RICHARD FINDS THAT NO CHASTENING SEEMETH TO BE JOYOUS
“Tell him who you are, Dick,”
said Sandy, when Bates appeared with the lantern.
“What’s the use of trying to cover up your
name, when the light will blow the whole thing?”
“Well, Dick,” added the
farmer, adopting the name Sandy had used, “if
you don’t tell me who you are, I shall see what
virtue there is in that cowhide.”
“My name is Richard Grant,”
replied the broker’s son, sullenly, and with
the feeling that he had sacrificed all his manhood
by giving up the point.
“Ah, then you are the son of
Mr. Grant, of Woodville!” sneered Mr. Batterman.
“I don’t wonder you didn’t want to
tell your name, for stealing melons isn’t a
very respectable business.”
“I am willing to pay for the
melons, and let the matter drop where it is,”
said Richard, who was so far humbled as to be willing
to compromise with the owner of the stolen fruit.
“I am not exactly willing to
let the matter drop where it is. You are the
son of a rich and respectable man, and you ought to
know better than to steal; and I am going to give
you a lesson which I hope you will profit by.”
“I will pay double price for
all the melons, if you will let me go.”
“I wouldn’t let you go
if you would pay ten times the value of the melons.
I want to teach you better than to steal; and when
I’ve done with you, I don’t believe you
will want to steal any more of my fruit.”
“What are you going to do?”
demanded Richard, very much disturbed by the decided
tones of the farmer.
“I’m going to give you a sound thrashing.”
“No, you are not,” said
Richard, who would rather have died on the spot than
submit to the humiliation of a flogging.
“You will see whether I am or
not. It’s no kind of use for me to take
a rich man’s son like you before the court.
Your father would pay your fine, and you would laugh
in your sleeve, and call it a good joke.”
“You have no right to flog me,” protested
Richard.
“Perhaps I haven’t; but
I’m going to do it, if I have to suffer myself
for it. I am going to have the satisfaction of
curing you of stealing my melons.”
Bates had taken hold of Sandy again,
and Mr. Batterman prepared to make good his promise.
By the light of the lantern Richard saw the hard face
of the farmer. It was stern and forbidding, and
he felt that he meant all he had said. How could
the son of the owner of Woodville submit to the disgrace
of being whipped? At home he was treated with
respect and consideration. The servants took
off their hats to him. His father, in his sternest
moments, had never hinted such a thing as corporal
punishment.
It seemed absolutely impossible for
him to submit to the farmer’s terrible remedy,
but there was no way to avoid it. He had offered
to compromise, but nothing would satisfy his relentless
captor. The punishment was to be inflicted in
the spirit of revenge rather than from a sense of
duty, which made it all the more intolerable to think
of. He was not to be whipped for his own or the
public good, but to satisfy the malice and revenge
of “Old Batterbones.”
He decided not to submit to the infliction;
but he might as well have decided not to let the sun
rise on the following morning, or to stop the Hudson
in its majestic flow to the sea. His own experience,
so dearly bought in the garden, had shown him that
he was utterly incapable of any successful resistance.
He looked around him for the means of escape, and
racked his brain for some expedient that would enable
him to checkmate his unwieldy opponent; but he looked
in vain, and thought in vain. There was nothing
upon which to hang even the faintest hope of resistance
or escape.
The farmer held him by the collar,
and the terrible instrument of torture was raised
over his head. It fell, and Richard writhed with
the pain, not of the body alone, for the blow seemed
to penetrate to his soul. It lacerated his pride,
his self-respect, more than it did his legs.
He trembled like an aspen leaf, as much from intense
emotion as from the smart of the stroke.
Richard was no coward, but he would
have begged off, if he could have done so with any
prospect of success; but he might as well have pleaded
with the ocean to hold back its destructive waves,
as with Mr. Batterman to stay his hand, before his
revenge was satisfied. Another and another blow
fell. The pain was so severe that the culprit
could not endure it, and the quick-falling strokes
soon kindled a fire in his soul which neither prudence
nor policy could check. It burst out in a raging
flame of passion, which caused him to roar like a mad
bull, and to kick, bite, and struggle like an imprisoned
tiger.
All this resistance only added to
the spite of his persecutor and he laid on the blows
till his own strength failed him. In vain Sandy
remonstrated with Richard upon the folly of his course,
and begged him to keep cool, as though a severe flogging
was one of the light afflictions of this world, that
may be endured with patience by a philosophical temperament.
“Old Batterbones” had
exhausted himself in the struggle. His “wind”
was gone; and he gave up because he could do no more,
rather than because he was satisfied with the extent
of the punishment.
“There, Mr. Richard Grant, of
Woodville, when you want to steal any more melons
of mine, think of that,” said the farmer, as
he cast the culprit from him.
“You’ll have to pay for
this,” groaned Richard, who felt as though he
had endured all the tortures of the Inquisition.
“Perhaps I shall,” puffed
Mr. Batterman; “but if you have got enough to
make you a wiser and a better boy, I shall be perfectly
satisfied.”
