks were gaunt, and the lines of his frame seemed to be prematurely old; but the ample forehead and every feature was suffused with the luminosity by which a high intelligence reflects itself. The face of the boy, pale, gentle and mobile, was too rare to describe. His eyes, vivid in hue and very deeply set, were bright with a kind of veiled lustre; his form was of elfin slightness; his hands looked as frail as gossamer. Yet the countenance, although full of the solemn wonder of childhood, and angelic beauty, was marred by a gross physical blemish. Every feature appeared to have been touched by the wand of a fairy, yet in the middle of the right cheek was an open wound.

There was not a sound in the little room except the ticking of the clock, and an occasional creak from the fire. Now and again the man would pause in his scrutiny of the old yellow page. Uplifting the finger which pursued every word of the faded and almost illegible writing, he would seem to consider it with secret thoughts shaping themselves upon his lips. Then he would smile a little and sigh faintly and turn to it again.

Presently his gaze sought the boy. Within it was a look of indescribable solitude, for as the boy crouched over the old volume printed in black letter which he held upon his knees, great tears dripped softly from his eyes. The white-haired man addressed him in a low voice that was like a caress.

“Ah, my brave one! thou dost not fear the drama.”

The boy looked up with a startled face. He gave a little shiver.

“What is that, my father,” he asked, “that you speak of as the drama?”

“What is that, beloved one,” asked his father, “that afflicts you with dismay?”

The boy pressed his palms against his thin temples.

“I think—I think it is the words, my father,” he said, “the something in the sound of the words.”

“Truly,” said his father, “the something in the sound of the words. That which is given is taken away—the something in the sound of the words.”

“Did you not say, my father,” said the boy, “that the drama was—was what you call a ‘play’?”

“Yes, a play,” said his father, “a bewildering and curious play—a haunting and strange play. It is almost terrible, and yet it is beautiful also.”

“I don’t understand,” said the boy, his eyes growing dark with perplexity.

His father was quick to read his distress, and a mournful compassion came into his face. The boy left his book and came to his father’s side. The man folded the frail and excitable form to his bosom.

“Patience, patience, agile spirit!” he exclaimed as he pressed his lips upon the gaunt cheek upon which lay the wound.

“I must understand all things, my father,” said the boy, who was composed a little by his father’s arms. “I—I must know something more about the drama, for I—I must understand it all.”

“It is that which we feel,” said his father. “It is sometimes in the air. If we listen we can hear it. I hear it now.”

The boy lifted his face with all his senses strung.

“I can only hear the ticking of the clock, my father, and the creaking of the fire.”

“There is something else.”

The boy walked to the shutters of the little room, pressed his ear against them, and listened with great intensity.

“There is only the gurgle of water,” he said, “and the little voice of the wind.”

“And,” said the man with faint eyes.

“And—and! And the mighty roar of the streets of the great city.”

“That is the drama, beloved one.”

The boy sprang away from the shutters with a little cry.

“Yes, now I know,” he said excitedly. “Now I know what it is. And it was the something in the sound of the words. That which is given is taken away. It is what I am always dreaming about this little room of ours. I am always dreaming, my father, that it has been taken from us, that we have been cast out of it, that we have it no more. I have even dreamt that we wandered all day and all night in the cold and dreadful streets of the great city, among all those fierce and cruel street-persons, and that they looked upon us continually with their rude eyes. Then it is that I shiver so much in my fear that I awaken; and I could shout with joy when I find it is ours still, and that it has all been a dream.”

The look of compassion deepened in the man’s face.

“Dost thou never grow weary of this little room?” he said.

“Never, never, my father,” said the boy. “I can never grow weary of this little room. I almost wish sometimes we did not venture to leave it, lest one day we should lose our path in the great city, and not find our way back. I sometimes think I would like to stay in it every moment of my earth-life, so that I might read every one of those authors in the shop. How I wish, my father, that I understood all the hard words and all the strange tongues like you do. But at least I understand one more very difficult word now that I know what is the meaning of the drama.”

“That is to say, beloved one,” said his father, “now that you understand the meaning of the drama you hold the key to many other words that are also very difficult.”

“Yes, yes, my father—and how quickly I shall learn them!”

“You are indeed wonderful at learning.”

“Yet sometimes, my father, I hardly dare to think how much there is to know. Sometimes when I lie by your side in the darkness, my father, and something seems to have happened to the moon, I almost feel that I shall never be able to know all.”

“Thou art quite resolved, my brave one, to know all?”

“Oh yes, my father,” said the boy, and his eyes grew round with surprise at the question.

“Wherefore, beloved?”

“I must, I must!” said the boy, and his eyes grew dark with bewilderment. “Dost thou not know, O my father——” He checked his words of surprised explanation shyly and suddenly.

“I know,” said his father gently, “thou art one of great projects.”

“I had forgotten, O my father,” said the boy, a little timorously, “that I had not revealed them unto you.”

“Pray do so, my beloved,” said the man softly.

The boy faltered. A shy blush overspread the pallor of his cheeks.

“I am to be one of the great ones of the earth, my father,” he said, with the sensitive gaze of a girl.

“Truly,” said his father, with a glance of grave tenderness; “destiny declared it so in the hour that you were born. And I doubt not you will be called to great endeavours.”

“Oh yes, my father,” said the boy, with strange simplicity. “I am to walk the path of heroes.”

