CHAPTER VI
A LOOKING-GLASS, A SILVER MATCH-BOX, A GLASS OF WHISKY, AND--VOX POPULI
I
Peter, thirteen to sixteen!--and left, so it appears, very much the same,
as far as actual possessions go, at the end of it as at the poverty-struck
commencement. Friendship, Honour, Glory--how these things came and went
with him during these years might have a book to themselves were it not
that our business is with a wider stage and more lasting issues--and there
is but little room for a full-fledged chronicle. Though Dawson's--and to
take the history of Miss Gill only--of her love affair with the curate, of
her final desperate appeal to him and of his ultimate confession that he
was married already--provides a story quite sufficient for three excellent
volumes. Or there is the history of Benbow, that bucolic gentleman into
whose study we led Peter a chapter or two ago, Head for this year or two of
Dawson's--soon to be head of nothing but the dung-heap and there to crow
only dismally--with a childlike Mrs. Benbow, led unwittingly to Dawson's
as a lamb to the slaughter-house--later to flee, crying, back to her
hearth and home, her life smashed to the tiniest pieces and no brain nor
strength to put it together again. Or there is the natural and interesting
progression, on the part of any child, behind whose back those iron gates
of Dawson's have swung, from innocence to knowledge, from knowledge to
practice, from practice to miserable Submission, Concealment, and a merry
prospective Hell--this is a diverting study with which it would be easy to
fill these pages.
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