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 his _confrères_
constitutes 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. “_I_ can’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.
_That_ would 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 he _is_
frightened. 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 propensity _to be_
frightened, 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 as _we_ know 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.