The white-haired man averted his glance.

“It is for that reason I must be well found in knowledge, my father,” said the boy.

“True, beloved one,” said the man through pale lips.

“And the meaning of every thing, my father,” said the boy; “bird, beast and reptile, and the moon and stars, and why the street-persons walk the streets of the great city; and why the earth is so many-coloured; and why the sky is so near and yet so far off; and why when you clutch the air there is nothing in your hand. Must not such as I know all this, my father?”

“True.”

“And why a man has two legs, and a horse four, and a crocodile I know not how many, and why a serpent crawls upon its belly.”

“True, true,” said his father. “But I fear, beloved one, that all this knowledge is not to be acquired in this little room of ours. If you wish to learn the meaning of all things, will you not have to go to school?”

A shiver passed through the boy’s frame. His face had the pallor of great fear.

“Dost thou mean, O my father,” he said, “that I must leave this little room of ours and go out among the street-persons in the endless streets of the great city?”

“He who would understand the meaning of all things,” said his father, “must certainly go to school.”

“Yet are not all things to be learned from the ancient authors, my father?” asked the boy eagerly. “Is not every secret contained in those hundreds of books in the shop that it is not yet given to my mind to grasp?”

“There are many secrets, beloved, which no book has the power to reveal.”

“Not even those among them, my father, which are wrought of the great souls of heroes?” said the boy in dismay.

“Not even they.”

“Yet have I not heard you say, my father, that there were few things they did not understand?”

“True, beloved, but they had not the power to commit the whole of their knowledge to their writings.”

“But did you not say, my father, that each of these great ones communed with his peers constantly and faithfully in his little inner room?”

“What a prodigious memory is yours! But I ought to have made it clear to you that before these heroes could commune with their peers faithfully, they were compelled to leave their little rooms, adventure out among the streets of the great city and go to school.”

“Then, my father, I also will go to school.”

The boy clasped his frail hands, and strove to conceal the abject fear in his eyes.

“When, my brave one?”

“To-morrow I will go, my father.”

“So be it then, beloved one.”

In the silence which followed the tense breathing of the frail form could be heard to surmount the ticking of the clock, the creaking of the fire, the little voice of the wind, the gurgle of water, and the great roar of London.

“Are all heroes in bitter fear, my father, when first they go to school?” asked the boy.

“Indeed, yes.”

“Do they ever tremble like cravens, and do their eyes grow dark?”

“Yes, beloved one.”

“Have not these great ones a strange cowardice, my father?”

“Is not the cowardice of heroes the measure of their courage?”

“Can it be, O my father,” said the boy, with a deepening pallor, “that these great ones derive their valour from their craven hearts?”

“Truly, beloved, if they learn the secret.”

“The secret, my father?”

“The secret which is only to be learned in the school which is in the streets of the great city.”

The face of the boy grew like death. “To-morrow then, my father,” he said in a faint and small voice, “Achilles will adventure forth to this school which is in the streets of the great city, that he too may learn this secret. He should have known that one like himself should not only have great learning, wisdom and constancy, but also a noble valour.”

“True, a thousand times! This is indeed Achilles!”

“I give you good-night, my father. Pray remember me in your vigil.”

The boy threw his arms round the man’s neck, and pressed his cheek against him. It seemed to burn like a flame.

The boy took a candle from the chimney-piece, lighted it, and in his great fear of the darkness, was accompanied by his father up the stairs. When the white-haired man had enveloped the frail form in the blankets with a woman’s tenderness, he left the light in the chamber burning at its fullest, and returned to the little room. It was then near to midnight.

The massive old tome in which he had been reading was open still upon the table. He knelt before it, pressing his eyes upon the yellow parchments. On the clock in the little room the hands made their tardy circuit: midnight passed; one o’clock; two o’clock; three o’clock. Throughout these hours the man remained thus, not heeding that all about him was darkness; for the lamp and the fire had burned themselves out long ago.

Near to the hour of four a ghostly figure, pale but luminous, crept into the silence of the room. It was the boy, clad in a white gown and bearing a lighted candle. He touched the kneeling figure softly.

“My father,” he breathed; “how you tremble, my father, and how cold you are!”

The man rose to his feet with a slight shiver.

“The fire is low,” he said. “Are we not ever cold when the fire is low?”

“The fire is out, my father,” said the boy.

“Is the fire ever out, beloved,” said his father, “while one ember is still faintly burning? May we not draw it into flame perhaps?”

The man knelt again and breathed upon the embers, so that presently they began to glow.

“I could not rest, my father,” said the boy, “and I grew so afraid of the loneliness that I have come to be near you. I do not think it is raining now, but the wind is speaking bitterly. I wish the stars would shine. I am not so craven-hearted when the stars look at me with their bright eyes.”

“May there not be one among all those millions,” said his father, “who knows that to be so, and shines out to comfort you? Let us look.”

With eager hands the boy helped his father to unfasten and cast back the shutters. Through heavy masses of walls and chimney-stacks a fragment of the void was to be seen. Across it the broken clouds were scudding, and a single star was visible. It emerged faint but keen and clear.

“It is Jupiter,” cried the boy in a voice of joy and excitement. “Hail, mighty prince of the heavens! Ave, ave, great lord of the air!”

The patient white-haired figure at the boy’s side was peering also towards the star. In his eyes shone the entrancement of many thoughts.

