Works of Ellen Wood, page 220
“I was not guilty of it,” Arthur impressively said, his tone full of emotion. “Mr. Dean! believe me. When I shall come to answer to my Maker for my actions upon earth, I cannot then speak with more earnest truth than I now speak to you. I am entirely innocent of the charge. I did not touch the money; I did not know that the money was lost, until Mr. Galloway announced it to me some days afterwards.”
The dean gazed at Arthur as he stood before him; at his tall form — noble even in its youthfulness — his fine, ingenuous countenance, his earnest eye; it was impossible to associate such with the brand of guilt, and the dean’s suspicious doubts melted away. If ever uprightness was depicted unmistakably in a human countenance, it shone out then from Arthur Channing’s.
“But there appears, then, to be some mystery attaching to the loss, to the proceedings altogether,” debated the dean.
“No doubt there may be; no doubt there is,” was the reply of Arthur. “Sir,” he impulsively added, “will you stand my friend, so far as to grant me a favour?”
The dean wondered what was coming.
“Although I have thus asserted my innocence to you; and it is the solemn truth; there are reasons why I do not wish to speak out so unequivocally to others. Will you kindly regard this interview as a confidential one — not speaking of its purport even to Mr. Galloway?”
“But why?” asked the dean.
“I cannot explain. I can only throw myself upon your kindness, Mr. Dean, to grant the request. Indeed,” he added, his face flushing, “my motive is an urgent one.”
“The interview was not of my seeking, so you may have your favour,” said the dean, kindly. “But I cannot see why you should not publicly assert it, if, as you say, you are innocent.”
“Indeed, I am innocent,” repeated Arthur. “Should one ray of light ever be thrown upon the affair, you will see, Mr. Dean, that I have spoken truth.”
“I will accept it as truth,” said the dean. “You may continue to take the organ.”
“I knew God would be with me in the interview!” thought Arthur, as he thanked the dean and left the Chapter House.
He did not go home immediately. He had a commission to execute in the town, and went to do it. It took him about an hour, which brought it to five o’clock. In returning through the Boundaries he encountered Roland Yorke, just released from that bane of his life, the office, for the day. Arthur told him how near he had been to losing the Cathedral.
“By Jove!” uttered Roland, flying into one of his indignant fits. “A nice dean he is! He’d deserve to lose his own place, if he had done it.”
“Well, the danger is over for the present. I say, Yorke, does Galloway talk much about it?”
“Not he,” answered Roland. “He’s as sullen and crabbed as any old bear. I often say to Jenkins that he is in a temper with himself for having sent you away, and I don’t care if he hears me. There’s an awful amount to do since you went. I and Jenkins are worked to death. And there’ll be the busiest time of all the year coming on soon, with the autumn rents and leases. I shan’t stop long in it, I know!”
Smiling at Roland’s account of being “worked to death,” for he knew how much the assertion was worth, Arthur continued his way. Roland continued his, and, on entering his own house, met Constance Channing leaving it. He exchanged a few words of chatter with her, though it struck him that she looked unusually sad, and then found his way to the presence of his mother.
“What an uncommonly pretty girl that Constance Channing is!” quoth he, in his free, unceremonious fashion. “I wonder she condescends to come here to teach the girls!”
“I think I shall dismiss her, Roland,” said Lady Augusta.
“I expect she’ll dismiss herself, ma’am, without waiting for you to do it, now William Yorke has found bread and cheese, and a house to live in,” returned Roland, throwing himself at full length on a sofa.
“Then you expect wrong,” answered Lady Augusta. “If Miss Channing leaves, it will be by my dismissal. And I am not sure but I shall do it,” she added, nodding her head.
“What for?” asked Roland, lazily.
“It is not pleasant to retain, as instructress to my children, one whose brother is a thief.”
Roland tumbled off the sofa, and rose up with a great cry — a cry of passionate anger, of aroused indignation. “What?” he thundered.
“Good gracious! are you going mad?” uttered my lady. “What is Arthur Channing to you, that you should take up his cause in this startling way upon every possible occasion?”
“He is this to me — that he has nobody else to stand up for him,” stuttered Roland, so excited as to impede his utterance. “We were both in the same office, and the shameful charge might have been cast upon me, as it was cast upon him. It was mere chance. Channing is as innocent of it as you, mother; he is as innocent as that precious dean, who has been wondering whether he shall dismiss him from the Cathedral. A charitable lot you all are!”
“I’m sure I don’t want to be uncharitable,” cried Lady Augusta, whose heart was kind enough in the main. “And I am sure the dean never was uncharitable in his life: he is too good and enlightened a man to be uncharitable. Half the town says he must be guilty, and what is one to think? Then you would not recommend me to let it make any difference to Miss Channing’s coming here?”
“No!” burst forth Roland, in a tone that might have brought down the roof, had it been made of glass. “I’d scorn such wicked injustice.”
“If I were you, I’d ‘scorn’ to put myself into these fiery tempers, upon other people’s business,” cried my lady.
“It is my business,” retorted Roland. “Better go into tempers than be hard and unjust. What would William Yorke say at your speaking so of Miss Channing?”
Lady Augusta smiled. “It was hearing what William Yorke had done that almost decided me. He has broken off his engagement with Miss Channing. And he has done well, Roland. It is not meet that he should take his wife from a disgraced family. I have been telling him so ever since it happened.”
Roland stood before her, as if unable to digest the news: his mouth open, his eyes staring. “It is not true!” he shrieked.
