The Surprising Adventures of Sir Toady Lion with Those of General Napoleon Smith

"Come on, Hugh John – the time is up!" said his father from the side of the dog-cart, where (somewhat ostentatiously) he had been refastening straps which Mike had already done to a nicety.

At this moment Toady Lion passed with half a dozen lettuce leaves. He was no more excited "than nothing at all," as Prissy indignantly said afterwards.

"Good-bye, Toady Lion," said Hugh John, "you can have my other bat and the white rat with the pink eyes."

Toady Lion stood with the lettuce leaves in his arms, looking on in a bored sort of way. Prissy could have slapped him if her hands had not been otherwise employed.

He did not say a word till his brother was perched up aloft on the dog-cart with his cricket bat nursed between his knees and a new hard-hat pulled painfully over his eyes. Then at last Toady Lion spoke. "Did 'oo find the funny fing behind the stable, Hugh John?"

Before Hugh John had time to reply, the dog-cart drove away amid sharp explosions of grief from the white-capped throng. Jane Housemaid dripped sympathy from a first-floor window till the gravel was wet as from a smart shower. Toady Lion alone stood on the steps with his usual expression of bored calmness. Then he turned to Prissy.

"Why is 'oo so moppy?"

"Oh, you go away – you've got no heart!" said Prissy, and resumed her luxury of woe.

If Toady Lion had been a Gallic boy, we should have said that he shrugged his shoulders. At all events, he smiled covertly to the lettuces as he moved off in the direction of the rabbit-hutches.

"It was a very funny fing w'at was behind the stable," he said. For Sir Toady Lion was a humorist. And you can't be a humorist without being a little hard-hearted. Only the heart of a professional writer of pathos can be one degree harder.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE GOOD CONDUCT PRIZE

IT was three years after. Sometimes three years makes a considerable change in grown-ups. More often it leaves them pretty much where they were. But with boys and girls the world begins all over again every two years at most. So the terms went and came, and at each vacation, instead of returning home, Hugh John went to London. For it so happened that the year he had left for school the house of Windy Standard was burned down almost to the ground, and Mr. Picton Smith took advantage of the fact to build an entirely new mansion on a somewhat higher site.

The first house might have been saved had the Bounding Brothers been in the neighbourhood, or indeed any active and efficient helpers. But the nearest engine was under the care of the Edam fire brigade, who upon hearing of the conflagration, with great enthusiasm ran their engine a quarter of a mile out of the town by hand. Then their ardour suddenly giving out, they sat down and had an amicable smoke on the roadside till the horse was brought to drag the apparatus the rest of the distance.

But alas! the animal was too fat to be got between the shafts, so it had to be sent back and a leaner horse forwarded. Meantime the house of Windy Standard was blazing merrily, and when the Edam fire company finally arrived, the ashes were still quite hot.

So in this way it came about that it was three long years before Hugh John again saw the hoary battlements of the ancient strength on the castle island which he and his army had attacked so boldly. There were great changes in the town itself. The railway had come to Edam, and now steamed and snorted under the very walls of the Abbey. Chimneys had multiplied, and the smoke columns were taller and denser. The rubicund Provost had gone the way of all the earth, even of all provosts! And the leading bailie, one Donnan, a butcher and army contractor, sat with something less of dignity but equal efficiency in his magisterial chair.

Hugh John from the station platform saw something of this with a sick heart, but he was sure that out in the pure air and infinite quiet of Windy Standard he would find all things the same. But a new and finer house shone white upon the hill. Gardens flourished on unexpected places with that appearance of having been recently planted, frequently pulled up by the roots, looked at and put back, which distinguishes all new gardens. Here and there white-painted vineries and conservatories winked ostentatiously in the sun.

What a time Hugh John had been planning they would have! For months he had thought of nothing but this. Toady Lion and he would do all over again those famous deeds of daring he had done at the castle. Again they would attack the island. Other secret passages would be discovered. All would be as it had been – only nicer. And Cissy Carter – more than everything else he had looked forward to meeting Cissy. Prissy had seen her often, and even during the last week she had written to Hugh John (Prissy always did like to write letters) that Cissy Carter was just splendid – so much older and so improved. Cissy was now nearly seventeen, being (as before) a year and three months older than Hugh John.

Now the distinguished military hero had not been much troubled with sentiment during his school terms. Soldiers at the front never are. He was fully occupied in doing his lessons fairly. He got on well with "the fellows." He was anxious to keep up his end in the games. But, for all that, during these years he had sacredly kept the half of the crooked sixpence in his box, hidden in the end of a tie which he never wore. Now, however, he had looked it out, and by dint of hammering his imagination, he had managed to squeeze out an amount of feeling which quite astonished himself.

He would be noble, generous, forbearing. He remembered how faithfully Cissy had loved him, and how unresponsive he had been in the past. He resolved that all would be very different now.

It was.

Then again he had brought back a record of some distinction from St. Salvator's. He had won the school golf championship. He possessed also a fine bat with an inscription on silver, telling how in the match with St. Aiden's, a rival college of much pretension, he had made 100 not out, and taken eight wickets for sixty-nine.

