In about an hour he finished his morning work in the vinery, and I went
out with him in the garden, where he left me to tidy up a great bed of
geraniums with a basket and a pair of scissors.
"I've got to see to the men now," he said. "By-and-by we'll go and have
a turn at the cucumbers."
The bed I was employed upon was right away from the house in a sort of
nook where the lawn ran up amongst some great Portugal laurels. It was
a mass of green and scarlet, surrounded by shortly cropped grass, and I
was very busy in the hot sunshine, enjoying my task, and now and then
watching the thrushes that kept hopping out on to the lawn and then back
under the shelter of the evergreens, when I suddenly saw a shadow, and,
turning sharply, found that my friend of the peach-house had come softly
up over the grass with another lad very much like him, but a little
taller, and probably a couple of years older.
"Hullo, pauper!" said the first.
I felt my cheeks tingle, and my tongue wanted to say something very
sharp, but I kept my teeth closed for a moment and then said: "Good morning, sir!"
He took no notice of this, but turned to his brother and whispered
something, when they both laughed together; and as I bent down over my
work I felt as if I must have looked very much like one of the scarlet
geraniums whose dead blossom stems I was taking out.
Of course, a boy with a well-balanced brain and plenty of sound, honest,
English stuff in him ought to be able to treat with contempt the jeering
and laughter of those who are teasing him; but somehow I'm afraid that
there are very few boys who can bear being laughed at with equanimity.
I know, to be frank, I could not, for as those two lads stared at me and
then looked at each other and whispered, and then laughed heartily--
well, no; not heartily, but in a forced way, I felt my face burn and my
fingers tingle. My mouth seemed to get a little dry, too, and the
thought came upon me in the midst of my sensations that I wanted to get
up and fight.
The circumstances were rather exceptional, for I was suffering from two
sore places. One started from my shoulder and went down my back, where
there must have been the mark of the cane; the other was a mental sore,
caused by the word pauper, which seemed to rankle and sting more than
the cut from the cane.
Of course I ought to have treated it as beneath my notice, but whoever
reads this will have found out before now that I was very far from
perfect; and as those two lads evidently saw my annoyance, and went on
trying to increase it, I bent over my work in a vicious way, and kept on
taking out the dead leaves and stems as if they were some of the enemies
Mr Solomon had been talking about in the pits.