II

When at last the morning brought its grey light the boy set out with his father into the streets of the great city. Amid the dun-coloured wilderness through which he passed, amid the labyrinth of dread thoroughfares in which noise, dirt, and confusion seemed to contend, he grasped his father’s hand in the fear of his heart. The rattle of horses and carts, the mud-flinging hoofs and the cries of the drivers, the vigour and rudeness of the street-persons by whom he was hustled, filled him with a dire consternation. Yet beyond all that he suffered in this way, which was no more than a little personal inconvenience after all, was the fear, permanent, overmastering and intense, that never would his father and he be able to retrace their steps to that tiny refuge which they had left so lately, which now seemed so far away that they could never hope to win their way back. How could they hope to retrace their steps among that ever-surging sea of streets and houses and faces and vehicles? Once as he was submerged in a whirlpool that was formed by the meeting of four main arteries of traffic, and was compelled to wait until a strangely clad street-person, who wore a helmet like Minerva, stopped, by the magic process of holding up his hand, the unending procession of carts and horses to enable his father and himself and a swarm of street-persons, who pressed upon his heels and trod upon his toes, to pass to that debatable land across the way, which looked so full already that it could not yield space for another living soul, he held his father’s hand convulsively and said in a voice of despair: “I feel sure, my father, we shall never win our way back to our little room.”

In point of actual time this journey was not more than half-an-hour, yet it formed such a highly wrought experience, that to the boy it seemed to transcend and even to efface all that had previously happened in the placid term of his existence. At last it came to an end in a succession of quiet streets that led to a gloomy square, which, although very forbidding of aspect, was almost peaceful. The houses in it, tall and stately and austere, had a row of steep stone steps furnished with iron railings. It was one of these rows he ascended; and his father knocked with a boldness that seemed superhuman at a very stern-looking front door.

After a brief period of waiting in which it seemed to the boy that he must be choked by the violent beatings of his heart, the door was opened by an old woman, equally stern of aspect, who asked their business in a gruff voice. The boy’s father said something to her which the boy was too excited to comprehend, whereupon she conducted them into a dark passage filled with bad air, and left them there while she went to inquire if they would be received by him they sought. Presently she returned to lead them to his presence.

In a room at the end of the long passage, which seemed to grow darker and darker at every step they took, they found a very aged man. In appearance he was not unlike a faun. His eyes were sunken far in his cheeks, and they seemed to be faded like those of the blind. His features were so lean that they looked almost spectral; his tall frame and long limbs were warped with feebleness; and the boy noticed that his hands had red mittens to keep them warm. His head, which was of great nobility, was bald at the top, yet the lower part was covered by hair that was even whiter than that of the boy’s father, and so long that it came down upon his shoulders.

This venerable figure sat at a table before a fire in a dark and sombre room, which faced the north and smelt of ink. Maps were on the walls; here and there were scattered books; there was a globe on a tripod; while blackboards, charts and desks abounded in all the panoply of education. The old school-master was ruling lines in a ciphering-book with the gravest nicety; while at his back the fire was shedding its glow on a coat which use had rendered green, ragged and threadbare.

When the boy and his father came into his presence, the aged man, although stricken with painful infirmity, rose to his feet and welcomed them with a beautiful courtesy.

“I cannot expect you to remember me, sir,” said the boy’s father, with a simplicity that was a little timorous.

The aged school-master approached quite close to the boy’s father; in his faded eyes was a peering intentness.

“You must give me a minute to think, if you please,” he quavered in a low voice, which in the ears of the boy had the effect of music. “Now that I am old, my memory, of which I have always been vain, is the first to desert me. If you are one of my scholars I shall recall you, for it is my boast that each of my scholars has graven a line in the tablets of my mind.”

Of a sudden the aged school-master gave a cry of joy.

“Why—why!” he exclaimed, “it must be William Jordan.”

He held out both his hands to the boy’s father with an eagerness that was like a child’s, and the boy saw that his eyes, which a moment since were destitute of meaning, had now the pregnant beauty of an ancient masterpiece.

“O that the hour should be at hand,” said the old man, “when I should cease to recall William Jordan!”

The old man seemed to avert his face from that of the boy’s father in a kind of dismay; and his voice pierced the boy with an emotion that he had never felt before.

“It is thirty years since you saw me last,” said the boy’s father.

“In the flesh as an eager-faced young man,” said the school-master. “But every night as I sit by the fire, I summon William Jordan to lead the pageant of my experience. When my spirit is like clay you stand before it, the first among the valiant, so subtle yet so brave. When this generation, which is so restless, so brilliant, so full of vitality, seems to tell me that I am but a survival of a phase which now is nought, I say to it, ‘So be it, my children, but where is the William Jordan among you? I would have you show me his peer before I yield.’”

The boy, whose nature was like the strings of some miraculous instrument which are not only susceptible to the slightest human touch, but are also responsive to the delicate waves in the air, knew that some strange emotion was overwhelming his father, although none could have perceived it but himself.

“My dear old master,” said the boy’s father, with an indescribable melancholy, “it is the old voice—the old voice that we loved to hear. And it is the old courage—the old incomparable suit of mail.”

“A school-master’s courage should increase as he grows old, I think,” said the old man, whose voice was like a harp. “It is true his age is menaced by all the noble energies he has failed to mould; by all the expenditure of spirit, by all the devout patience he has lavished upon them, which have come to no harvest; but is it not by giving our all without hope of a requital that in the end teaches us to accept our destiny?”

