Black care, however, continued to sit behind the horseman with harrowing
persistence. A certain Dr. Drury (another schoolmaster) punished him on
suspicion of "some nameless horror," of which the unfortunate youngster
happened to be innocent. When, afterward, the latter fact began to be
obvious, "he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong.
But, with a boy's stupid slowness, I said nothing, and he had not the
courage to carry reparation farther." The poverty of Anthony's father
deprived the boy of all the external advantages that might have enabled
him to take rank with his fellows: and his native awkwardness and
sensitiveness widened the breach. "I had no friend to whom I could pour
out my sorrows. I was big, awkward and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked
about in a most unattractive manner. Something of the disgrace of my
school-days has clung to me all through life. When I have been claimed as
school-fellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at
Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things
from most of which I was kept in estrangement. I was never a coward, but
to make a stand against three hundred tyrants required a moral courage
which I did not possess." Once, however, they pushed him too far, and he
was driven to rebellion. "And then came a great fight--at the end of which
my opponent had to be taken home to be cured." And then he utters the
characteristic wish that some one, of the many who witnessed this combat,
may still be left alive "who will be able to say that, in claiming this
solitary glory of my school-days, I am making no false boast." The lonely,
lugubrious little champion! One would almost have been willing to have
received from him a black eye and a bloody nose, only to comfort his sad
heart. It is delightful to imagine the terrific earnestness of that
solitary victory: and I would like to know what boy it was (if any) who
lent the unpopular warrior a knee and wiped his face.