第17章

ROBERT TO THE RESCUE!

That Shargar was a parish scholar--which means that the parish paid his fees, although, indeed, they were hardly worth paying--made very little difference to his position amongst his school-fellows.Nor did the fact of his being ragged and dirty affect his social reception to his discomfort.But the accumulated facts of the oddity of his personal appearance, his supposed imbecility, and the bad character borne by his mother, placed him in a very unenviable relation to the tyrannical and vulgar-minded amongst them.

Concerning his person, he was long, and, as his name implied, lean, with pale-red hair, reddish eyes, no visible eyebrows or eyelashes, and very pale face--in fact, he was half-way to an Albino.His arms and legs seemed of equal length, both exceedingly long.The handsomeness of his mother appeared only in his nose and mouth, which were regular and good, though expressionless; and the birth of his father only in his small delicate hands and feet, of which any girl who cared only for smallness, and heeded neither character nor strength, might have been proud.His feet, however, were supposed to be enormous, from the difficulty with which he dragged after him the huge shoes in which in winter they were generally encased.

The imbecility, like the large feet, was only imputed.He certainly was not brilliant, but neither did he make a fool of himself in any of the few branches of learning of which the parish-scholar came in for a share.That which gained him the imputation was the fact that his nature was without a particle of the aggressive, and all its defensive of as purely negative a character as was possible.Had he been a dog, he would never have thought of doing anything for his own protection beyond turning up his four legs in silent appeal to the mercy of the heavens.He was an absolute sepulchre in the swallowing of oppression and ill-usage.It vanished in him.There was no echo of complaint, no murmur of resentment from the hollows of that soul.The blows that fell upon him resounded not, and no one but God remembered them.

His mother made her living as she herself best knew, with occasional well-begrudged assistance from the parish.Her chief resource was no doubt begging from house to house for the handful of oatmeal which was the recognized, and, in the court of custom-taught conscience, the legalized dole upon which every beggar had a claim;and if she picked up at the same time a chicken, or a boy's rabbit, or any other stray luxury, she was only following the general rule of society, that your first duty is to take care of yourself.She was generally regarded as a gipsy, but I doubt if she had any gipsy blood in her veins.She was simply a tramper, with occasional fits of localization.Her worst fault was the way she treated her son, whom she starved apparently that she might continue able to beat him.

The particular occasion which led to the recognition of the growing relation between Robert and Shargar was the following.Upon a certain Saturday--some sidereal power inimical to boys must have been in the ascendant--a Saturday of brilliant but intermittent sunshine, the white clouds seen from the school windows indicating by their rapid transit across those fields of vision that fresh breezes friendly to kites, or draigons, as they were called at Rothieden, were frolicking in the upper regions--nearly a dozen boys were kept in for not being able to pay down from memory the usual instalment of Shorter Catechism always due at the close of the week.

Amongst these boys were Robert and Shargar.Sky-revealing windows and locked door were too painful; and in proportion as the feeling of having nothing to do increased, the more uneasy did the active element in the boys become, and the more ready to break out into some abnormal manifestation.Everything--sun, wind, clouds--was busy out of doors, and calling to them to come and join the fun; and activity at the same moment excited and restrained naturally turns to mischief.Most of them had already learned the obnoxious task--one quarter of an hour was enough for that--and now what should they do next? The eyes of three or four of the eldest of them fell simultaneously upon Shargar.

Robert was sitting plunged in one of his day-dreams, for he, too, had learned his catechism, when he was roused from his reverie by a question from a pale-faced little boy, who looked up to him as a great authority.

'What for 's 't ca'd the Shorter Carritchis, Bob?'

''Cause it's no fully sae lang's the Bible,' answered Robert, without giving the question the consideration due to it, and was proceeding to turn the matter over in his mind, when the mental process was arrested by a shout of laughter.The other boys had tied Shargar's feet to the desk at which he sat--likewise his hands, at full stretch; then, having attached about a dozen strings to as many elf-locks of his pale-red hair, which was never cut or trimmed, had tied them to various pegs in the wall behind him, so that the poor fellow could not stir.They were now crushing up pieces of waste-paper, not a few leaves of stray school-books being regarded in that light, into bullets, dipping them in ink and aiming then at Shargar's face.