The boy’s father stood like a statue before his old preceptor.

“Master, your voice overcomes me,” he said. “But it is just, it is perfectly just that I should live to hear it sound reproachful in my ears.”

“I do not reproach you, dear Isocrates,” said the old man, with the exquisite humility that is only begotten by wisdom. “Or if my words have chidden you it is that there is an echo in yourself. Isocrates was ever your name among us. We cannot order our destiny; we can only fulfil it.”

“I was one of great projects,” said the boy’s father.

“Him whom I recall had ambition burning in his veins like a chemical,” said the old man.

“Yes, master,” said the boy’s father, with a curious simplicity, “but on a day he tasted the poppy that perished the red blood in his veins. From that hour he could never be what he promised. The strength was taken from his right hand.”

An expression of pain escaped the lips of the aged school-master.

“I foresaw that peril,” he said. “I prayed for you continually, Isocrates; and I would have forewarned you had I not feared the catastrophe so much. It is the cardinal weakness of such as myself that we fear even to gaze upon the vulnerable heel whereby the poisoned arrow enters the powerful. False preceptor hast thou been, O Socrates, to the young Plato!”

The aged man seemed all broken by the sudden anguish that shook his feebleness. The boy’s father, in whose eyes the suffering of his former preceptor was reflected, raised the senile fingers to his lips with strange humility.

“All the devices of the pharmacopeia,” said the boy’s father, “could not have kept the poison out of these weak veins, dear master. It is one more act of wantonness that we must lay to the door of Nature. For the poison was first compounded by the fermentation of those many diverse and potent essences with which the blood was charged. It is the curse of the age, master. It is the deadly gas exuded by the putrefaction of what we have agreed to call ‘progress,’ which fuses the nerves and the tissues into the incandescent fervour by which they destroy themselves.”

“But only, Apollo, that there may be a nobler renascence.”

“We shall not heed it, master, when we lie with the worms.”

“Ah, no! Yet as we crouch by the fire on these cold winter evenings, is it not well to wrap ourselves in the vision of all the undeveloped glories in our midst? Is it not well for our minds to behold a William Jordan brooding in his garret among all these millions of people who will never learn his name? For thirty years have I been seeking that treatise by which he is to establish Reason on its only possible basis.”

“Ah, dear master, philosophy is an anodyne for subtle minds,” said the boy’s father.

“Were these your words, Isocrates, when you expounded to me that wonderful synopsis on your twentieth birthday?”

“Philosophy is a narcotic which in the end destroys the cells of the brain.”

“And poetry, my dear friend, what is poetry?”

“I have not the courage to define it, master.”

“Is this the language of despair, Isocrates?”

“It is the curse of the time, dear master,” said the boy’s father, with wan eyes. “This terrible electrical machinery of the age which grandiloquently we call Science, has ground our wits to a point so fine that they pierce through the brave old faiths that once made us happy. This William Jordan of whom you speak spent twenty years in his little room seeking to establish Reason on its only possible basis. He planned his ethic in I know not how many tomes. Each was to be a masterpiece of courage, truth, and vitality; each was to be wrought of the life-blood and fine flower of his manhood. He began his labour a powerful and imperious young man; he passed the all-too-rapid years in his profound speculations; and then he found himself inept and white-haired.”

“So then, after all, Isocrates, your ethic is embodied?” said the aged man with the eager devoutness of the disciple.

The joy in the face of the old man was that of one who has long dreamed of a treasure which at last is to be revealed to his gaze. His eyes were about to feast on its peerless splendour, yet of a sudden his hopes seemed to render him afraid. There might not be a sufficient heat left in his veins to yield those intolerable pangs of rapture which fuse with ecstasy the worship of the devotee.

“Let me see it,” he said. “The desires of my youth are returning upon me. I must look upon it; I must press it to my bosom. I yearn to see how my own strength in the heyday of its promise, in the passion of its development, yet condemned to walk in chains, has yet been able to vindicate the nobility of its inheritance. Show me your Ethic, beloved Isocrates. I yearn to feast my eyes upon this latest blow for freedom with the same intensity with which I fingered the yellow pages in which I first found wisdom hiding her maiden chastity.”

The boy’s father met this entreaty with a gesture that seemed to pierce the old man like a sword.

“Where is it?” he cried. “You will not deny one who is old the last of his hopes!”

The boy’s father had the mien of a corpse.

“It is unwritten, master,” he said, in a voice that seemed to be no louder than the croak of a frog. “When after twenty years of devout preparation I took up the pen, I found that Nature had denied the strength to my right hand.”

The old man recoiled from the gaze of the boy’s father with a cry of dismay.

“I should have known it,” he said; and then, with strange humility, “let us not reproach her, Isocrates; she, too, must obey the decree.”

“By which human sacrifice is offered on her altars,” said the boy’s father, with a gaunt gaze. “What new abortion shall she fashion with our blood and tears?”

“The issue of our loins,” said the aged man, with a kind of gentle passion.

“In order that our humiliation may re-enact itself,” said the boy’s father; “in order, dear master, that we may mock ourselves again.”

“Nay, Isocrates,” said the old man, “is it not written that if by our fortitude we sustain the Dynasty to its appointed hour, Nature will grant it a means to affirm itself?”

