Nothing of sufficient consequence to record here, occurred for some weeks to the Channings, or to those connected with them. October came in; and in a few days would be decided the uncertain question of the seniorship. Gaunt would leave the college on the fifth; and on the sixth the new senior would be appointed. The head-master had given no intimation whatever to the school as to which of the three seniors would obtain the promotion, and discussion ran high upon the probabilities. Some were of opinion that it would be Huntley; some, Gerald Yorke; a very few, Tom Channing. Countenanced by Gaunt and Huntley, as he had been throughout, Tom bore on his way, amid much cabal; but for the circumstance of the senior boy espousing (though not very markedly) his cause, his place would have been unbearable. Hamish attended to his customary duties in Guild Street, and sat up at night as usual in his bedroom, as his candle testified to Judith. Arthur tried bravely for a situation, and tried in vain; he could get nothing given to him—no one seemed willing to take him on. There was nothing for it but to wait in patience. He took the organ daily, and copied, at home, the cathedral music. Constance was finding great favour with the Earl of Carrick—but you will hear more about that presently. Jenkins grew more like a shadow day by day. Roland Yorke went on in his impulsive, scapegrace fashion. Mr. and Mrs. Channing sent home news, hopeful and more hopeful, from Germany. And Charley, unlucky Charley, had managed to get into hot water with the college school.
Thus uneventfully had passed the month of September. October was now in, and the sixth rapidly approaching. What with the uncertainty prevailing, the preparation for the examination, which on that day would take place, and a little private matter, upon which some few were entering, the college school had just then a busy and exciting time of it.
Stephen Bywater sat in one of the niches of the cloisters, a pile of books by his side. Around him, in various attitudes, were gathered seven of the most troublesome of the tribe—Pierce senior, George Brittle, Tod Yorke, Fred Berkeley, Bill Simms, Mark Galloway, and Hurst, who had now left the choir, but not the school. They were hatching mischief. Twilight overhung the cloisters; the autumn evenings were growing long, and this was a gloomy one. Half an hour, at the very least, had the boys been gathered there since afternoon school, holding a council of war in covert tones.
“Paid out he shall be, by hook or by crook,” continued Stephen Bywater, who appeared to be president—if talking more than hisconfrèresconstitutes one. “The worst is, how is it to be done? One can’t wallop him.”
“Not wallop him!” repeated Pierce senior, who was a badly disposed boy, as well as a mischievous one. “Why not, pray?”
“Not to any good,” said Bywater. “Ican’t, with that delicate face of his. It’s like beating a girl.”
“That’s true,” assented Hurst. “No, it won’t do to go in for beating; might break his bones, or something. I can’t think what’s the good of those delicate ones putting themselves into a school of this sort. A parson’s is the place for them; eight gentlemanly pupils, treated as a private family, with a mild usher, and a lady to teach the piano.”
The council burst into a laugh at Hurst’s mocking tones, and Pierce senior interrupted it.
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t—”
“Say she, Pierce,” corrected Mark Galloway.
“She, then. I don’t see why she shouldn’t get a beating if she deserves it; it will teach her not to try her tricks on again. Let her be delicate; she’ll feel it the more.”
“It’s all bosh about his being delicate. She’s not,” vehemently interrupted Tod Yorke, somewhat perplexed, in his hurry, with the genders. “Charley Channing’s no more delicate than we are. It’s all in the look. As good say that detestable little villain, Boulter, is delicate, because he has yellow curls. I vote for the beating.”
“I’ll vote you out of the business, if you show insubordination, Mr. Tod,” cried Bywater. “We’ll pay out Miss Charley in some way, but it shan’t be by beating him.”
“Couldn’t we lock him up in the cloisters, as we locked up Ketch, and that lot; and leave him there all night?” proposed Berkeley.
“But there’d be getting the keys?” debated Mark Galloway.
“As if we couldn’t get the keys if we wanted them!” scoffingly retorted Bywater. “We did old Ketch the other time, and we could do him again.Thatwould not serve the young one out, locking him up in the cloisters.”
“Wouldn’t it, though!” said Tod Yorke. “He’d be dead of fright before morning, he’s so mortally afraid of ghosts.”
“Afraid of what?” cried Bywater.
“Of ghosts. He’s a regular coward about them. He dare not go to bed in the dark for fear of their coming to him. He’d rather have five and twenty pages of Virgil to do, than he’d be left alone after nightfall.”
The notion so tickled Bywater, that he laughed till he was hoarse. Bywater could not understand being afraid of “ghosts.” Had Bywater met a whole army of ghosts, the encounter would only have afforded him pleasure.
“There never was a ghost seen yet, as long as any one can remember,” cried he, when he came out of his laughter. “I’d sooner believe in Gulliver’s travels, than I’d believe in ghosts. What a donkey you are, Tod Yorke!”
“It’s Charley Channing that’s the donkey; not me,” cried Tod, fiercely. “I tell you, if we locked him up here for a night, we should find him dead in the morning, when we came to let him out. Let’s do it.”
“What, to find him dead in the morning!” exclaimed Hurst. “You are a nice one, Tod!”
“Oh, well, I don’t mean altogether dead, you know,” acknowledged Tod. “But he’d have had a mortal night of it! All his clothes gummed together from fright, I’ll lay.”
“I don’t think it would do,” deliberated Bywater. “A whole night—twelve hours, that would be—and in a fright all the time, if heisfrightened. Look here! I have heard of folks losing their wits through a thing of the sort.”
“I won’t go in for anything of the kind,” said Hurst. “Charley’s not a bad lot, and he shan’t be harmed. A bit of a fright, or a bit of a whacking, not too much of either; that’ll be the thing for Miss Channing.”
“Tod Yorke, who told you he was afraid of ghosts?” demanded Bywater.
“Oh, I know it,” said Tod. “Annabel Channing was telling my sisters about it, for one thing: but I knew it before. We had a servant once who told us so, she had lived at the Channings’. Some nurse frightened him when he was a youngster, and they have never been able to get the fear out of him since.”
“What a precious soft youngster he must have been!” said Mr. Bywater.
“She used to get a ghost and dress it up and show it off to Miss Charley—”
“Get a ghost, Tod?”
“Bother! you know what I mean,” said Tod, testily. “Get a broom or something of that sort, and dress it up with a mask and wings: and he is as scared over it now as he ever was. I don’t care what you say.”
“Look here!” exclaimed Bywater, starting from his niche, as a bright idea occurred to him. “Let one of us personate a ghost, and appear to him! That would be glorious! It would give him a precious good fright for the time, and no harm done.”
If the boys had suddenly found the philosopher’s stone, it could scarcely have afforded them so much pleasure as did this idea. It was received with subdued shouts of approbation: the only murmur of dissent to be heard was from Pierce senior. Pierce grumbled that it would not be “half serving him out.”