Besides this presentation cricket bat Hugh John had brought home only one other prize. This was a fitted dressing-bag of beautiful design, with a whole armoury of wonderful silver-plated things inside. It was known as the Good Conduct Prize, and was awarded every year, not by the masters, but by the free votes of all the boys. Prissy was enormously proud of this tribute paid to her brother by his companions. The donor was an old gentleman whose favourite hobby was the promotion of the finer manners of the ancient days, and the terms of the remit on which the award must be made were, that it should be given to the boy who, in the opinion of his fellow-students, was most distinguished for consistent good manners and polite breeding, shown both by his conduct to his superiors in school, and in association with his equals in the playing fields.

At first Hugh John had taken no interest whatever in this award, perhaps from a feeling that his own claims were somewhat slender – or thinking that the prize would merely be some "old book or other." But it happened that, in order to stimulate the school during the last lax and sluggish days of the summer term, the head-master took out the fittings of the dressing-bag, and set the stand containing them on his desk in view of all.

There was a set of razors among them.

Instantly Hugh John's heart yearned with a mighty desire to obtain that prize. How splendid it would be if he could appear at home before Toady Lion and Cissy Carter with a moustache!

That night he considered the matter from all points of view – and felt his muscles. In the morning he was down bright and early. He prowled about the purlieus of the playground. At the back of the gymnasium he met Ashwell Major.

"I say, Ashwell Major," he said, "about that Good Conduct Prize – who are you going to vote for?"

"Well," replied Ashwell Major, "I haven't thought much – I suppose Sammy Carter."

"Oh, humbug!" cried our hero; "see here, Sammy will get tons of prizes anyway. What does he want with that one too?"

"Well," said the other, "let's give it to little Brown. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. He's such a cake."

Hugh John felt that the time for moral suasion had come.

"Smell that!" he said, suddenly extending the clenched fist with which a week before he had made "bran mash" of the bully of the school.

Reluctantly Ashwell Major's nostrils inhaled the bouquet of Hugh John's knuckles. Ashwell Major seemed to have a dainty and discriminating taste in perfumes, for he did not appear to relish this one.

Then Ashwell Major said that now he was going to vote solidly for Hugh John Smith. He had come to the conclusion that his manners were quite exceptional.

And so as the day went on, did the candidate for the fitted dressing-bag argue with the other boarders, waylaying them one by one as they came out into the playground. The day-boys followed, and each enjoyed the privilege of a smell at the fist of power.

"I rejoice to announce that the Good Conduct Prize has been awarded by the unanimous vote of all the scholars of Saint Salvator's to Hugh John Picton Smith of the fifth form. I am the more pleased with this result, that I have never before known such complete and remarkable unanimity of choice in the long and distinguished history of this institution."

These were the memorable words of the headmaster on the great day of the prize-giving. Whereupon our hero, going up to receive his well-earned distinction, blushed modestly and becomingly; and was gazed upon with wrapt wonder by the matrons and maids assembled, as beyond controversy the model boy of the school. And such a burst of cheering followed him to his seat as had never been heard within the walls of St. Salvator's. For quite casually Hugh John had mentioned that he would be on the look-out for any fellow that was a sneak and didn't cheer like blazes.

Moral. —There is no moral to this chapter.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

HUGH JOHN'S BLIGHTED HEART

ON the first evening at home Hugh John put on his new straw hat with its becoming school ribbon of brown, white and blue, for he did not forget that Prissy had described Cissy Carter as "such a pretty girl." Now pretty girls are quite nice when they are jolly. What a romp he would have, and even the stile would not be half bad.

He ran down to the landing-stage, having given his old bat and third best fishing-rod to his brother to occupy his attention. Toady Lion was in an unusually adoring frame of mind, chiefly owing to the new bat with the silver inscription which Hugh John had brought home with him. If that were Toady Lion's attitude, how would it be with the enthusiastic Cissy Carter? She must be more than sixteen now. He liked grown-up girls, he thought, so long as they were pretty. And Cissy was pretty, Prissy had distinctly said so.

The white punt bumped against the landing-stage, but the brown was gone. However, he could see it at the other side, swaying against the new pier which Mr. Davenant Carter had built opposite to that of Windy Standard. This was another improvement; you used to have to tie the boat to a bush of bog-myrtle and jump into wet squashy ground. The returned exile sculled over and tied up the punt to an iron ring.

Then with a high and joyous heart he started over the moor, taking the well-beaten path towards Oaklands.

Suddenly, through the wood as it grew thinner and more birchy, he saw the gleam of a white dress. Two girls were walking – no, not two girls, Prissy and a young lady.

"Oh hang!" said Hugh John to himself, "somebody that's stopping with the Carters. She'll go taking up all Cissy's time, and I wanted to see such a lot of her."

The white dresses and summer hats walked composedly on.

"I tell you what," said Hugh John to himself, "I'll scoot through the woods and give them a surprise."

And in five minutes he leaped from a bank into the road immediately before the girls. Prissy gave a little scream, threw up her hands, and then ran eagerly to him.