For a moment there was silence, then Mr. Cardus, with awful politeness, asked Jeremy what was the meaning of this sight.
"We've been fighting," answered the boy, sulkily. "He hit----"
"Thank you, Jeremy, I don't want the particulars, but I will take this opportunity to tell you before your sister and my nephew what I think of you. You are a boor and a lout, and, what is more, you are a coward."
At this unjust taunt the lad coloured to his eyes.
"Yes, you may colour, but let me tell you that it is cowardly to pick a quarrel with a boy the moment he sets foot inside my doors----"
"I say, uncle," broke in Ernest, who was unable to see anything cowardly about fighting, an amusement to which he was rather partial himself, and who thought that his late antagonist was getting more than his due, "I began it, you know."
It was not true, except in the sense that he had begun it by striking the dog: nor did this statement produce any great effect on Mr. Cardus, who was evidently seriously angry with Jeremy on more points than this. But at least it was one of those well-meant fibs at which the recording angel should not be offended.
"I do not care who began it," went on Mr. Cardus, angrily, "nor is it about this only that I am angry. You are a discredit to me, Jeremy, and a discredit to your sister. You are dirty, you are idle; your ways are not those of a gentleman. I sent you to school--you ran away. I give you good clothes--you will not wear them. I tell you, boy, that I will not stand it any longer. Now listen. I am going to make arrangements with Mr. Halford, the clergyman at Kesterwick, to undertake Ernest's education. You shall go with him; and if I see no improvement in your ways in the course of the next few months, I shall wash my hands of you. Do you understand me now?"
The boy Jeremy had, during this oration, been standing in the middle of the room, first on one leg, then on the other. At its conclusion he brought the leg that was at the moment in the air down to the ground, and stood firm.
"Well," went on Mr. Cardus, "what have you to say?"
"I have to say," blurted out Jeremy, "that I don't want your education. You care nothing about me," he went on, his grey eyes flashing and his heavy face lighting up; "nobody cares about me except my dog Nails. Yes, you make a dog of me myself; you throw things to me as I throw Nails a bone. I don't want your education, and I won't have it. I don't want the fine clothes you buy for me, and I won't wear them. I don't want to be a burden on you either. Let me go away and be a fisher-lad and earn my bread. If it hadn't been for her," pointing to his sister, who was sitting aghast at his outburst, "and for Nails, I'd have gone long ago, I can tell you. At any rate, I should not be a dog then. I should be earning my living, and have no one to thank for it. Let me go, I say, where I shan't be mocked at if I do my fair day's work. I'm strong enough; let me go. There! I've spoken my mind now;" and the lad broke out into a storm of tears, and, turning, tramped out of the room.
As he went, all Mr. Cardus's wrath seemed to leave him.
"I did not think he had so much spirit in him," he said aloud. "Well, let us have our dinner."
At dinner the conversation flagged, the scene that preceded it having presumably left a painful impression; and Ernest, who was an observant youth, fell to watching little Dorothy doing the honours of the table; cutting up her crazed old grandfather's food for him, seeing that everybody had what he wanted, and generally making herself unobtrusively useful. In due course the meal came to an end, and Mr. Cardus and old Atterleigh went back to the office, leaving Dorothy alone with Ernest. Presently the former began to talk.
"I hope that your eye is not painful," she said. "Jeremy hits very hard."
"O no, it's all right. I'm used to it. When I was at school in London I often used to fight. I'm sorry for him, though--your brother, I mean."
"Jeremy! O yes, he is always in trouble, and now I suppose that it will be worse than ever. I do all I can to keep things smooth, but it is no good. If he won't go to Mr. Halford's, I am sure I don't know what will happen;" and the little lady sighed deeply.
"O, I daresay that he will go. Let's go and look for him, and try and persuade him."
"We might try," she said, doubtfully. "Stop a minute, and I will put on my hat, and then if you will take that nasty thing off your eye, we might walk on to Kesterwick. I want to take a book, out of which I have been teaching myself French, back to the cottage where old Miss Ceswick lives, you know."
"All right," said Ernest.
Presently Dorothy returned, and they went out by the back way to a little room near the coach-house, where Jeremy stuffed birds and kept his collection of eggs and butterflies; but he was not there. On inquiring of Sampson, the old Scotch gardener who looked after Mr. Cardus's orchid-houses, she discovered that Jeremy had gone out to shoot snipe, having borrowed Sampson's gun for that purpose.
"That is just like Jeremy," she sighed. "He is always going out shooting instead of attending to things."
"Can he hit birds flying, then?" asked Ernest.
"Hit them!" she answered, with a touch of pride; "I don't think he ever misses them. I wish he could do other things as well."
Jeremy at once went up at least fifty per cent. in Ernest's estimation.
On their way back to the house they peeped in through the office window, and Ernest saw "Hard-riding Atterleigh" at his work, copying deeds.
"He's your grandfather, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"Does he know you?"
"In a sort of way; but he is quite mad. He thinks that Reginald is the devil, whom he must serve for a certain number of years. He has got a stick with numbers of notches on it, and he cuts out a notch every month. It is all very sad. I think it is a very sad world;" and she sighed again.
"Why does he wear hunting-clothes?" asked Ernest.
"Because he always used to ride a good deal. He loves a horse now. Sometimes you will see him get up from his writing table, and the tears come into his eyes if anybody comes into the yard on horseback. Once he came out and tried to get on to a horse and ride off, but they stopped him."
"Why don't they let him ride?"
"O, he would soon kill himself. Old Jack Tares, who lives at Kesterwick, and gets his living by rats and ferrets, used to be whip to grandfather's hounds when he had them, and says that he always was a little mad about riding. One moonlight night he and grandfather went out to hunt a stag that had strayed here out of some park. They put the stag out of a little grove at a place called Claffton, five miles away, and he took them round by Starton and Ashleigh, and then came down the flats to the sea, about a mile and a half below here, just this side of the quicksand. The moon was so bright that it was almost like day, and for the last mile the stag was in view not more than a hundred yards in front of the hounds, and the pace was racing. When he came to the beach he went right through the waves out to the sea, and the hounds after him, and grandfather after them. They caught him a hundred yards out and killed him, and then grandfather turned his horse's head and swam with the hounds."
"My eye!" was Ernest's comment on this story. "And what did Jack Tares do?"
"O, he stopped on the beach and said his prayers; he thought that they would all be drowned."
Then they passed through the old house, which was built on a little ness or headland that jutted beyond the level of the shore-line, and across which the wind swept and raved all the winter long, driving the great waves in ceaseless thunder against the sandy cliffs. It was a desolate spot that the grey and massive house, of which the roof was secured by huge blocks of rock, looked out upon, nude of vegetation, save for rank, rush-like grass and plants of sea-holly. In front was the great ocean, rushing in continually upon the sandy bulwarks, and with but few ships to break its loneliness. To the left, far as the eye could reach, ran a line of cliff, till it was as full of gaps as an old crone's jaw. Behind this stretched mile upon mile of desolate-looking land, covered for the most part with ling and heath, and cut up with dikes, whence the water