"Who's the boy?" said Daisy, over her shoulder, to Jean; as, glancing
out of the window of the big Harrison kitchen, she saw, at the front
corner of the house, a younger man get out of the car after the bulky
Sir Thomas. "I thought all the visitors here were elderly men. There's
been no young ones at all since I've been here."
"Ey?" Jean came to "keek," resting a hand on the shoulder of the younger
girl, "why, if it's no young Harrison! Did I never tell ye Sir Thomas
had a lad? Well, well." Jean sat down again to her pea-shelling.
"Ay," she pursued, as her rapid fingers stripped the split pods of their
green kernels, "yon's Harold Harrison. He looks like his father, an' he
talks like his father, and as to his disposeetion--well, I'm bound in
fairness-like to say he's a bittie of his good mither--just a wee wee
streak, like the lean in bacon--pinched in between thick layers of Sir
Thomas himsel'. The young-lad's no so rough-edged in manner--the college
has polished him on the ootside.... But I'll say no more: ye'll see him
juist now, when ye serve the supper."
And when Daisy did see the young man--sitting with his knees crossed and
his elbow on the edge of the table, talking to his father but not
noticing the quiet, awkward mother at all--she almost dropped the tray
she was carrying. For Harold Harrison and the masked fighter who had
boxed four rounds with Champion Nick Cluett, were one and the same young
man.
"I'd know that chin anywhere," said Daisy, as she confided to Jean the
discovery she had made, "it's just like his father's. And his lower lip
is burst, too, just where I saw Nick hit the masked fighter. He has a
piece of red sticking-plaster on it."
"Mon, mon!" Jean was interested; "is that so, then? I kenned he was a
boxer; and I suppose, as the Harrisons has the name of getting what they
'go after,' its no surprisin' he's won to the top. It's aye the way. He
has everything--his money, his schooling, his place in society, his
business chances--an' yet he'll no be satisfied till he steals the
boxin' honors from a puir lad that has nothing but his gloves. Nick's a
machinist; and, up till lately, when money from his matches commenced to
come in a little, he's had to do all his training in the nicht-time;
while the Harrison lad's had all day and all night, if he needed, to
make himsel' pairfect.... Ey, ey--it's the way o' the warld, lassie."
"He'll never beat Nick," some flash of vague enthusiasm warmed Daisy for
an instant; then she added--boxing terms and predictions coming handily
to her tongue after that chatty hour across the supper-table from the
"sporty" Miss Yockley--"he'd never last twenty rounds, or even ten, in a
finish bout. Nicky Cluett," Daisy concluded with feminine irrelevance,
"is a gentleman. The other fellow would be afraid to fight him without a
mask on."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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