“Yes, it will,” said Bywater. “Pierce senior shall be the ghost: he tops us all by a head.”
“Hurst is as tall as Pierce senior.”
“That he is not,” interrupted Pierce senior, who was considerably mollified at the honour being awarded to him. “Hurst is not much above the tips of my ears. Besides, Hurst is fat; and you never saw a fat ghost yet.”
“Have you seen many ghosts, Pierce?” mocked Bywater.
“A few; in pictures. Wretched old scarecrows they always are, with a cadaverous face and lantern jaws.”
“That’s the reason you’ll do so well, Pierce,” said Bywater. “You are as thin as a French herring, you know, with a yard and a half of throat.”
Pierce received the doubtful compliment flatteringly, absorbed in the fine vista of mischief opening before him. “How shall I get myself up, Bywater?” asked he, complaisantly. “With horns and a tail?”
“Horns and a tail be bothered!” returned Hurst. “It must be like a real ghost, all white and ghastly.”
“Of course it must,” acquiesced Bywater.
“I know a boy in our village that they served out like that,” interposed Bill Simms, who was a country lad, and boarded in Helstonleigh. “They got a great big turnip, and scooped it out and made it into a man’s face, and put a light inside, and stuck it on a post where he had to pass at night. He was so frightened that he died.”
“Cram!” ejaculated Tod Yorke.
“He did, though,” repeated Simms. “They knew him before for an awful little coward, and they did it to have some fun out of him. He didn’t say anything at the time; didn’t scream, or anything of that sort; but after he got home he was taken ill, and the next day he died. My father was one of the jury on the inquest. He was a little chap with no father or mother—a plough-boy.”
“The best thing, if you want to make a ghost,” said Tod Yorke, “is to get a tin plate full of salt and gin, and set it alight, and wrap yourself round with a sheet, and hold the plate so that the flame lights up your face. You never saw anything so ghastly. Scooped-out turnips are all bosh!”
“I could bring a sheet off my bed,” said Bywater. “Thrown over my arm, they’d think at home I was bringing out my surplice. And if—”
A wheezing and coughing and clanking of keys interrupted the proceedings. It was Mr. Ketch, coming to lock up the cloisters. As the boys had no wish to be fastened in, themselves, they gathered up their books, and waited in silence till the porter was close upon them. Then, with a sudden war-whoop, they sprang past him, very nearly startling the old man out of his senses, and calling forth from him a shower of hard words.
The above conversation, puerile and school-boyish as it may seem, was destined to lead to results all too important; otherwise it would not have been related here. You very likely may have discovered, ere this, that this story of the Helstonleigh College boys is not merely a work of imagination, but taken from facts of real life. Had you been in the cloisters that night with the boys—and you might have been—and heard Master William Simms, who was the son of a wealthy farmer, tell the tale of a boy’s being frightened to death, you would have known it to be a true one, if you possessed any knowledge of the annals of the neighbourhood. In like manner, the project they were getting up to frighten Charles Channing, and Charles’s unfortunate propensityto befrightened, are strictly true.
Master Tod Yorke’s account of what had imbued his mind with this fear, was a tolerably correct one. Charley was somewhat troublesome and fractious as a young child, and the wicked nurse girl who attended upon him would dress up frightful figures to terrify him into quietness. She might not have been able to accomplish this without detection, but that Mrs. Channing was at that time debarred from the active superintendence of her household. When Charley was about two years old she fell into ill health, and for eighteen months was almost entirely confined to her room. Judith was much engaged with her mistress and with household matters, and the baby, as Charley was still called, was chiefly left to the mercies of the nurse. Not content with frightening him practically, she instilled into his young imagination the most pernicious stories of ghosts, dreams, and similar absurdities. But, foolish asweknow them to be, they are not the less horrible to a child’s vivid imagination. At two, or three, or four years old, it is eagerly opening to impressions; and things, solemnly related by a mother or a nurse, become impressed upon it almost as with gospel truth. Let the fears once be excited in this terrible way, and not a whole lifetime can finally eradicate the evil. I would rather a nurse broke one of my children’s limbs, than thus poison its fair young mind.
In process of time the girl’s work was discovered—discovered by Judith. But the mischief was done. You may wonder that Mrs. Channing should not have been the first to discover it; or that it could have escaped her notice at all, for she had the child with her often for his early religious instruction; but, one of the worst phases of this state of things is, the shrinking tenacity with which the victim buries the fears within his own breast. He dare not tell his parents; he is taught not; and taught by fear. It may not have been your misfortune to meet with a case of this sort; I hope you never will. Mrs. Channing would observe that the child would often shudder, as with terror, and cling to her in an unaccountable manner; but, having no suspicion of the evil, she attributed it to a sensitive, timid temperament. “What is it, my little Charley?” she would say. But Charley would only bury his face the closer, and keep silence. When Martha—that was the girl’s name: not the same Martha who was now living at Lady Augusta’s—came for him, he would go with her willingly, cordially. It was not her he feared. On the contrary, he was attached to her; she had taught him to be so; and he looked upon her as a protector from those awful ghosts and goblins.
Well, the thing was in time discovered, but the mischief, I say, was done. It could not be eradicated. Charles Channing’s judgment and good sense told him that all those bygone terrors were only tricks of that wretched Martha’s: but, overcome the fear, he could not. All consideration was shown to him; he was never scolded for it, never ridiculed; his brothers and sisters observed to him entire silence upon the subject—even Annabel; and Mr. and Mrs. Channing had done reasoning lovingly with him now. It is not argument that will avail in a case like this. In the broad light of day, Charley could be very brave; would laugh at such tales with the best of them; but when night came, and he was left alone—if he ever was left alone—then all the old terror rose up again, and his frame would shake, and he would throw himself on the bed or on the floor, and hide his face; afraid of the darkness, and of what he might see in it. He was as utterly unable to prevent or subdue this fear, as he was to prevent his breathing. He knew it, in the sunny morning light, to be a foolish fear, utterly without reason: but, in the lonely night, there it came again, and he could not combat it.
Thus, it is easy to understand that the very worst subject for a ghost trick to be played upon, was Charley Channing. It was, however, going to be done. The defect—for it really is a defect—had never transpired to the College school, who would not have spared their ridicule, or spared Charley. Reared, in that point, under happier auspices, they could have given nothing but utter ridicule to the fear. Chattering Annabel, in her thoughtless communications to Caroline and Fanny Yorke, had not bargained for their reaching the ears of Tod; and Tod, when the report did reach his ears, remembered to have heard the tale before; until then it had escaped his memory.
