But still better things seemed to be afoot in the world of Mr. Huss. The rest of the governors of Woldingstanton, it became apparent, were not in agreement with Sir Eliphaz and Mr. Dad upon the project of replacing Mr. Huss by Mr. Farr; and a number of the old boys of the school at the front, getting wind of what was going on, had formed a small committee for the express purpose of defending their old master. At the head of this committee, by a happy chance, was young Kenneth Burrows, the nephew and heir of Sir Eliphaz. At the school he had never been in the front rank; he had been one of those good-all-round boys who end as a school prefect, a sound man in the first eleven, and second or third in most of the subjects he took. Never had he played a star part or enjoyed very much of the head’s confidences. It was all the more delightful therefore to find him the most passionate and indefatigable champion of the order of things that Mr. Huss had set up. He had heard of the proposed changes at his uncle’s dinner-table when on leave, and he had done something forthwith to shake that gentleman’s resolves. Lady Burrows, who adored him, became at once pro-Huss. She was all the readier to do this because she did not like Mr. Dad’s rather emphatic table manners, nor Mr. Farr’s clothes.
“You don’t know what Mr. Huss was to us, Sir,” the young man repeated several times, and returned to France with that sentence growing and flowering in his mind. He was one of those good types for whom the war was a powerful developer. Death, hardship, and responsibility—he was still not two-and-twenty, and a major in the artillery—had already made an understanding man out of the schoolboy; he could imagine what dispossession meant; his new maturity made it seem a natural thing to write to comfort his old head as one man writes to another. His pencilled sheets, when first they came, made the enfeebled recipient cry, not with misery but happiness. They were reread like a love-letter; they were now on the coverlet, and Mr. Huss was staring at the ceiling and already planning a new Woldingstanton rising from its ashes, greater than the old.
_It is only in the last few weeks_, the young man wrote, _that we have heard of all these schemes to break up the tradition of Woldingstanton, and now there is a talk of your resigning the headmastership in favour of Mr. Farr. Personally, Sir, I can’t imagine how you can possibly dream of giving up your work—and to him of all people;—I still have a sort of doubt about it; but my uncle was very positive that you were disposed to resign (personally, he said, he had implored you to stay), and it is on the off-chance of his being right that I am bothering you with this letter. Briefly it is to implore you to stand by the school, which is as much as to say to stand by yourself and us. You’ve taught hundreds of us to stick it, and now you owe it to us to stick it yourself. I know you’re ill, dreadfully ill; I’ve heard about Gilbert, and I know, Sir, we all know, although he wasn’t in the school and you never betrayed a preference or were led into an unfair thing through it, how much you loved him; you’ve been put through it, Sir, to the last degree. But, Sir, there are some of us here who feel almost as though they were your sons; if you don’t and can’t give us that sort of love, it doesn’t alter the fact that there are men out here who think of you as they’d like to think of their fathers. Men like myself particularly, who were left as boys without a father._