Austin bade him go, and think nothing of the consequences till he got there.

Richard groaned in soul.

“You’ve no pride, Austin.”

“Perhaps not.”

“You don’t know what it is to ask a favour of a brute you hate.”

Richard stuck to that view of the case, and stuck to it the faster the more imperatively the urgency of a movement dawned upon him.

“Why,” continued the boy, “I shall hardly be able to keep my fists off him!”

“Surely you’ve punished him enough, boy?” said Austin.

“He struck me!” Richard’s lip quivered.  “He dared not come at me with his hands.  He struck me with a whip.  He’ll be telling everybody that he horsewhipped me, and that I went down and begged his pardon.  Begged his pardon!  A Feverel beg his pardon!  Oh, if I had my will!”

“The man earns his bread, Ricky.  You poached on his grounds.  He turned you off, and you fired his rick.”

“And I’ll pay him for his loss.  And I won’t do any more.”

“Because you won’t ask a favour of him?”

“No!  I will not ask a favour of him.”

Austin looked at the boy steadily.  “You prefer to receive a favour from poor Tom Bakewell?”

At Austin’s enunciation of this obverse view of the matter Richard raised his brow.  Dimly a new light broke in upon him.  “Favour from Tom Bakewell, the ploughman?  How do you mean, Austin?”

“To save yourself an unpleasantness you permit a country lad to sacrifice himself for you?  I confess I should not have so much pride.”

“Pride!” shouted Richard, stung by the taunt, and set his sight hard at the blue ridges of the hills.

Not knowing for the moment what else to do, Austin drew a picture of Tom in prison, and repeated Tom’s volunteer statement.  The picture, though his intentions were far from designing it so, had to Richard, whose perception of humour was infinitely keener, a horrible chaw-bacon smack about it.  Visions of a grinning lout, open from ear to ear, unkempt, coarse, splay-footed, rose before him and afflicted him with the strangest sensations of disgust and comicality, mixed up with pity and remorse—­a sort of twisted pathos.  There lay Tom; hobnail Tom! a bacon-munching, reckless, beer-swilling animal! and yet a man; a dear brave human heart notwithstanding; capable of devotion and unselfishness.  The boy’s better spirit was touched, and it kindled his imagination to realize the abject figure of poor clodpole Tom, and surround it with a halo of mournful light.  His soul was alive.  Feelings he had never known streamed in upon him as from an ethereal casement, an unwonted tenderness, an embracing humour, a consciousness of some ineffable glory, an irradiation of the features of humanity.  All this was in the bosom of the boy, and through it all the vision of an actual hob-nail Tom, coarse, unkempt, open from ear to ear; whose presence was a finger of shame to him and an oppression