One
day as the two were walking together in the green playground, Mr. Gordon passed
by; and as the boys touched their caps, he nodded and smiled pleasantly at
Russell, but hardly noticed, and did not return Eric’s salute. He had begun to
dislike the latter more and more, and had given him up altogether as one of the
reprobates. Barker, who happened to pass at the same moment, received from him
the same cold glance that Eric had done.
“What
a surly devil that is,” said Eric, when he had passed; “did you see how he
purposely cut me?”
“A
surly...? Oh, Eric, that’s the first time I ever heard you swear.”
Eric
blushed. He hadn’t meant the word to slip out in Russell’s hearing, though
similar and worse expressions were common enough in his talk with other boys.
But he didn’t like to be reproved, even by Russell, and in the ready spirit of
self-defence, he answered—
“Pooh,
Edwin, you don’t call that swearing, do you? You’re so strict, so religious,
you know. I love you for it, but then, there are none like you. Nobody thinks
anything of swearing here,—even of real swearing, you know.”
Russell
was silent.
“Besides,
what can be the harm of it? it means nothing. I was thinking the other night,
and I made out that you and Owen are the only two fellows here who don’t swear.”
Russell
still said nothing.
“And,
after all, I didn’t swear; I only called that fellow a surly devil.”
“Oh,
hush! Eric, hush!” said Russell sadly. “You wouldn’t have said so half a year
ago.”
Eric
knew what he meant. The image of his father and mother rose before him, as they
sate far away in their lonely Indian home, thinking of him, praying for him,
centring all their hopes in him. In him!—and he knew how many things he was
daily doing and saying, which would cut them to the heart. He knew that all his
moral consciousness was fast vanishing, and leaving him a bad and reckless boy.
In
a moment all this passed through his mind. He remembered how shocked he had
been at swearing at first; and even when it became too familiar to shock him,
how he determined never to fall into the habit himself. Then he remembered how
gradually it had become quite a graceful sound in his ears—a sound of entire
freedom and independence of moral restraint; an open casting off, as it were,
of all authority, so that he had begun to admire it, particularly in Duncan,
and, above all, in his new hero, Upton; and he recollected how, at last, an
oath had one day slipped out suddenly in his own words, and how strange it
sounded to him, and how Upton smiled to hear it, though his own conscience had
reproached him bitterly; but now that he had done it once, it became less
dreadful, and gradually grew common enough, till even conscience hardly
reminded him that he was doing wrong.
He
thought of all this, and hung his head. Pride struggled with him for a moment,
but at length he answered, “Oh, Edwin, you’re quite right, and I’m all in the
wrong as usual. But I shall never be like you,” he added in a low sad tone.
“Dear
Eric, don’t think that I’m always sermonising. But I hope that I know the difference
between what’s right and what’s wrong, and do let me say that you will be so
much happier, if you try not to yield to all the bad things round us. Remember,
I know more of school than you.”
The
two boys strolled on silently. That night Eric knelt at his bedside, and prayed
as he had not done for many a long day.
And
here let those scoff who deny “the sinfulness of little sins”—but I remember
the words of one who wrote, that:
The most childish thing which man can do,
Is yet a sin which Jesus never did
When Jesus was a child,—and yet a sin
For which in lowly pain he came to die
That for the bravest sin that e’er was praised
The King Eternal wore the crown of thorns.