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The wide-mouthed man helped me into my jacket, shook hands with me, and said I had no science, but the devil's own pluck-and-lights. Then he, too, faded away into the night; and I found myself alongside of Doggy Bates, marching up the street after Mr. Stimcoe, who declaimed, as he went, upon the vulgarity of street-fighting.
He mounted the coach again, and, climbing forward whispered in the back of the coachman's ear. The passengers bent their heads to listen. They nodded; the coachman nodded too, and stretched down a hand. "Can you climb, sonny, or shall we fetch the steps for you? There, I reckoned you was more of a man than to need 'em!" Mrs. Stimcoe detained me for a moment to fold me in a masculine hug.
Stimcoe with the finest courtesy, and, alone among her creditors, was rewarded with that lady's respect. I knew, to be sure we all knew that she must be in arrears with Captain Branscome's pay; but we were unprepared for the morning when, on the stroke of the church clock our Greenwich time he walked up to the door, resolutely handed Mrs. Stimcoe a letter, and as resolutely walked away again.
I need scarcely say that we mimicked him; but in school he kept far better discipline than Stimcoe, for, with all his oddity, we knew him to be a brave man. Such mathematics as we needed he taught capably enough and very patiently.
Stimcoe's delicate health, and this again to the subject of damp sheets, and this finally to Mrs. Stimcoe's suggesting that Miss Plinlimmon might perhaps like to have a look at my bedroom. The bedroom assigned to me opened out of Mrs. Stimcoe's own. Mrs. Stimcoe swept this into her pocket with a turn of the hand, and explained frankly that her husband, like most scholars, was absent-minded.
"Look here," said I, staring down at him, "that's nonsense!" "Oh, very well," he answered promptly; "then we're the 'Backward Sons of Gentlemen' that's down in the prospectus and we're fetching water for Mother Stimcoe, because the turncock cut off the company's water this morning! See? But you won't blow the gaff on the old girl, will you?" "Are you all there is, you three?"
At the foot of the hill we parted, with the understanding that I was to run straight home to Stimcoe's, and explain my absence at locking-up or, as Mr. Stimcoe preferred to term it, "names-calling" as best I might. Thereupon I did an incredibly foolish thing, which, as it proved, defeated all our plans and gave rise to unnumbered woes.
The brass doorplate of No. 7 "Copenhagen Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen. Principal, the Rev. Stimcoe credit, as Miss Plinlimmon remarked before ringing the bell. Mrs. Stimcoe herself opened the door to us, in a full lace cap and a maroon-coloured gown of state. She was a gaunt, hard-eyed woman, tall as a grenadier, remarkable for a long upper lip decorated with two moles.
Then I lay panting, and my opponent under me the pair of us too weary for the moment to strike a blow; and then, as breath came back, I was aware of a sudden hush in the din. A hand took me by the shirt-collar, dragged me to my feet, and swung me round, and I stared, blinking, into the face of Mr. Stimcoe. "Dishgrashful!" said Mr. Stimcoe.
"It's for you," she announced, coming to a standstill under the window and speaking up to me after a curt nod towards Captain Branscome "from Miss Plinlimmon; and you'd best come down and hear what it says, for it's serious." I should here explain that Mr. and Mrs. Stimcoe made a practice of reading all letters received or despatched by us. It was a part of the system.
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