Charley had got into hot water with some of the boys. Bywater had been owing him a grudge for weeks, on account of Charley’s persistent silence touching what he had seen the day the surplice was inked; and now there arose another grudge on Bywater’s score, and also on that of others. There is not space to enter into the particulars of the affair; it is sufficient to say that some underhand work, touching cribs, came to the knowledge of one of the under-masters—and came to him through Charley Channing.
Not that Charley went, open-mouthed, and told; there was nothing of that disreputable character—which the school held in especial dislike—the sneak, about Charles Channing. Charley would have bitten his tongue out first. By an unfortunate accident Charles was pinned by the master, and questioned; and he had no resource but to speak out. In honour, in truth, he could not do otherwise; but, the consequence was—punishment to the boys; and they turned against him. Schoolboys are not famous for being swayed by the rules of strict justice; and they forgot to remember that in Charles Channing’s place they would (at any rate, most of them) have felt bound to do the same. They visited the accident upon him, and were determined—as you have heard them express it in their own phrase—to “serve him out.”
Leaving this decision to fructify, let us turn to Constance. Lady Augusta Yorke—good-hearted in the main, liberal natured, swayed by every impulse as the wind—had been particularly kind to Constance and Annabel Channing during the absence of their mother. Evening after evening she would insist upon their spending at her house, Hamish—one of Lady Augusta’s lasting favourites, probably from his good looks—being pressed into the visit with them by my lady. Hamish was nothing loth. He had given up indiscriminate evening visiting; and, since the coolness which had arisen in the manner of Mr. Huntley, Hamish did not choose to go much to Mr. Huntley’s, where he had been a pretty constant visitor before; and he found his evenings hang somewhat heavily on his hands. Thus Constance saw a good deal of the Earl of Carrick; or, it may be more to the purpose to say, the earl saw a good deal of her.
For the earl grew to like her very much indeed. He grew to think that if she would only consent to become his wife, he should be the happiest man in ould Ireland; and one day, impulsive in his actions as was ever Lady Augusta, he told Constance so, in that lady’s presence.
Constance—much as we may regret to hear it of her—behaved in by no means a dignified manner. She laughed over it. When brought to understand, which took some little time, that she was actually paid that high compliment, she laughed in the earl’s face. He was as old as her father; and Constance had certainly regarded him much more in the light of a father than a husband.
“I do beg your pardon, Lord Carrick,” she said, apologetically “but I think you must be laughing at me.”
“Laughing at ye!” said the earl. “It’s not I that would do that. I’d like ye to be Countess of Carrick to-morrow, me dear, if you can only get over me fifty years and me grey hair. Here’s me sister—she knows that I’d like to have ye. It’s you that are laughing at me, Miss Constance; at me ould locks.”
“No, indeed, indeed it is not that,” said Constance, while Lady Augusta sat with an impassive countenance. “I don’t know why I laughed. It so took me by surprise; that was why, I think. Please do not say any more about it, Lord Carrick.”
“Ye could not like me as well as ye like William Yorke? Is that it, child?”
Constance grew crimson. Like him as she liked William Yorke!
“Ye’re the nicest girl I have seen since Kathleen Blake,” resumed the straightforward, simple earl. “She promised to have me; she said she liked me grey hair better than brown, and me fifty years better than thirty, but, while I was putting the place a bit in order for her, she went and married a young Englishman. Did ye ever see him, Augusta?”—turning to his sister. “He is a baronet. He came somewhere from these parts.”
Lady Augusta intimated stiffly that she had not the honour of the baronet’s acquaintance. She thought her brother was making a simpleton of himself, and had a great mind to tell him so.
“And since Kathleen Blake went over to the enemy, I have not seen anybody that I’d care to look twice at, till I came here and saw you, Miss Constance,” resumed the earl. “And if ye can only get to overlook the natural impediments on me side, and not mind me being poor, I’d be delighted, me dear, if ye’d say the word.”
“You are very kind, very generous, Lord Carrick,” said Constance, with an impulse of feeling; “but I can only beg you never to ask me such a thing again.”
“Ah! well, child, I see ye’re in earnest,” good-naturedly responded the earl, as he gave it up. “I was afraid ye’d only laugh at me. I knew I was too old.”
And that was the beginning and the ending of Lord Carrick’s wooing. Scarcely worth recording, you will think. But there was a reason for doing so.
The important sixth of October—important to the Helstonleigh College boys—did not rise very genially. On the contrary, it rose rather sloppily. A soaking rain was steadily descending, and the streets presented a continuous scene of puddles. The boys dashed through it without umbrellas (I never saw one of them carry an umbrella in my life, and don’t believe the phenomenon ever was seen), their clean surplices on their arms; on their way to attend ten-o’clock morning prayers in the cathedral. The day was a holiday from school, but not from morning service.
The college bell was beginning to ring out as they entered the schoolroom. Standing in the senior’s place, and calling over the roll, was Tom Channing, the acting senior for a few brief hours. Since Gaunt’s departure, the previous day, Tom Channing had been head of the school; it lay in the custom of the school for him so to be. Would his place be confirmed? or would he lose it? Tom looked flurried with suspense. It was not so much being appointed senior that he thought of, as the disgrace, the humiliation that would be his portion, were he deposed from it. He knew that he deserved the position; that it was his by right; he stood first on the rolls, and he had done nothing whatever to forfeit it. He was the school’s best scholar; and—if he was not always a perfect model for conduct—there was this much to be said in his favour, that none of them could boast of being better.
The opinion of the school had been veering round for the last few days in favour of Tom. I do not mean that he, personally, was in better odour with it—not at all, the snow-ball, touching Arthur, had gathered strength in rolling—but in favour of his chances of the seniorship. Not a breath of intimation had the head-master given; except that, one day, in complaining to Gaunt of the neglect of a point of discipline in the school, which point was entirely under the control of the senior boy, he had turned to Tom, and said, “Remember, Channing, it must be observed for the future.”
Tom’s heart leaped within him as he heard it, and the boys looked inquiringly at the master. But the master’s head was then buried in the deep drawer of his desk, hunting for a lost paper. Unless he had spoken it in forgetfulness—which was not improbable—there could be no doubt that he looked upon Tom as Gaunt’s successor. The school so interpreted it, and chose to become, amongst themselves, sullenly rebellious. As to Tom, who was nearly as sanguine in temperament as Hamish, his hopes and his spirits went up to fever heat.—
One of the last to tear through the street, splashing his jacket, and splashing his surplice, was Harry Huntley. He, like all the rest, took care to be in time that morning. There would have been no necessity for his racing, however, had he not lingered at home, talking. He was running down from his room, whither he had gone again after breakfast, to give the finishing brush to his hair (I can tell you that some of those college gentlemen were dandies), when Mr. Huntley’s voice was heard, calling him into the breakfast-room.