Speaking out of a simple faith the old man turned for the first time to the boy, who, throughout this interview, had stood timidly at his father’s side. The old faded eyes seemed to devour the delicate and shrinking face of the child with their surmise. Suddenly he took the boy by the hand.

“It is by this that the Dynasty will affirm itself,” said the old man, enfolding the frail form in a kind of prophetic exaltation.

The boy’s father seemed to cower at these words of his old preceptor.

“My prophetic soul!” he cried. Horror appeared to scarify the wasted features of the boy’s father.

The proud gladness of the well-remembered voice had seemed to break the boy’s father; for those ears it was charged with mockery.

The old school-master, still smiling in the expression of his simple faith, received his former pupil in his arms and took him to his bosom with the ineffable tenderness by which a matron consoles a young girl.

The boy could not understand this painful scene which had been enacted before him. He could form no conception of the manner in which two natures had been wrung by their first meeting after thirty years. He could only discern, and that very dimly, that this aged man bore a similar relation to his father that his father bore to himself. The voice, the look, the bearing of this old man, were precisely those with which he himself was succoured when he awoke shuddering and bathed in terror, and implored his father to strike a match to dispel the phantasies which peopled the darkness of the night.

III

Sunk in bewilderment that one so wise and powerful as his father should be so distressed, the boy seemed to lose the sense of what was taking place around him. But he was recalled to it with a start of dismay; his father was about to leave the room. Involuntarily he turned to the door also, and placed his hand on his father’s arm.

“Do you forget that you are now at school, Achilles?” said his father in a low voice.

The boy could not repress a little quiver of fear.

“You—you are not going to forsake me, my father!” he said.

“What of the resolve you took last night?” said his father. “By whose act is it, beloved one, that you have come to school?”

A vague sense of darkness seemed to close about the boy.

“But our little room,” he said, shivering. “Am I never to return to it, my father? Am I never to behold it again?”

“I make you my promise, beloved one,” said his father softly. “At dusk I will return to take you there.”

Furtively, mournfully the boy relaxed his grip of his father’s hand.

In the next instant he realized that his father was gone, and that he was alone with the dumb immensity of his despair. All about him was black and vague. Yet in the midst of the close-pressing stillness sat the school-master, a venerable and silent form, slowly ruling lines in a ciphering-book. How old, noble, and patient he looked!

Presently the aged master ceased from his labours. He gathered a pile of books, rose and placed them under his arm. He turned to the boy, who was weeping secretly, and said, “Dry your eyes and come with me.”

Filled with nameless misgivings, the boy followed the school-master out through the door, along a passage, and down a flight of stone stairs. At the bottom of these was another door. It opened into a large room, which was full of youthful street-persons, and a great clamour.

The master took his seat at a table apart. It was somewhat higher than the desks at which the youthful street-persons were seated. He told the boy, who followed very close upon his heels, to sit at his side.

The entrance of the aged master appeared to have an effect upon the behaviour of his scholars, or perhaps the appearance in his wake of a new companion had engaged their curiosity. But the boy, trembling in every limb, was far from returning their bold glances. He sat close by the master, mutely craving protection from the fierce horde that was all about him. Had he been led into a den of wild beasts, his fear could not have been more extreme.

The tasks of the day were begun by each of the boys reading aloud in his turn a brief portion of Holy Writ. To him, who heard their voices for the first time, they sounded harsh, strange, and uncouth. Most of them faltered and grew confused at the easiest words, in none were sincerity and coherence; and when the master, to sustain one who was baffled, recited a few verses, his tones, in their sweetness and dignity, sounded like music. Sometimes the master would remark upon the beauty and truth of that which was read, or he would pause to furnish a parallel out of common experience, in order to elucidate an incident as it was narrated.

The presence of this gentle and learned man, the continual sense that he was near, began to soothe the boy’s tremors. And the beautiful language seemed to gird him with the sense of a new and enkindling security. But his terror returned upon him with overmastering power when the moment came in which he was asked personally to continue the theme. The whole of it had long been so familiar to him that he carried every word in his heart, yet when the call was made upon him to recite that for which he required no book, he was so much oppressed with the nameless dread of his surroundings that he could only gasp and burst into tears.

After all the boys had done their tasks after their own private fashion, the master read to them a fable, which the boy recognized gratefully as an old friend out of the ancient authors; also a wonderful tale from similar sources, and a few passages from the life of a great national hero.

The boy was enchanted. The simplicity of the reading made him strangely happy; the themes addressed him with a ravishment he had never felt before. And the horde of fierce creatures all about him, indulging in grimaces and covert horseplay, seemed also to become amenable to this delight. At least their uneasy roughness grew less as the beautiful voice proceeded; and by the time these stories of wonder, wisdom and endeavour were at an end, even the rudest among them had wide eyes and open mouths.

Upon the conclusion of these tales the old school-master wrote a few cabalistic figures on a board, and then said to the boy, “Can you do sums?”

“I—I—I—I d-don’t t-think I—I k-know, sir,” said the boy, stammering timorously.

“Perhaps we will test your knowledge,” said the old man, and added as he smiled in a secret and beautiful manner, “there is one simple question in arithmetic that it is the custom to put to a new scholar on his first appearance among us. Can you tell us what two and two make?”

