Humphrey Bold | Page 7

captain was ever somewhat long winded
over his stories, and I could see that my father was growing impatient;
but he sat back in his chair with his hands upon the arms and said never
a word.
"Young Cludde and Cyrus Vetch, it seems, have a sweet tooth for your
apples, Ellery," said the captain, "and Cludde told me with a fine
indignation that Humphrey flatly refused to fill his pockets for their
behoof. They were proceeding to enforce their requisition, I gather,
when the boy broke from them, and, finding himself hard pressed by
and by, took refuge behind Joe Punchard's bandy legs. And Joe must
needs take up the cudgels on behalf of the oppressed, and chose an
original way of punishing the oppressor. And thus the rolling of the
barrel is explained."

At this Mistress Pennyquick broke out into vehement denunciation of
the two boys, but my father silenced her. Quietly he began to question
me: he would take no denial, and drew out of me bit by bit the whole
story of the bullying I had suffered from those two of my
schoolfellows.
And then he was more angry than I had seen him ever before. He smote
the arm of the chair with his great fist, and vowed he would not have
me ill used; and though he said but little, and never once raised his
voice, I knew by the set of his lips and the gleam of his eye that it
would go hard with anyone who baited me again. Then the captain
made a proposition for which I have been thankful all my life long.
"The moral of it is, Ellery, that Humphrey must be a pupil of mine.
"Give me your arm, boy.
"Ah!" says he, feeling the muscle, which was soft enough, no doubt,
seeing that I was only eleven and had never done anything about the
farm. "We must alter that. Let him come to me twice a week, Ellery,
and he shall learn the arts of self defense, first with nature's own
weapons, for boxing I take to be the true foundation of all bodily
exercise, and afterwards, when he is a little grown, the more delicate
science of swordsmanship, which demands bodily strength and wits,
and to which the other is but a prelude. And I warrant you, if he have
the right stuff in him, that by the time the schoolmaster has done with
him he shall be able to hold his own against any man, and will need no
succors from Joe Punchard or anyone else."
Hereupon Mistress Pennyquick set up a cry about the wickedness of
teaching little boys to fight, and the state she would be in if I was some
day brought home mangled and disfigured, and a great deal more to the
same effect. The captain tapped the table until she had finished, and
then, with a fine courtly bow, he said:
"Spoken like a woman, ma'am. Humphrey will suffer hard knocks, to
be sure; yes, please God, he shall have many a black eye, and many a
bloody nose, and we shall make a man of him, ma'am: a gentleman he

is already."
"Yes, to be sure," says the simple creature, "and his mother was a born
lady, and--"
"Tuts, ma'am," the captain here interrupted. "I was not alluding to his
pedigree. The boy has suffered torment for months without breathing a
word of it to betray his schoolfellows; from that I deduce that he has
the spirit of a gentleman, and I want no further proof."
"'Tis time the boy was abed," says my father. "Run away, lad."
I got up at once to go, guessing that my father wished to have some
private talk with Captain Galsworthy. My ears were tingling, I confess,
with his praise of me, and my heart throbbed with delight and pride at
the thought of being the captain's pupil. I could not sleep for thinking of
it. I imagined all manner of scenes in which I should some day figure,
and saw myself already holding off five enemies at once with my
flashing sword. These visions haunted my dreams when at last I slept,
and it was after a bout of especial fierceness that I found myself lying
awake, in a great heat and breathlessness.
And then I was aware of an actual sound--a sound which no doubt had
entered into my dreams as the clash of arms. It was a soft and regular
tapping, a ghostly sound to hear at dead of night, and like to scare a boy
of quick imagination. I lay for some moments in a state bordering on
panic, unable to think, much less to act.
Tap, tap, tap--so it went on, like the ticking of the great clock on