by Ellen Wood
“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 are not to 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,
“J. JENKINS.”
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, it can’t be 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 be dark, 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 exe
rcise-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 forward past IT 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 —
Whether the light, hung at the boat-house, deceived his sight — whether the slippery mud caused him to lose his footing — whether he was running too quickly and could not stop himself in time — or whether, in his irrepressible fear, he threw himself unconsciously in, to escape what might be behind him, will never be known. Certain it is, that the unhappy boy went plunge into the river, another and a last wild cry escaping him as the waters closed over his head.