Now, although the boy was advanced in book-knowledge far beyond his years, he had hardly the rudiments of the practical sciences. Therefore at first he was unable to answer the most primitive of all questions therein, and his confusion was great. And the other boys who had heard this question, which was so simple as to seem ridiculous, observed his distress with a scorn that was far too lofty to conceal.

“What would you say that two and two make?” the school-master asked.

“I—I—I think, sir, they m-make five,” stammered the boy at last.

A shout of laughter arose from the other boys at this grotesque answer.

“He thinks two and two make five!” boy after boy could be heard repeating to his companions; “he thinks two and two make five!”

The aged school-master, however, derived neither amusement nor scorn from this answer. His look was one of high yet grave happiness as he said, “We give a special name to each of our boys, and I have been wondering what name to bestow upon you. The name of your father was Isocrates—one of great gifts, but timorous of disposition; but I think you must be known by the name of a universal hero. We will call you by the name of Achilles, who was the bravest among all the Greeks.”

At these words of the master looks of consternation clouded the faces of all the boys.

“Why, sir, he is a dunce,” expostulated a thoughtful and shrewd boy with piercing black eyes.

The aged master looked at this boy with a mild indulgence in his smile.

“Adamantus,” said the master, “that is a condition necessary to a universal hero in his youth.”

Adamantus, who was one of the first boys in the school, was far from a comprehension of this dark saying; yet he felt himself to be rebuked, without knowing to what extent or why he should be. But shortly afterwards, when the play-hour came, and they ran out to indulge in their games in the small London garden, some of the older and graver boys, of whom Adamantus was one of the chief, stood apart to discuss what they were bound to consider an act of notorious partiality on the part of the master. That a mere small boy, a weak and foolish boy should be decorated with a much-coveted name for returning a ridiculous answer was one of those frank injustices that they felt obliged to resent.

“Adamantus only means that I am a bit of a sticker at my books, which I don’t think I am really,” said the bearer of that name; “and who ever heard of Polycrates and Polydames?”

“Yes, it is not fair,” said the bearer of the last of these names; “but then, he is an old fool. He is just an old dodderer.”

When the boys had gone forth to the garden, the master said to his new pupil, “Will you not go out and make their acquaintance, Achilles?”

For answer the boy clasped his fingers about the master’s sleeve. He had grown dumb with terror.

“So be it,” said the old man, regarding him with pity and concealed tenderness.

A little while afterwards the boy rose suddenly of his own motion from the master’s table.

“Where are you going, Achilles?” said the master.

“I—I am g-going, s-sir, to the garden to the boys,” he stammered.

As he walked out through the door his gaunt cheeks were like death.

He crept into the garden with the greatest caution and secrecy. He hardly dared to breathe lest he should be heard, he feared to move lest he should be seen. Crouching against the wall, moving neither foot nor hand, he longed to stop the motions of his heart. They were so loud that he felt they were bound to be noticed.

His fears proved to be well founded. A tall, heavy, puffy boy with vivid red hair came near. He was trying to kick the cap of another boy, who was much smaller than himself, over the wall. By an odd misadventure one of these attempts landed it full in the face of the trembling intruder.

“Hullo, New Boy!” said the boy with red hair.

He gave the cap a final kick, which lifted it among the branches of the only tree the garden contained. He then turned his attention to his important discovery. He moistened his lips with his tongue, and gave an anticipatory leer to the figure that shrank away from him.

“New Boy,” he said, “what is your name?”

“I—I d-don’t t-think I know, sir,” the boy stammered.

“D-don’t t-think you know your name, New Boy,” said the boy with red hair, with polite deprecation. “How odd!”

Almost as quick as thought the boy with red hair took the boy’s arm in what seemed to be the grip of a giant and twisted it ferociously. The boy gave a little yelp of agony and stupefaction.

“D-doesn’t t-that help you to remember your name, New Boy?” said the boy with red hair persuasively. As he spoke he pressed his face so close to that of the quivering thing in his grasp that he almost rubbed the gaunt cheek with his blunt and freckled nose.

The boy hung mute and limp with terror.

“L-lost y-your tongue, New Boy?” said the boy with red hair. “Or perhaps you haven’t lost it really?”

The arm that was still in the grip of the giant received another such twist that a wild shriek was heard all over the garden.

The cry brought other boys crowding to the scene. They were of diverse ages and sizes, they were of various tempers and complexions, but one and all were animated by the same critical curiosity. Among them was a boy, who, although far more robust of physique, was slightly less in inches than he who cowered away from their eyes. He measured him carefully with his eye, and, seeming to derive an ampler power from such gross terror, turned to his companions with a swelling air, as if to enforce the fact that in stature he was somewhat the less of the two, and said, “I think I ought to be able to hit him.”

With chin borne loftily, with each step taken firmly yet delicately, and with an air of dauntlessness which affected not to be in the least conscious of the approval such a deed was bound to excite in the minds of the intelligent, this boy approached, and at his leisure struck the new boy in the face with his clenched fist as hard as he could.

A little afterwards the ringing of a bell summoned all the boys indoors to their books. The new boy crept back to his place at the master’s table in a kind of swoon. For the remainder of that day any command of the common faculties which, under happy conditions, he sometimes enjoyed, was destroyed. He could hardly see, he could affix no meaning to that which he heard; the functions of speech and memory were denied to him altogether. Whenever the school-master left the room he followed upon his heels from one place to another with the ridiculous docility of a dumb animal.