“Harry,” said he, “I don’t think that I need enjoin you not to suffer your manner to show triumph towards Tom Channing, should you be promoted over him to-day.”
“I shan’t be, papa. Channing will have the seniorship.”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, from something Pye let drop. We look upon it that Channing is as good as senior.”
Mr. Huntley remembered the tenor of the private conversation the master had held with him, and believed his son would find himself mistaken, and that he, Harry, would be made senior. That it would be Gerald Yorke, Mr. Huntley did not believe. “At any rate, Harry, take heed to what I say,” he resumed. “Be very considerate and courteous towards your friend Channing, if you should obtain it. Do not let me have to blush for my son’s ill feeling.”
There was a tone in Mr. Huntley’s voice which, to Harry’s ears, seemed to intimate that he did not speak without reason. “Papa, it would not be fair for me to go up over Channing,” he impulsively said.
“No. Comparing your merits together, Channing is the better man of the two.”
Harry laughed. “He is not worse, at all events. Why are you saying this, papa?”
“Because I fancy that you are more likely to be successful than Tom Channing. I wish I may be mistaken. I would rather he had it; for, personally, he had done nothing to forfeit it.”
“If Harry could accept the seniorship and displace Tom Channing, I would not care to call him my brother again,” interrupted Ellen Huntley, with a flashing eye.
“It is not that, Ellen; you girls don’t understand things,” retorted Harry. “If Pye displaces Tom from the scholarship, he does not do it to exalt me; he does it because he won’t have him at any price. Were I to turn round like a chivalrous Knight Templar and say I’d not take it, out of regard to my friend Tom, where would be the good? Yorke would get hoisted over me, and I should be laughed at for a duffer. But I’ll do as you like, papa,” he added, turning to Mr. Huntley. “If you wish me not to take the honour, I’ll resign it in favour of Yorke. I never expected it to be mine, so it will be no disappointment; I always thought we should have Channing.”
“Your refusing it would do no good to Channing,” said Mr. Huntley. “And I should have grumbled at you, Harry, had you suffered Yorke to slip over your head. Every one in his own right. All I repeat to you, my boy, is, behave as you ought to Tom Channing. Possibly I may pay the college school a visit this morning.”
Harry opened his eyes to their utmost width.
“You, papa! Whatever for?”
“That is my business,” laughed Mr. Huntley. “It wants only twenty minutes to ten, Harry.”
Harry, at the hint, bounded into the hall. He caught up his clean surplice, placed there ready for him, and stuck his trencher on his head, when he was detained by Ellen.
“Harry, boy, it’s a crying wrong against Tom Channing. Hamish never did it—”
“Hamish” interrupted Harry, with a broad grin. “A sign who you are thinking of, mademoiselle.”
Mademoiselle turned scarlet. “You know I meant to say Arthur, stupid boy! It’s a crying wrong, Harry, upon Tom Channing. Looking at it in the worst light,hehas been guilty of nothing to forfeit his right. If you can help him to the seniorship instead of supplanting him, be a brave boy, and do it. God sees all things.”
“I shall be late, as sure as a gun!” impatiently returned Harry. And away he sped through the rain and mud, never slackening speed till he was in the college schoolroom.
He hung up his trencher, flung his surplice on to a bench, and went straight up, with outstretched hand, to Tom Channing, who stood as senior, unfolding the roll. “Good luck to you, old fellow!” cried he, in a clear voice, that rang through the spacious room. “I hope, with all my heart, that you’ll be in this post for many a day.”
“Thank you, Huntley,” responded Tom. And he proceeded to call over the roll, though his cheek burnt at sundry hisses that came, in subdued tones, from various parts of the room.
Every boy was present. Not a king’s scholar but answered to his name; and Tom signed the roll for the first time. “Channing, acting senior.” Not “Channing, senior,” yet. It was a whim of Mr. Pye’s that on Sundays and saints’ day—that is, whenever the king’s scholars had to attend service—the senior boy should sign the roll.
They then put on their surplices; and rather damp surplices some of them were. The boys most of them disdained bags; let the weather be what it might, the surplices, like themselves, went openly through it. Ready in their surplices and trenchers, Tom Channing gave the word of command, and they were on the point of filing out, when a freak took Pierce senior to leave his proper place in the ranks, and walk by the side of Brittle.
“Halt!” said Channing. “Pierce senior, take your place.”
“I shan’t,” returned Pierce. “Who is to compel me?” he added with a mocking laugh. “We are without a senior for once.”
“I will,” thundered Tom, his face turning white at the implied sneer, the incipient disobedience. “I stand here as the school’s senior now, whatever I may do later, and I will be obeyed. Return to your proper place.”
There was that in Tom’s eye, in Tom’s tone, that somehow over-awed Mr. Pierce; and he walked sheepishly to his own place. There was no mistaking that Channing would make a firm senior. The boys proceeded, two and two, decorously through the cloisters, snatching off their trenchers as they entered the college gates. Tom and Huntley walked last, Tom bearing the keys. The choir gained, the two branched off right and left, Huntley placing himself at the head of the boys on the left, orcantoriside; Tom, assuming his place as acting senior, on thedecani. When they should sit next in that cathedral would their posts be reversed?
The dean was present: also three canons—Dr. Burrows, who was subdean, Dr. Gardner, and Mr. Mence. The head-master chanted, and in the stall next to him sat Gaunt. Gaunt had discarded his surplice with his schoolboy life; but curiosity with regard to the seniorship brought him amongst them again that day. “I hope you’ll keep the place, Channing,” he whispered to him, as he passed the boys to get to his stall. Arthur Channing was at his place at the organ.
Ere eleven o’clock struck, service was over, and the boys marched back again. Not to the schoolroom—into the chapter-house. The examination, which took place once in three years, was there held. It was conducted quite in a formal manner; Mr. Galloway, as chapter clerk, being present, to call over the roll. The dean, the three prebendaries who had been at service, the head and other masters of the school, all stood together in the chapter-house; and the king’s scholars wearing their surplices still, were ranged in a circle before them.
The dean took the examination. Dr. Burrows asked a question now and then, but the dean chiefly took it. There is neither space nor time to follow it in detail here: and no one would care to read it, if it were given. As a whole, the school acquitted itself well, doing credit to its masters. One of the chapter—it was Dr. Gardner, and the only word he spoke throughout—remarked that the head boy was a sound scholar, meaning Tom Channing.
The business over, the dean’s words of commendation spoken, then the head-master took a step forward and cleared his throat. He addressed himself to the boys exclusively; for, what he had to say, had reference to them and himself alone: it was supposed not to concern the clergy. As to the boys, those who were of an excitable temperament, looked quite pale with suspense, now the long-expected moment was come. Channing? Huntley? Yorke?—which of the three would it be?