“I’ll be revenged on you
for this, if it costs me my life,” exclaimed
Richard, whose soul smarted even more than his body.
“Shut up, now!” said the
farmer, angrily, “or I’ll give you some
more.”
Richard did shut up, for the incident
had developed a grain of discretion in his composition,
if nothing better-though nothing better
could be expected from a flogging inflicted in the
spirit of malice.
“Now, my boy,” said the
farmer, turning to Sandy, when he had in some measure
recovered his breath, “we will see what we can
do for you. You are not a fool like the other
fellow, and your wisdom will serve you a good turn.”
Sandy made no remark in reply to this
speech of Mr. Batterman. He had made up his mind
to submit with all the philosophy he could bring to
his aid. He had been flogged before. It was
not a new institution to him, as it had been to his
companion in iniquity. He looked upon a flogging
as one of the necessary evils to which a fast boy must
submit; and though he did not think it was all for
the best, he was disposed to make the best of it.
The thrashing was the gate by which he was to escape
from a bad scrape.
The farmer bore less malice towards
him than towards his friend. He had offered no
resistance, and been measurably humble under the discipline
of misfortune. The blows were lighter and less
in number, and when a dozen strokes had been administered,
Mr. Batterman was satisfied, and so expressed himself.
At the same time he volunteered an opinion that Richard
was the real sinner, and had led the other into the
mischief-a position which Sandy took no
pains to controvert.
But Sandy, though he was a philosopher,
and an embryo man of the world, did not submit to
his punishment in silence. He was not a Stoic,
and every blow extorted from him a cry of pain, which
was as politic as it was necessary. He labored
to convince the farmer that he was suffering severely
from the castigation, so that he might be the sooner
satisfied with what had been done. Compared with
that which Richard had received, his whipping was
light. When it was finished, he was surprised
that he had got off with so little; and he congratulated
himself upon the strategy which had so sensibly diminished
his portion.
“Now, boys, you can go.
If you are satisfied, I am; and when you want to steal
any more of my fruit, just remember my treatment of
fruit thieves,” said the farmer.
“You haven’t seen the
end of this yet,” replied Richard, as he moved
off, his skin and his proud spirit smarting in unison.
“You haven’t seen the
end of it either, if you don’t keep a civil
tongue in your head.”
Richard was tempted to enter immediately
upon the work of revenging himself for what he had
suffered, and when the farmer spoke, he picked up
a couple of stones, with the intention of throwing
them at his tormentor; but Sandy, cool and self-possessed
in the hour of tribulation, dissuaded him from this
insane course.
“No use, Dick; drop the stones,
and we will pay him off at another time, when we can
do so without danger.”
Richard listened to this prudent advice,
and concluded to adopt it, though he was impatient
to be revenged upon the farmer. He was not satisfied
with Sandy. He had not been sustained in his resistance
to the barbarous conduct of their captor. He
thought his companion had been tame and mean-spirited,
he had submitted so quietly to his punishment; and
when they had got out of the hearing of Mr. Batterman,
he roundly reproached him for his pusillanimous demeanor.
“I don’t want to call
you any hard names, Dick, but in my humble opinion,
you were a downright fool,” replied Sandy.
“It’s no sort of use to pound a stone
wall with your naked fist. You don’t hurt
the wall any.”
“I like to see a fellow show
some spirit,” growled Richard. “I
thought you had some spunk; but you caved in, and
took your flogging as meekly as though you had been
one of the saints in Fox’s Book of Martyrs.”
“I don’t know any thing
about your martyrs, but I hadn’t any notion of
getting a double licking, as you did. You got
four times as much as I did, just because you were
fool enough to resist. If there had been any
use in fighting, I would have fought as big as you
did.”
“I like to see a fellow stand
by another when he gets into a scrape,” whined
Richard.
“Do you mean to say I didn’t
stand by you? Did I run away from you?”
demanded Sandy, indignantly.
“You couldn’t run away.
The man held you fast, or you would have done so.”
“It’s very easy for you
to talk. I did all I could to make you act like
a reasonable fellow; but you were bound to be a fool,
and you got all you bargained for.”
Richard made no reply to his companion’s
taunts, for his philosophy was beginning to commend
itself to his common sense, as he thought of the difference
in the two floggings, and realized that it was all
owing to his own stupidity. They walked along
in silence, till they reached the Greyhound, but still
with “thoughts too big for utterance.”
“A pretty condition I am in
to go home,” said Richard, as he took his place
at the helm.
“You will be all right in a
day or two,” replied Sandy, consolingly.
“What will my father say?”
“If you are fool enough to let
him know about it, I don’t care what he says.”
“How can I help it? The
blood is running down my legs now. My skin is
all cut up.”
“Wash off the blood, and don’t
let any body see your legs.”
“I could kill Old Batterbones,”
added Richard, grating his teeth.
“We’ll pay him off.”
“I’ll have my revenge, if I die for it.”
“I’m with you there, Dick.”
It was midnight when the Greyhound reached the pier
at Woodville.