At noon the mid-day meal was taken. Many of the scholars then adjourned to a long table in another room, but as the master followed them the boy kept ever by his side. An old woman who cut the food, and who seemed to wield great authority, said to him in a harsh voice, which made him tremble, “You have no right to sit there. Down there at the bottom is the place for new boys.”

“No,” said the master, “let him sit with me.”

During the meal the boy ate no food. When, having declined to touch a robust helping of meat, he also rejected an even more liberal serving of pudding, the old woman said to him roughly, “You must have a proud stomach if it refuses good food.”

After the meal he followed in the steps of the master wherever he went, until the hour came to re-enter the school-room to renew the tasks of the day. Many were the fierce and scornful eyes that were directed upon him as again he took his seat at the master’s table; yet of these he was not conscious, for he had no knowledge of what was happening about him.

About the hour the shadows of the dismal November afternoon grew so oppressive that it became necessary to light the gas, he saw the form of his father in the door. He gave a little convulsed cry, threw his arms round his father’s neck, and buried his face in his coat. His father and the aged master looked at one another without saying anything.

The boy and his father journeyed home on the top of an omnibus. On another occasion such a proceeding would have filled him with a high sense of adventure, but now all the life seemed to have passed out of him. The horses and carts, their drivers, the shouting newsboys, the seething crowds on the pavements, the flaring lights of the shops had nothing to communicate. Yet, when he found himself again in the little room, which he had left only a few brief hours, the sudden joy in recovering that which he had felt to be lost for ever amounted almost to delirium. It soon passed. It was followed by deep dejection, and a sense of strange despair.

The hours of the long evening went very slowly. The ticking of the clock had never seemed so loud and so deliberate. A feeling of lassitude at last began to creep upon him, so that he leant his arms on the table, and pressed his closed eyes upon them. Yet he was not in the least weary, and felt no desire for sleep. His father asked no questions in regard to the doings of the day.

At eight o’clock his father put up the shutters of the shop. It was his habit to sit all day amid the books waiting for customers who seldom came. That day not one had crossed the threshold.

When the hour arrived at which it was usual for the boy to go to bed, he lighted his candle in a dull and mechanical way.

“I suppose, my father,” he said, “heroes do not crave for death?”

“Yes, Achilles,” said his father, “death is a guerdon they do not seek.”

His father accompanied him up the stairs as was his invariable custom during the winter evenings, for he had not the courage to enter a dark room alone. When the boy had sought sanctuary in his cold bed, his father left him with the light burning at its fullest.

It was in the small hours of the morning when his father entered the chamber again. The boy lay wide-eyed, with his head pillowed upon his hands. He was gazing through the curtainless window at the bright stars. Thus did he lie all night very cold and still, but at six o’clock, when his father left his side to light the fire in the little room and to clean out the shop, he had fallen into a light and troubled rest. Later, when his father returned to bid him rise, he found that sheer fatigue had at last overcome him, and that his broken sleep had changed to a slumber that was deep and dreamless. It was only by shaking that the boy could be induced to open his eyes.

“You will be late at the school, Achilles,” said his father.

The boy gave a little faint shiver, and for an instant he cowered among the warm blankets in terror and dismay. In the next, however, he had left his too-pleasant refuge. He clothed his tottering limbs, yet they were so weak that he could hardly walk down the stairs. He took a deep draught of milk, of the inferior London kind, and again accompanied his father through the press of traffic to the house in the gloomy square. Throughout the journey neither spoke.

The incidents of the day were much like those of the previous one, except that his father and the aged master did not re-enact their former interview. As on the day before, the boy sat at the master’s table, and followed him wherever he went. The aged man continued to show him much consideration, while his voice, as it became familiar to the boy’s ears, seemed to grow even gentler and more melodious. Yet the eyes of the boys who sat opposite seemed to grow increasingly scornful and fierce.

The days passed with little change from this order. The boy’s pallor deepened, and his cheeks grew more gaunt than when he entered the school. Sometimes when he returned to the little room in the evening, still in his father’s care, he would be so overcome with weariness that he would lay his head on the table and fall asleep. He ate little; and the previous brightness of his childhood, his frank and insatiable curiosity, gave place to a settled air of lassitude, weariness and dejection.

Once or twice upon returning to the little room he would appear to have been invigorated by some incident of the day, which yet he did not mention. On these infrequent occasions he would seem to have a little appetite for his food, and he would read in some of the less familiar of the ancient authors under his father’s guidance.

Sometimes when his father went to rest in the midnight hours he found the boy kneeling at the side of the bed in his white gown. On one occasion, when the boy was too overborne to take off his own clothes, his father helped him to do so. In removing them his father observed the right arm to be much swollen, and to be greatly bruised and lacerated. His father affected not to notice its condition.

The boy was unfailing in his attendance at the school. Every morning at the same hour he went forth in his father’s care; at the same hour every evening he returned in the same vigilant custody. Days grew into weeks, weeks grew into months, months into years, but the intimacy of time, and increase in stature and understanding opened up no intercourse with the other boys in the school. He still remained one apart at the master’s table. The contemptuous disfavour with which he was viewed upon his first entrance into their midst grew into a tradition which all respected, so that even those who came after him, who were his inferiors in years and stature and knowledge of books, were only too eager to accept the verdict which had been passed upon him. By this pious conformity they gained the freedom of their own republic.

