Schools vary. Sanstead House belonged to the more difficult class. Mr Abney’s constant flittings did much to add to the burdens of his assistants, and his peculiar reverence for the aristocracy did even more. His endeavour to make Sanstead House a place where the delicately nurtured scions of the governing class might feel as little as possible the temporary loss of titled mothers led him into a benevolent tolerance which would have unsettled angels.
Success or failure for an assistant-master is, I consider, very much a matter of luck. My colleague, Glossop, had most of the qualities that make for success, but no luck. Properly backed up by Mr Abney, he might have kept order. As it was, his class-room was a bear-garden, and, when he took duty, chaos reigned.
I, on the other hand, had luck. For some reason the boys agreed to accept me. Quite early in my sojourn I enjoyed that sweetest triumph of the assistant-master’s life, the spectacle of one boy smacking another boy’s head because the latter persisted in making a noise after I had told him to stop. I doubt if a man can experience so keenly in any other way that thrill which comes from the knowledge that the populace is his friend. Political orators must have the same sort of feeling when their audience clamours for the ejection of a heckler, but it cannot be so keen. One is so helpless with boys, unless they decide that they like one.
It was a week from the beginning of the term before I made the acquaintance of the Little Nugget.
I had kept my eyes open for him from the beginning, and when I discovered that he was not at school, I had felt alarmed. Had Cynthia sent me down here, to work as I had never worked before, on a wild-goose chase?
Then, one morning, Mr Abney drew me aside after breakfast.
‘Ah–Mr Burns.’
It was the first time that I had heard those soon-to-be-familiar words.
‘I fear I shall be compelled to run up to London today. I have an important appointment with the father of a boy who is coming to the school. He wishes–ah–to see me.’
This might be the Little Nugget at last.
I was right. During the interval before school, Augustus Beckford approached me. Lord Mountry’s brother was a stolid boy with freckles. He had two claims to popular fame. He could hold his breath longer than any other boy in the school, and he always got hold of any piece of gossip first.
‘There’s a new kid coming tonight, sir,’ he said–‘an American kid. I heard him talking about it to the matron. The kid’s name’s Ford, I believe the kid’s father’s awfully rich. Would you like to be rich, sir? I wish I was rich. If I was rich, I’d buy all sorts of things. I believe I’m going to be rich when I grow up. I heard father talking to a lawyer about it. There’s a new parlour-maid coming soon, sir. I heard cook telling Emily. I’m blowed if I’d like to be a parlour-maid, would you, sir? I’d much rather be a cook.’
He pondered the point for a moment. When he spoke again, it was to touch on a still more profound problem.
‘If you wanted a halfpenny to make up twopence to buy a lizard, what would you do, sir?’
He got it.
Ogden Ford, the El Dorado of the kidnapping industry, entered Sanstead House at a quarter past nine that evening. He was preceded by a Worried Look, Mr Arnold Abney, a cabman bearing a large box, and the odd-job man carrying two suitcases. I have given precedence to the Worried Look because it was a thing by itself. To say that Mr Abney wore it would be to create a wrong impression. Mr Abney simply followed in its wake. He was concealed behind it much as Macbeth’s army was concealed behind the woods of Dunsinane.
I only caught a glimpse of Ogden as Mr Abney showed him into his study. He seemed a self-possessed boy, very like but, if anything, uglier than the portrait of him which I had seen at the Hotel Guelph.