I really think I spent the rest of the day in stupor. I am
sure it was not till the following morning that I learned the decision
to which my father had come about us.
Jem was too obviously ill to be anywhere at present but at home; and my
father decided that he would not send him back to Crayshaw's at all, but
to a much more expensive school in the south of England, to which the
parson of our parish was sending one of his sons. I was to return to
Crayshaw's at once; he could not afford the expensive school for us
both, and Jem was the eldest. Besides which, he was not going to
countenance rebellion in any school to which he sent his sons, or to
insult a man so highly recommended to him as Mr. Crayshaw had been.
There certainly seemed to have been some severity, and the boys seemed
to be a very rough lot; but Jem would fight, and if he gave he must
take. His great-grandfather was just the same, and _he_ fought the
Putney Pet when he was five-and-twenty, and his parents thought he was
sitting quietly at his desk in Fetter Lane.
I loved Jem too well to be jealous of him, but I was not the less
conscious of the tender tone in which my father always spoke even of
his faults, and of the way it stiffened and cooled when he added that I
was not so ready with my fists, but that I was as fond of my own way as
Jem was of a fight; but that setting up for being unlike other people
didn't do for school life, and that the Woods had done me no kindness by
making a fool of me.
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