As the boy grew older his reading in the ancient authors became more prolonged, more profound, and more various. The longer he spent at his books, the more authors with whom he entered into an acquaintance, the more was his curiosity inspired. The questions he put to his father in the little room increased greatly in number and magnitude. Some were so delicate that his father, although familiar with many authors in many tongues, was fain to hesitate in his replies; yet, whenever he was able, he would give an answer that was tempered, not to his own experience, but to that of his questioner.

One evening, when the boy had been nearly two years at the school, he asked his father, who observed that his eyes were much swollen with tears recently shed, “When pain hurts us bitterly, my father, must we still continue to praise the Most High?”

“Pain is a monitor whose zeal is sometimes a little excessive, beloved one,” said his father.

“Is it our own incontinence, my father, that makes our fear so great? There seems to be two opinions among these authors.”

“When nature is affronted,” said his father, “she utters protests that all must heed. The wise do not shun her indignation, neither do they court it; but, when they come to suffer it, they seek first for the cause, and then for that which may remove it.”

“And having found the cause, my father, and also that which may remove it, must they ever shrink from the task?”

“Never, Achilles,” said his father.

The boy rose from his chair at the table. His face was like death.

“Do you mind kneeling with me here, my father?” he said. “I seem to do better when you are at my side.”

The boy and his father knelt together in the little room.

All that long night the boy never closed his eyes. He lay on his pillow looking at the brightness of the stars. After a while he tossed restlessly from side to side. His lips were parched; his cheeks burned; his mind had an intolerable vivacity.

At the first faint streaks of dawn he staggered from his bed, dressed his faint limbs, and crept down the stairs. Presently, when his father rose, he found him sharpening upon a stone a large knife, which was used for cutting bread. Observing the boy’s deadly white cheeks and burning eyes, his father placed his hand on his shoulder, saying, “I trust, Achilles, you are aware that there are remedies from which there is no appeal.”

The face of the boy showed that no appeal was desired. He partook neither of food nor drink at the frugal breakfast; and when his father, as was his custom, made ready to accompany him to the school, he said, “I think, my father, I must walk alone to-day. I am twelve years old to-day.”

“As you will, Achilles,” said his father, as he replaced his hat on the peg.

It was with the greatest difficulty that the boy reached the school. He had a perfect acquaintance with every step of the way. The name of every street was engraved in his memory in its proper sequence; he knew by heart almost every tradesman’s sign; yet it was only by the aid of others that he ever reached the school. When he came to the wide crossings, where the traffic was endless, his courage deserted him, and do what he would he had not the physical power to leave the kerb. He remained upon the verge of the crossing for more than half-an-hour, reduced to tears of dismay at his own futility, until an old woman happened to observe him and led him across the street. No sooner had he come to the other side, than, without venturing to thank her, he started to run as fast as he could, pursued by an agony of shame.

Upon his arrival at the school he provided delight and astonishment for his fellows by breaking down in those tasks in which his proficiency had long been remarkable. At each fresh attempt he failed the more miserably. From the first his skill in the classic authors had been so great that it was thought by the others to be discreditable; yet this morning they rejoiced to find that it had passed from him altogether. When at last, in his humiliation, he burst into tears, they raised a shout of laughter.

“The power will return to you, my dear Achilles,” said the aged school-master softly. “It will be the greater for having been denied you altogether.”

In the play-hour the others gathered round him with their taunts. The heavy boy with red hair, who from the first day had shown the greatest assiduity in beating him, said, as he winked at his laughing companions, “Watch me tickle up the biggest dunce in the school.”

However, almost so soon as he advanced, with his ruthless hands outspread, he recoiled with a cry of fear. His victim had suddenly produced a large knife from his coat.

“If you make me cry out again,” said the boy, in a slow and quiet voice, “it is my intention to kill you.”

All stood gaping with amazement and horror, and the boy’s face was so strange that at first none ventured to come near him. At last the oldest boy in the school, who was also the boldest, crept round behind him cautiously, swooped upon him and pinioned his arms. There and then, with the knife still in his hand, they dragged him into the presence of the master.

The old man, very infirm and half blind as he was, could not understand their clamour at first. But when that which had occurred was rendered clear to him, he ordered every boy to his place. Then addressing the heavy boy with red hair, he said, “Come to me, Enceladus.”

A deep silence, the fruit of curiosity, was maintained while this boy lurched up to the master’s table. He wore a smirk of satisfaction upon his face, as one who, unaccustomed to notoriety, has come to taste it suddenly.

“Enceladus,” said the aged master, in so sorrowful a voice that it sank into the hearts even of those who were accustomed to heed it least, “you are rude and unmannerly. Take up your books and leave us. Never, upon any pretext, must you come among us again.”

The boy with red hair, insensitive and slow-witted as he was, was as if stunned by this public and totally unexpected humiliation.

“Why, sir,” he whimpered, “why, sir, it was not I who drew the knife.”

A burning sense of injustice caused the head boy of the school to rise in his place. He it was who had pinioned the arms of him who had dared to hold such a weapon.

“No, sir,” he cried, “it was not Enceladus who drew the knife; it was Achilles.”

“Mnestheus,” said the aged master, addressing the head boy with a stern melancholy that none had heard on his lips before, “you are declared unworthy of that office to which you have been called. You also, here and now, must go from among us, and never, Mnestheus, must you come among us again.”