“The praise bestowed upon you, gentlemen, by the Dean and Chapter has been, if possible, more gratifying to myself than to you. It would be superfluous in me to add a word to the admonition given you by the Very Reverend the Dean, as to your future conduct and scholarly improvement. I can only hope, with him, that they may continue to be such as to afford satisfaction to myself, and to those gentlemen who are associated with me as masters in the collegiate school.”
A pause and a dead silence. The head-master cleared his throat again, and went on.
“The retirement of William Gaunt from the school, renders the seniorship vacant. I am sorry that circumstances, to which I will not more particularly allude, prevent my bestowing it upon the boy whose name stands first upon the rolls, Thomas Ingram Channing. I regret this the more, that it is not from any personal fault of Channing’s that he is passed over; and this fact I beg may be most distinctly understood. Next to Channing’s name stands that of Henry Huntley, and to him I award the seniorship. Henry Huntley, you are appointed senior of Helstonleigh Collegiate School. Take your place.”
The dead silence was succeeded by a buzz, a murmur, suppressed almost as soon as heard. Tom Channing’s face turned scarlet, then became deadly white. It was a cruel blow. Huntley, with an impetuous step, advanced a few paces, and spoke up bravely, addressing the master.
“I thank you, sir, for the honour you have conferred upon me, but I have no right to it, either by claim or merit. I feel that it is but usurping the place of Channing. Can’t you give it to him, please sir, instead of to me?”
The speech, begun formally and grandly enough for a royal president at a public dinner, and ending in its schoolboy fashion, drew a smile from more than one present. “No,” was all the answer vouchsafed by Mr. Pye, but it was spoken with unmistakable emphasis, and he pointed his finger authoritatively to the place already vacated by Tom Channing. Huntley bowed, and took it; and the next thing seen by the boys was Mr. Galloway altering the roll. He transposed the names of Channing and Huntley.
The boys, bowing to the clergy, filed out, and proceeded to the schoolroom, the masters following them. Tom Channing was very silent. Huntley was silent. Yorke, feeling mad with everyone, was silent. In short, the whole school was silent. Channing delivered the keys of the school to Huntley; and Mr. Pye, with his own hands, took out the roll and made the alteration in the names. For, the roll belonging to the chapter-house was not, as you may have thought, the every-day roll of the schoolroom. “Take care what you are about, Huntley,” said the master. “A careless senior never finds favour with me.”
“Very well, sir,” replied Huntley. But he was perfectly conscious, as he spoke, that his chief fault, as senior, would be that of carelessness. And Gaunt, who was standing by, and knew it also, telegraphed a significant look to Huntley. The other masters went up to Huntley, shook hands, and congratulated him, for that was the custom of the school; indeed, it was for that purpose only that the masters had gone into the schoolroom, where they had, that day, no business. Gaunt followed suit next, in shaking hands and congratulating, and the school afterwards; Gerald Yorke doing his part with a bad grace.
“Thank you all,” said Harry Huntley. “But it ought to have been Tom Channing.” Poor Tom’s feelings, during all this, may be imagined.
The king’s scholars were slinging their surplices on their arms to depart, for they had full holiday for the remainder of the day, when they were surprised by the entrance of Mr. Huntley. He went straight up to the head-master, nodding pleasantly to the boys, right and left.
“Well, and who is your important senior?” he gaily demanded of the master.
“Henry Huntley.”
Mr. Huntley drew in his lips. “For another’s sake I am sorry to hear it. But I can only express my hope that he will do his duty.”
“I have just been telling him so,” observed the master.
“What brings me here, is this, sir,” continued Mr. Huntley to the master. “Knowing there was a doubt, as to which of the three senior boys would be chosen, I wished, should it prove to be my son, to speak a word about the Oxford exhibition, which, I believe, generally accompanies the seniorship. It falls due next Easter.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Pye.
“Then allow me to decline it for my son,” replied Mr. Huntley. “He will not need it; and therefore should not stand in the light of any other boy. I deemed it well, sir, to state this at once.”
“Thank you,” warmly responded the head-master. He knew that it was an unselfish, not to say generous, act.
Mr. Huntley approached Tom Channing. He took his hand; he shook it heartily, with every mark of affection and respect. “You must not allow this exaltation of Harry to lessen the friendship you and he entertain for each other,” he said, in tones that reached every pair of ears present—and not one but was turned up to listen. “You are more deserving of the place than he, and I am deeply sorry for the circumstances which have caused him to supplant you. Never mind, Tom; bear on bravely, lad, and you’ll outlive vexation. Continue to be worthy of your noble father; continue to be my son’s friend; there is no boy living whom I would so soon he took pattern by, as by you.”
The hot tears rushed into Tom’s eyes, and his lip quivered. But that he remembered where he was, he might have lost his self-control. “Thank you, sir,” he answered, in a low tone.
“Whew!” whistled Tod Yorke, as they were going out. “A fine friend he is! A thief’s brother.”
“A thief’s brother! A thief’s brother!” was the echo.
“But he’s not our senior. Ha! ha! that would have been a good joke! He’s not our senior!”
And down the steps they clattered, and went splashing home, as they had come, they and their surplices, through the wet streets and the rain.
The moon was high in the heavens. Lighting up the tower of the cathedral, illuminating its pinnacles, glittering through the elm trees, bringing forth into view even the dark old ivy on the prebendal houses. A fair night—all too fair for the game that was going to be played in it.
When the Helstonleigh College boys resolved upon what they were pleased to term a “lark”—and, to do them justice, they regarded this, their prospective night’s work, in no graver light—they carried it out artistically, with a completeness, a skill, worthy of a better cause. Several days had they been hatching this, laying their plans, arranging the details; it would be their own bungling fault if it miscarried. But the college boys were not bunglers.
Stripped of its details, the bare plot was to exhibit a “ghost” in the cloisters, and to get Charley Channing to pass through them. The seniors knew nothing of the project. Huntley—it was the day following his promotion—would have stopped it at once, careless as he was. Tom Channing would have stopped it. Gerald Yorke might or might not; but Tod had taken care not to tell Gerald. And Griffin, who was burning to exercise in any way his newly acquired power, would certainly have stopped it. They had been too wise to allow it to come to the knowledge of the seniors. The most difficult part of the business had been old Ketch; but that was managed.
The moonlight shone peacefully on the Boundaries, and the conspirators were stealing up, by ones and twos, to their place of meeting, round the dark trunks of the elm trees. Fine as it was overhead, it was less so under-foot. The previous day, you may remember, had been a wet one, the night had been wet, and also the morning of the present day. Schoolboys are not particularly given to reticence, and a few more than the original conspirators had been taken into the plot. They were winding up now, in the weird moonlight, for the hour was approaching.
