An extraordinary meeting of the School Committee was held at the Drovers’ Arms that evening to confer with Joel Ham, B.A., and consider what was best to be done under the circumstances. The men of the township recognised that it was their bounden duty to support the master in an affair of this kind. When occasion arose they assisted in the capture of vagrant youths, and when Joel imagined a display of force advisable they attended at the punishment and rendered such assistance as was needful in the due enforcement of discipline. It was understood by all that the school would lose prestige and efficiency if Haddon and McKnight were not taken and at once subjected to the rules of the establishment and the rod of the master.
The meeting was quite informal. It was held in the bar, and the discussion of the vital matter in hand was concurrent with the absorption of McMahon’s beer. Mr. Ham’s best attention was given to the latter object.
“Bring the boys to me, gentlemen,” he said, “and I will undertake to induce in them a wholesome contrition and a proper respect for letters—temporarily, at least.”
Neither of the lads had yet returned to his home; but the paternal McKnight promised, like a good citizen, that immediately his son was available he would be reduced to subjection with a length of belting, and then handed over to the will of the scholastic authority without any reservation. Mr. McKnight was commended for his public spirit; and it was then agreed that a member of the Committee should wait upon Widow Haddon to invite her co-operation, and point out the extent to which her son’s mental and moral development would be retarded by a display of weakness on her part at a crisis of this kind?
Mr. Ephraim Shine volunteered for this duty. Ephraim was a tall gaunt man, with hollow cheeks, a leathery complexion, and large feet. He walked or sat with his eyes continually fixed upon these feet—reproachfully, it seemed—as if their disproportion were a source of perennial woe; he carried his arms looped behind him, and had acquired a peculiar stoop—to facilitate his vigilant guardianship of his feet, apparently. Mr. Shine, as superintendent of the Waddy Wesleyan Chapel, represented a party that had long since broken away from the School Committee, which was condemned in prayer as licentious and ungodly, and left to its wickedness when it exhibited a determination to stand by Joel Ham, a scoffer and a drinker of strong drinks, as against a respectable, if comparatively unlettered, nominee of the Chapel and the Band of Hope. His presence at the committee meeting to-night was noted with surprise, although it excited no remark; and his offer to interview the widow was accepted with gratitude as a patriotic proposal. There was only one dissentient—Rogers, a burly faceman from the Silver Stream.
“Don’t send Shine to cant an’ snuffle, an’ preach the poor woman into a fit o’ the miserables,” he said.
Ephraim lifted his patient eyes to Rogers’s face for a moment with an expression of meek reproof, then let them slide back to his boots again, but answered nothing. The enmity of the two was well known in Waddy. Rogers was a worldly man who drank and swore, and who loved a fight as other men loved a good meal; and Shine, as the superintendent, must withhold his countenance from so grievous a sinner. Besides, there was a belief that at some time or another the faceman had thrashed Shine, who was searcher at the Stream in his week-day capacity, and for that reason was despised by the miners, and regarded as a creature apart. Ephraim, it was remarked, was always particularly careful in searching Rogers when he came off shift, in the hope, as the men believed, of one day finding a secreted nugget, and getting even with his enemy by gaoling him for a few years.
As Ephraim passed out from the bar he again allowed his eyes to roll up and meet those of his enemy from the dark shadow of his thick brows.
“Don’t forget the little widow was sweet on Frank Hardy before you jugged him, Tinribs,” said the miner.
Tinribs was a name bestowed upon the superintendent by the youth of Waddy, and called after him by irreverent small boys from convenient cover or under the shelter of darkness. He found the Widow Haddon at home. She it was who answered his knock.
“I have come from the School Committee, ma’am,” he said, still intent upon his boots.
“About Dickie, is it? Come in.”
Mrs. Haddon was dressmaker-in-ordinary to the township, and her otherwise carefully tended kitchen was littered with clippings and bits of material. She resumed her task by the lamp a soon as the delegate of the School Committee was comfortably seated.
“Has Richard come home, ma’am?” Ephraim was an orator, and prided himself on his command of language.
The widow shook her head. “No,” she said composedly. “I don’t think he will come home to-night.”
“We have had a committee meeting, missus,” said Ephraim, examining the toe of his left boot reproach fully, “an’ it’s understood we’ve got to catch these boys.”
“What!” cried Mrs. Haddon, dropping her work into her lap. “You silly men are going to make a hunt of it? Then, let me tell you, you will not get that boy of mine to-morrow, nor this week, nor next. Was ever such a pack of fools! Let Dickie think he is being hunted, and he’ll be a bushranger, or a brigand chief, or a pirate, or something desperately wicked in that amazin’ head of his, and you won’t get a-nigh him for weeks, not a man Jack of you! Dear, dear, dear, you men—a set of interferin’, mutton-headed creatures!
“He’s an unregenerate youth—that boy of yours, ma’am.”
“Is he, indeed?” Mrs. Haddon’s handsome face flushed, and she squared her trim little figure. “Was he that when he went down the broken winze to poor Ben Holden? Was he that when he brought little Kitty Green and her pony out of the burnin’ scrub? Was he all a little villain when he found you trapped in the cleft of a log under the mount there, when the Stream men wouldn’t stir a foot to seek you?
During this outburst Shine had twisted his boots in all directions, and examined them minutely from every point of view.
“No, no, ma’am,” he said, “not all bad, not at all; but—ah, the—ah, influence of a father is missing, Mrs. Haddon.”
“That’s my boy’s misfortune, Mr. Superintendent.”
