He was suffering from too much fuss.  In the days which had elapsed since the wrestling bout on the moor Doughty’s injury had seemed likely to prove a bad sprain, but there had been a terrible twenty-four hours when the doctor, a portentous person with more pessimism than knowledge, had wagged his head forebodingly over the moaning patient.  Doughty had felt it was not in nature for anyone to be severe on a boy with an injured back, and so he babbled freely, under cover of a pretended delirium, feeling it was better to let his version get first to Old Tring.  For he guessed how that personage, always one to examine the springs of action before judgment, would look at his share in the matter.  Dr. Harvey had asked for a famous Plymouth surgeon to be sent for, and this afternoon he had arrived.  On his verdict as to Doughty’s condition depended Ishmael’s own fate, and he knew it.  For, whatever the provocation, the fact remained that Ishmael had injured a schoolfellow in a wrestling match admittedly serious in its intent, and the discipline of the school had to be considered, all the more rigidly that many rumours, mostly untrue, had circulated in the school.  Old Tring had suspended judgment, merely sending for Boase, who had arrived one evening at St. Renny covered with smuts and giving freely his opinions about the railway, on which, for motives of Christian poverty, he had been rash enough to travel in one of the unroofed third class compartments.

And, for the first time in his knowledge, Ishmael was aware that the Parson had not quite understood.  It was not that he did not understand what Ishmael felt as much as that he expected him to feel so much more than he did.  Ishmael loathed a fuss.  Yet the Parson had been a rock of support; Old Tring had been generosity itself; Polkinghorne and Carminow, even the little boys, had held their tongues and let him see that for their part they intended to think no more of what Doughty had said.  Killigrew had treated the whole affair as something between a joke and a matter so unimportant it made really no difference to anyone.  And of all the attitudes it was Killigrew’s, in the revulsion from fuss, that Ishmael was beginning to adopt as his own.  The only burning thing he felt about his position was anger—­an anger against his father in the first place and against Archelaus, oddly enough, in the second.  He knew that his eldest brother would do all in his power to make life as difficult as possible when he went back to take up the reins at Cloom.  With that burning grudge went another sensation—­the realisation that if all things had been otherwise, been normal, Cloom would, after all, never have been his, and he was struck by a certain unfairness that it should be his now.

But of any shame at his position he felt none, and it was this that apparently he was expected to feel by all save Killigrew.  They were all so eager to make him understand that there was nothing for him to feel ashamed about, that no one thought any the less of him or wanted him to think any less of himself.  Ishmael began to discover what he never, being very un-self-analytical, fully realised, that he was one of those elect souls born without that gift of the Evil One—­shame.  Some attain that freedom by hard striving, but some are born free, and of them was Ishmael.