Once more we must pay a visit to Mr. Ketch in his lodge, at his supper hour. Mr. Ketch had changed his hour for that important meal. Growing old with age or with lumbago, he found early rest congenial to his bones, as he informed his friends: so he supped at seven, and retired betimes. Since the trick played him in the summer, he had taken to have his pint of ale brought to him; deeming it more prudent not to leave his lodge and the keys, to fetch it. This was known to the boys, and it rendered their plans a little more difficult.
Mr. Ketch, I say, sat in his lodge, having locked up the cloisters about an hour before, sneezing and wheezing, for he was suffering from a cold, caught the previous day in the wet. He was spelling over a weekly twopenny newspaper, borrowed from the public-house, by the help of a flaring tallow candle, and a pair of spectacles, of which one glass was out. Cynically severe was he over everything he read, as you know it was in the nature of Mr. Ketch to be. As the three-quarters past six chimed out from the cathedral clock, his door was suddenly opened, and a voice called out, “Beer!” Mr. Ketch’s ale had arrived.
But the arrival did not give that gentleman pleasure, and he started up in what, but for the respect we bear him, we might call a fury. Dashing his one-eyed glasses on the table, he attacked the man.
“What d’ye mean with your ‘beer’ at this time o’ night? It wants a quarter to seven! Haven’t you no ears? haven’t you no clock at your place? D’ye think I shall take it in now?”
“Well, it just comes to this,” said the man, who was the brewer at the public-house, and made himself useful at odd jobs in his spare time: “if you don’t like to take it in now, you can’t have it at all, of my bringing. I’m going up to t’other end of the town, and shan’t be back this side of ten.”
Mr. Ketch, with much groaning and grumbling, took the ale and poured it into a jug of his own—a handsome jug, that had been in the wars and lost its spout and handle—giving back the other jug to the man. “You serve me such a imperant trick again, as to bring my ale a quarter of a hour aforehand, that’s all!” snarled he.
The man received the jug, and went off whistling; he had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Ketch and his temper well. That gentleman closed his door with a bang, and proceeded to take out his customary bread and cheese. Not that he had any great love for a bread-and-cheese supper as a matter of fancy: he would very much have preferred something more dainty; only, dainties and Mr. Ketch’s pocket did not agree.
“They want to be took down a notch, that public—sending out a man’s beer a quarter afore seven, when it ain’t ordered to come till seven strikes. Much they care if it stops a waiting and flattening! Be I a slave, that I should be forced to swallow my supper afore I want it, just to please them? They have a sight too much custom, that’s what it is.”
He took a slight draught of the offending ale, and was critically surveying the loaf, before applying to it that green-handled knife of his, whose elegance you have heard of, when a second summons was heard at the door—a very timid one this time.
Mr. Ketch flung down the bread and the knife. “What’s the reason I can’t get a meal in quiet? Who is it?”
There was no response to this, beyond a second faint tapping. “Come in!” roared out he. “Pull the string o’ the latch.”
But nobody came in, in spite of this lucid direction; and the timid tapping, which seemed to proceed from very small knuckles, was repeated again. Mr. Ketch was fain to go and open it.
A young damsel of eight or so, in a tattered tippet, and a large bonnet—probably her mother’s—stood there, curtseying. “Please, sir, Mr. Ketch is wanted.”
Mr. Ketch was rather taken to at this strange address, and surveyed the messenger in astonishment. “Who be you? and who wants him?” growled he.
“Please, sir, it’s a gentleman as is waiting at the big green gates,” was the reply. “Mr. Ketch is to go to him this minute; he told me to come and say so, and if you didn’t make haste he should be gone.”
“Can’t you speak plain?” snarled Ketch. “Who is the gentleman?”
“Please, sir, I think it’s the bishop.”
This put Ketch in a flutter. The “big green gates” could only have reference to the private entrance to the bishop’s garden, which entrance his lordship used when attending the cathedral. That the bishop was in Helstonleigh, Ketch knew: he had arrived that day, after a short absence: what on earth could he want withhim? Never doubting, in his hurry, the genuineness of the message, Ketch pulled his door to, and stepped off, the young messenger having already decamped. The green gates were not one minute’s walk from the lodge—though a projecting buttress of the cathedral prevented the one from being in sight of the other—and old Ketch gained them, and looked around.
Where was the bishop? The iron gates, the garden, the white stones at his feet, the towering cathedral, all lay cold and calm in the moonlight, but of human sight or sound there was none. The gates were locked when he came to try them, and he could not see the bishop anywhere.
He was not likely to see him. Stephen Bywater, who took upon himself much of the plot’s performance—of which, to give him his due, he was boldly capable—had been on the watch in the street, near the cathedral, for a messenger that would suit his purpose. Seeing this young damsel hurrying along with a jug in her hand, possibly to buy beer forherhome supper, he waylaid her.
“Little ninepins, would you like to get threepence?” asked he. “You shall have it, if you’ll carry a message for me close by.”
“Little ninepins” had probably never had a whole threepence to herself in her young life. She caught at the tempting suggestion, and Bywater drilled into her his instructions, finding her excessively stupid in the process. Perhaps that was all the better. “Now you mind, you arenotto say who wants Mr. Ketch, unless he asks,” repeated he for about the fifth time, as she was departing to do the errand. “If he asks, say you think it’s the bishop.”
So she went, and delivered it. But had old Ketch’s temper allowed him to go into a little more questioning, he might have discovered the trick. Bywater stealthily followed the child near to the lodge, screening himself from observation; and, as soon as old Ketch hobbled out of it, he popped in, snatched the cloister keys from their nail, and deposited a piece of paper, folded as a note, on Ketch’s table. Then he made off.
Back came Ketch, after a while. He did not know quite what to make of it, but rather inclined to the opinion that the bishop had not waited for him. “He might have wanted me to take a errand round to the deanery,” soliloquized he. And this thought had caused him to tarry about the gates, so that he was absent from his lodge quite ten minutes. The first thing he saw, on entering, was the bit of paper on his table. He seized and opened it, grumbling aloud that folks used his house just as they pleased, going in and out without reference to his presence or his absence. The note, written in pencil, purported to be from Joseph Jenkins. It ran as follows:—
My old father is coming up to our place to-night, to eat a bit of supper, and he says he should like you to join him, which I and Mrs. J. shall be happy if you will, at seven o’clock. It’s tripe and onions. Yours,
Now, if there was one delicacy, known to this world, more delicious to old Ketch’s palate than another, it was tripe, seasoned with onions. His mouth watered as he read. He was aware that it was—to use the phraseology of Helstonleigh—“tripe night.” On two nights in the week, tripe was sold in the town ready dressed. This was one of them, and Ketch anticipated a glorious treat. In too great a hurry to cast so much as a glance round his lodge (crafty Bywater had been deep), not stopping even to put up the bread and cheese, away hobbled Ketch as fast as his lumbago would allow him, locking safely his door, and not having observed the absence of the keys.