“It—it might be removed.”
“Eh? What’s that you say?”
The widow eyed her visitor sharply, but he was squirming over his unfortunate feet, and apparently suffering untold agonies on their account.
“The schoolmaster must be supported, missus,” he said hastily. “Discipline, you know. Boys have to be mastered.”
“To be sure; but you men, you don’t know how. My Dick is the best boy in the school, sometimes.”
“Sometimes, ma’am, yes.”
“Yes, sometimes, and would be always if you men had a pen’orth of ideas. Boys should be driven sometimes and sometimes coaxed.”
“And how’d you coax him what played wag under the very school, fought there, an’ then broke out of the place like a burgerler?”
“I know, I know—that’s bad; but it’s been a fearful tryin’ day, an’ allowances should be made.”
“Then, if he comes home you’ll give him over to be—ah, dealt with?”
“Certainly, superintendent; I am not a fool, an’ I want my boy taught. But don’t you men go chasn’ those lads; they’ll just enjoy it, an’ you’ll do no good. You leave Dickie to me, an’ I’ll have him home here in two shakes. Dickie’s a high-spirited boy, an’ full o’ the wild fancies of boys. He’s done this sort o’ thing before. Run away from home once to be a sailor, an’ slep’ for two nights in a windy old tree not a hundred yards from his own comfortable bed, imaginin’ he was what he called on the foretop somethin’. But I know well enough how to work on his feelings.”
“A father, ma’am, would be the savin’ o’ that lad.”
Mrs. Haddon dropped her work again and her dark eyes snapped; but Ephraim Shine had lifted one boot on to his knee, and was examining a hole in the sole with bird-like curiosity.
“When I think my boy needs special savin’ I’ll send for you, Mr. Shine—
“It’d be a grave responsibility, a trial an’ a constant triberlation, but I offer myself. I’ll be a father to your boy, ma’am, barrin’ objections.”
“An’ what is meant by that, Mr. Shine?”
The widow, flushed of face, with her work thrust forward in her lap and a steely light in her fine eyes, regarded the searcher steadily.
“An offer of marriage to yourself is meant, Mrs. Haddon, ma’am.”
Shine’s eyes came sliding up under his brows till they encountered those of Mrs. Haddon; then they fell again suddenly. The little widow tapped the table impressively with her thimbled finger, and her breast heaved.
“Do you remember Frank Hardy, Ephraim Shine?”
“To be certain I do.”
“Well, man, you may have heard what Frank Hardy was to me before he went to—to—”
“To gaol, Mrs. Haddon? Yes.”
“Listen to this, then. What Frank Hardy was to me before he is still, only more dear, an’ I’d as lief everybody in Waddy knew it.”
“A gaol-bird an’ a thief he is.”
“He is in gaol, an’ that may make a gaol-bird of him, but he is no thief. ’Twas you got him into gaol, an’ now you dare do this.”
Shine’s slate-coloured eyes slid up and fell again.
“’Twas done in the way o’ duty. He don’t deny I found the gold on him.”
“No, but he denies ever havin’ seen it in his life before, an’ I believe him.”
“An’ about that cunnin’ little trap in his boot-heel, ma’am?”
“It was what he said it was—the trick of some enemy.”
Mr. Shine lifted his right boot as if trying its weight, groaned and set it down again, tried the other, and said:
“An’ who might the enemy ha’ been, d’ye think?”
“I do not know, but—I am Frank Hardy’s friend, and you may not abuse him in my house.”
“You have a chance o’ a respectable man, missus.” Mrs. Haddon had risen from her seat and was standing over her visitor, a buxom black-gowned little fury.
“An’ I tell him to go about his business, an’ that’s the way.” The gesture the widow threw at her humble kitchen door was magnificent. “But stay,” she cried, although the imperturbable Shine had not shown the slightest intention of moving. “You’ve heard I went with Frank’s mother to visit him in the gaol there at the city; p’r’aps you’re curious to know what I said. Well, I’ll tell you, an’ you can tell all Waddy from yon platform in the chapel nex’ Sunday, if you like. ‘Frank,’ I said, ‘you asked me to be your wife, an’ I haven’t answered. I do now. I’ll meet you at the prison door when you come out, if you please, an’ I’ll marry you straight away.’ Those were my very words, Mr. Superintendent, an’ I mean to keep to them.”
Mrs. Haddon stood with flaming face and throbbing bosom, a tragedy queen in miniature, suffused with honest emotion. Ephraim sat apparently absorbed in his left boot, thrusting his finger into the hole in the sole, as if probing a wound.
“You wouldn’t think, ma’am,” he said presently with the air of a martyr, “that I gave fourteen-and six for them pair o’ boots not nine weeks since.”
Mrs. Haddon turned away with an impatient gesture.
“If you’ve said all you have to say, you might let me get on with my work.”
“I think that’s all, Mrs. Haddon.” The searcher arose, and stood for a moment turning up the toe of one boot and then the other; he seemed to be calculating his losses on the bargain. “You hand over the boy Richard, I understand, ma’am?”
“I’ll do what is right, Mr. Shine.”
“The Committee said as much. The Committee has great respect for you, Mrs. Haddon.”
Ephraim lifted his feet with an effort, and carried them slowly from the house, carefully and quietly closing the kitchen door after him. About half a minute later he opened the door again, just as carefully and as quietly, and said:
“Good night, ma’am, and God bless you.”
Then he went away, his hands bunched behind him, walking like a man carrying a heavy burden.