“He ain’t a bad sort, that Joe Jenkins,” allowed he, conciliated beyond everything at the prospect the invitation held out, and talking to himself as he limped away towards the street. “He don’t write a bad hand, neither! It’s a plain un; not one o’ them new-fangled scrawls that you can’t read. Him and his wife have held up their heads a cut above me—oh yes, they have, though, for all Joe’s humbleness—but the grand folks be a coming to. Old Jenkins has always said we’d have a supper together some night, him and me; I suppose this is it. I wonder what made him take and have it at Joe’s? If Joe don’t soon get better than he have looked lately—”
The first chime of the cathedral clock giving notice of the hour, seven! Old Ketch broke out into a heat, and tried to hobble along more quickly. Seven o’clock! What if, through being late, his share of supper should be eaten!
Peering out every now and then from the deep shade, cast by one of the angles of the cathedral, and as swiftly and cautiously drawn back again, was a trencher apparently watching Ketch. As soon as that functionary was fairly launched on his way, the trencher came out completely, and went flying at a swift pace round the college to the Boundaries.
It was not worn by Bywater. Bywater, by the help of the stolen keys, was safe in the cloisters, absorbed with his companions in preparations for the grand event of the night. In point of fact, they were getting up Pierce senior. Their precise mode of doing that need not be given. They had requisites in abundance, having disputed among themselves which should be at the honour of the contribution, and the result was an undue prodigality of material.
“There’s seven!” exclaimed Bywater in an agony, as the clock struck. “Make haste, Pierce! the young one was to come out at a quarter past. If you’re not ready, it will ruin all.”
“I shall be ready and waiting, if you don’t bother,” was the response of Pierce. “I wonder if old Ketch is safely off?”
“What a stunning fright Ketch would be in, if he came in here and met the ghost!” exclaimed Hurst. “He’d never think it was anything less than the Old Gentleman come for him.”
A chorus of laughter, which Hurst himself hushed. It would not do for noise to be heard in the cloisters at that hour.
There was nothing to which poor Charley Channing was more sensitive, than to ridicule on the subject of his unhappy failing—his propensity to fear; and there is no failing to which schoolboys are more intolerant. Of moral courage—that is, of courage in the cause of right—Charles had plenty; of physical courage, little. Apart from the misfortune of having had supernatural terror implanted in him in childhood, he would never have been physically brave. Schoolboys cannot understand that this shrinking from danger (I speak of palpable danger), which they call cowardice, nearly always emanates from a superior intellect. Where the mental powers are of a high order, the imagination unusually awakened, danger is sure to be keenly perceived, and sensitively shrunk from. In proportion will be the shrinking dread of ridicule. Charles Channing possessed this dread in a remarkable degree; you may therefore judge how he felt, when he found it mockingly alluded to by Bywater.
On this very day that we are writing of, Bywater caught Charles, and imparted to him in profound confidence an important secret; a choice few of the boys were about to play old Ketch a trick, obtain the keys, and have a game in the cloisters by moonlight. A place in the game, he said, had been assigned to Charles. Charles hesitated. Not because it might be wrong so to cheat Ketch—Ketch was the common enemy of the boys, of Charley as of the rest—but because he had plenty of lessons to do. This was Bywater’s opportunity; he chose to interpret the hesitation differently.
“So you are afraid, Miss Charley! Ho! ho! Do you think the cloisters will be dark? that the moon won’t keep the ghosts away? I say, itcan’tbe true, what I heard the other day—that you dare not be in the dark, lest ghosts should come and run away with you!”
“Nonsense, Bywater!” returned Charley, changing colour like a conscious girl.
“Well, if you are not afraid, you’ll come and join us,” sarcastically returned Bywater. “We shall have stunning good sport. There’ll be about a dozen of us. Rubbish to your lessons! you need not be away from them more than an hour. It won’t bedark, Miss Channing.”
After this, fearing their ridicule, nothing would have kept Charley away. He promised faithfully to be in the cloisters at a quarter past seven.
Accordingly, the instant tea was over, he got to his lessons; Tom at one side of the table—who had more, in proportion, to do than Charles—he at the other. Thus were they engaged when Hamish entered.
“What sort of a night is it, Hamish?” asked Charles, thinking of the projected play.
“Fine,” replied Hamish. “Where are they all?”
“Constance is in the drawing-room, giving Annabel her music lesson. Arthur’s there too, I think, copying music.”
Silence was resumed. Hamish stood over the fire in thought. Tom and Charles went on with their studies. “Oh dear!” presently exclaimed the latter, in a tone of subdued impatience.
Hamish turned his eyes upon him. He thought the bright young face looked unusually weary. “What is it, Charley, boy?”
“It’s this Latin, Hamish. I can’t make it come right. And Tom has no time to tell me.”
“Bring the Latin here.”
Charles carried his difficulties to Hamish. “It won’t come right,” repeated he.
“Like Mrs. Dora Copperfield’s figures, I expect, that wouldn’t add up,” said Hamish, as he cast his eyes over the exercise-book. “Halloa, young gentleman! what’s this! You have been cribbing.” He had seen in the past leaves certain exercises so excellently well done as to leave no doubt upon the point.
Charles turned crimson. Cribs were particularly objectionable to Mr. Channing, who had forbidden their use, so far as his sons were concerned. “I could not help it, Hamish. I used the cribs for about a week. The desk made me.”
“Made you!”
“Well,” confessed Charley, “there has been a row about the cribbing. The rest had cribbed, and I had not, and somehow, through that, it came out to the second master. He asked me a lot of questions, and I was obliged to tell. It made the desk savage, and they said I must do as they did.”
“Which you complied with! Nice young gentlemen, all of you!”
“Only for five or six days, Hamish. You may see that, if you look. I am doing my lessons on the square, now, as I did before.”
“And don’t go off the square again, if you please, sir,” repeated Hamish, “or you and I may quarrel. If Mr. Channing is not here, I am.”
“You don’t know how tyrannical the college boys are.”
“Don’t I!” said Hamish. “I was a college boy rather longer than you have yet been, Master Charley.”
He sat down to the table and so cleared Charley’s difficulties that the boy soon went on swimmingly, and Hamish left him. “How do you get on, Tom?” Hamish asked.
“Better than I need,” was Tom’s answer, delivered somewhat roughly. “After the injustice done me yesterday, it does not much matter how I get on.”
Hamish turned himself round to the fire, and said no more, neither attempting to console nor remonstrate. Charles’s ears were listening for the quarter past seven, and, the moment it chimed out, he left his work, took his trencher from the hall, and departed, saying nothing to any one.
He went along whistling, past Dr. Gardner’s house, past the deanery; they and the cathedral tower, rising above them, looked grey in the moonlight. He picked up a stone and sent it right into one of the elm trees; some of the birds, disturbed from their roost, flew out, croaking, over his head. In the old days of superstition it might have been looked upon as an evil omen, coupled with what was to follow. Ah, Charley! if you could only foresee what is before you! If Mrs. Channing, from her far-off sojourn, could but know what grievous ill is about to overtake her boy!
Poor Charley suspected nothing. He was whistling a merry tune, laughing, boy-like, at the discomfiture of the rooks, and anticipating the stolen game he and his friends were about to enjoy on forbidden ground. Not a boy in the school loved play better than did Master Charles Channing.
A door on the opposite side of the Boundaries was suddenly opened, to give admittance to one who sprung out with a bound. It was Gerald Yorke: and Charley congratulated himself that they were on opposite sides; for he had been warned that this escapade was to be kept from the seniors.
At that moment he saw a boy come forth from the cloisters, and softly whistle to him, as if in token that he was being waited for. Charley answered the whistle, and set off at a run. Which of the boys it was he could not tell; the outline of the form and the college cap were visible enough in the moonlight; but not the face. When he gained the cloister entrance he could no longer see him, but supposed the boy had preceded him into the cloisters. On went Charley, groping his way down the narrow passage. “Where are you?” he called out.
There was no answer. Once in the cloisters, a faint light came in from the open windows overlooking the graveyard. A very faint light, indeed, for the buildings all round it were so high, as almost to shut out any view of the sky: you must go quite to the window-frame before you could see it.
“I—s-a-a-y!” roared Charley again, at the top of his voice, “where are you all? Is nobody here?”
There came neither response nor sign of it. One faint sound certainly did seem to strike upon his ear from behind; it was like the click of a lock being turned. Charley looked sharply round, but all seemed still again. The low, dark, narrow passage was behind him; the dim cloisters were before him; he was standing at the corner formed by the east and south quadrangles, and the pale burial-ground in their midst, with its damp grass and its gravestones, looked cold and lonely in the moonlight.
The strange silence—it was not the silence of daylight—struck upon Charles with dismay. “You fellows there!” he called out again, in desperation. “What’s the good of playing up this nonsense?”
The tones of his voice died away in the echoes of the cloisters, but of other answer there was none. At that instant a rook, no doubt one of the birds he had disturbed, came diving down, and flapped its wings across the burial-ground. The sight of something, moving there, almost startled Charles out of his senses, and the matter was not much mended when he discovered it was only a bird. He turned, and flew down the passage to the entrance quicker than he had come up it; but, instead of passing out, he found the iron gate closed. What could have shut it? There was no wind. And if there had been ever so boisterous a wind, it could scarcely have moved that little low gate, for it opened inwards.
Charles seized it to pull it open. It resisted his efforts. He tried to shake it, but little came of that, for the gate was fastened firmly. Bit by bit stole the conviction over his mind that he was locked in.
Then terror seized him. He was locked in the ghostly cloisters, close to the graves of the dead; on the very spot where, as idle tales, went, the monks of bygone ages came out of those recording stones under his feet, and showed themselves at midnight. Not a step could he take, round the cloisters, but his foot must press those stones. To be locked in the cloisters had been nothing (from this point of view) for brave, grown, sensible men, such as the bishop, Jenkins, and Ketch—and they had been three in company, besides—but for many a boy it would have been a great deal; and for Charles Channing it was awful.
That he was alone, he never doubted. He believed—as fully as belief, or any other feeling could flash into his horrified mind—that Bywater had decoyed him into the cloisters and left him there, in return for his refusal to disclose what he knew of the suspicions bearing upon the damaged surplice. All the dread terrors of his childhood rose up before him. To say that he was mad in that moment might not be quite correct; but it is certain that his mind was not perfectly sane. His whole body, his face, his hair, grew damp in an instant, as of one in mortal agony, and with a smothered cry, which was scarcely like that of a human being, he turned and fled through the cloisters, in the vague hope of finding the other gate open.
It may be difficult for some of you to understand this excessive terror, albeit the situation was not a particularly desirable one. A college boy, in these enlightened days, laughs at supernatural tales as the delusions of ignorance in past ages; but for those who have had the misfortune to be imbued in infancy with superstition, as was Charles Channing, the terror still exists, college boys though they may be. He could not have told (had he been collected enough to tell anything) what his precise dread was, as he flew through the cloisters. None can do so, at these moments. A sort of vampire rises in the mind, and they shrink from it, though they see not what its exact nature may be; but it is a vampire that can neither be faced nor borne.
Feeling as one about to die; feeling as if death, in that awful moment, might be a boon, rather than the contrary, Charles sped down the east quadrangle, and turned into the north. At the extremity of the north side, forming the angle between it and the west, commenced the narrow passage similar to the one he had just traversed, which led to the west gate of entrance. A faint glimmering of the white flagged stones beyond this gate, gave promise that it was open. A half-uttered sound of thankfulness escaped him, and he sped on.
Ah! but what was that? What was it that he came upon in the middle of the north quadrangle, standing within the niches? A towering white form, with a ghastly face, telling of the dead; a mysterious, supernatural-looking blue flame lighting it up round about. It came out of the niche, and advanced slowly upon him. An awful cry escaped from his heart, and went ringing up to the roof of the cloisters. Oh! that the good dean, sitting in his deanery close to the chapter-house, could have heard that helpless cry of anguish!—that Dr. Burrows, still nearer, could have heard it, and gone forth into the cloisters with the succour of his presence! No, no; there could be no succour for a spot supposed to be empty and closed.
Back to the locked gate—with perhaps the apparition following him? or forwardpastIT to the open door? Which was it to be? In these moments there can be no reason to guide the course; but there is instinct; and instinct took that ill-fated child to the open door.
How he flew past the sight, it is impossible to tell. Had it been right in front of his path, he never would have passed it. But it had halted just beyond the niche, not coming out very far. With his poor hands stretched out, and his breath leaving him, Charles did get by, and made for the door, the ghost bringing up the rear with a yell, while those old cloister-niches, when he was fairly gone, grew living with moving figures, which came out of their dark corners, and shrieked aloud with laughter.
Away, he knew not whither—away, as one who is being pursued by an unearthly phantom—deep catchings of the breath, as will follow undue bodily exertion, telling of something not right within; wild, low, abrupt sounds breaking from him at intervals—thus he flew, turning to the left, which led him towards the river. Anywhere from the dreaded cloisters; anywhere from the old, grey, ghostly edifice; anywhere in his dread and agony. He dashed past the boat-house, down the steps, turning on to the river pathway, and—