“Indeed, it is perfectly true. I gathered a suspicion of it from William Yorke’s manner to-day, and I put the question plainly to Miss Channing herself. ‘Had they parted in consequence of this business of Arthur’s?’ She acknowledged that it was so.”
Roland turned white with honest anger. He dashed his hair from his brow, and with an ugly word, he dashed down the stairs four at a time, and flung out of the house; probably with the intention of having a little personal explosion with the Reverend William Yorke.
CHAPTER XXIX. — A TASTE OF “TAN.”
The cloisters of Helstonleigh were echoing with the sounds of a loud dispute, according as little with their sacred character, as with the fair beauty of the summer’s afternoon.
The excitement caused in the college school by the rumour of Lady Augusta Yorke’s having obtained the promise of the head-master that her son should be promoted to the seniorship over the heads of Channing and Huntley, had been smouldering ominously, and gathering greater strength from the very fact that the boys appeared to be powerless in it. Powerless they were: in spite of Tom Channing’s boast at the dinner-table that the school would not stand it tamely, and his meaning nod when Hamish had mockingly inquired whether the school intended to send Lady Augusta a challenge, or to recommend Mr. Pye to the surveillance of the dean.
In the first flow of their indignation, the boys, freely ringing the changes of rebellion, had avowed to one another that they would acquaint the dean with the head-master’s favouritism, and request his interference — as too many of us do when things happen that annoy us. We are only too prone to speak out our mind, and to proclaim what our remedy or revenge shall be. But when our anger has subsided, and we see things in their true light, we find that those boasts were only loud talking, and cannot be acted upon. Thus it was with the Helstonleigh college boys. They had hurled forth indignation at the master, had pretty nearly conned over the very words in which they should make known their grievance to the dean; but when the practical part came to be considered, their courage oozed out at their fingers’ ends. The mice, you remember, passed a resolution in solemn conclave that their enemy, the old cat, should be belled: an excellent precaution, and only wanting one small thing to render it efficient — no mouse would undertake to do it.
To prefer a complaint to the dean of their head-master was a daring measure; such as the school, with all its hardihood, had never yet attempted. It might recoil upon themselves; might produce no good to the question at issue, and only end in making the master their enemy. On the other hand, the boys were resolved not to submit tamely to a piece of favouritism so unjust, without doing something. In the midst of this perplexity, one of them suddenly mooted the suggestion that a written memorial should be sent to the head-master from the school collectively, respectfully requesting him to allow the choice of senior to be made in the legitimate order of things, by merit or priority, but not by favour.
Lame as the suggestion was, the majority were for its adoption simply because no other plan could be hit upon. Some were against it. Hot arguments prevailed on both sides, and a few personal compliments rather tending to break the peace, had been exchanged. The senior boy held himself aloof from acting personally: it was his place they were fighting for. Tom Channing and Huntley were red-hot against what they called the “sneaking,” meaning the underhand work. Gerald Yorke was equally for non-interference, either to the master or the dean. Yorke protested it was not in the least true that Lady Augusta had been promised anything of the sort. In point of fact, there was no proof that she had been, excepting her own assertion, made in the hearing of Jenkins. Gerald gravely declared that Jenkins had gone to sleep and dreamt it.
Affairs had been going on in a cross-grained sort of manner all day. The school, taking it as a whole, had been inattentive; Mr. Pye had been severe; the second master had caned a whole desk, and threatened another, and double lessons had been set the upper boys for the following morning. Altogether, when the gentlemen were released at five o’clock, they were not in the sweetest of tempers, and entered upon a wordy war in the cloisters.
“What possessed you to take and tear up that paper you were surreptitiously scribbling at, when Pye ordered you to go up and hand it in?” demanded Gaunt, of George Brittle. “It was that which put him out with us all. Was it a love-letter?”
“Who was to think he’d go and ask for it?” returned Brittle, an indifferent sort of gentleman, who liked to take things easily. “Guess what it was.”
“Don’t talk to me about guessing!” imperiously spoke Gaunt. “I ask you what it was?”
“Nothing less than the memorial to himself,” laughed Brittle. “Some of us made a rough shell of it, and I thought I’d set on and copy it fair. When old Pye’s voice came thundering, ‘What’s that you are so stealthily busy over, Mr. Brittle? — hand it in,’ of course I could only tear it into minute pieces, and pretend to be deaf.”
“You had best not try it on again,” said Gaunt. “Nothing puts out Pye like disobeying him to his face.”
“Oh, doesn’t it, though!” returned Brittle. “Cribs put him out the worst. He thought that was a crib, or he’d not have been so eager for it.”
“What sort of a shell is it?” asked Harry Huntley. “Who drew it out?”
“It won’t do at all,” interposed Hurst. “The head of it is, ‘Revered master,’ and the tail, ‘Yours affectionately.’”
A shout of laughter; Brittle’s voice rose above the noise. “And the middle is an eloquent piece of composition, calculated to take the master’s obdurate heart by storm, and move it to redress our wrongs.”
“We have no wrongs to redress of that sort,” cried Gerald Yorke.
“Being an interested party, you ought to keep your mouth shut,” called out Hurst to Yorke.
“Keep yours shut first,” retorted Yorke to Hurst. “Not being interested, there’s no need to open yours at all.”
“Let’s see the thing,” said Huntley.
Brittle drew from his pocket a sheet of a copy-book, tumbled, blotted, scribbled over with the elegance that only a schoolboy can display. Several heads had been laid together, and a sketch of the memorial drawn out between them. Shorn of what Hurst had figuratively called the head and tail, and which had been added for nonsense, it was not a bad production. The boys clustered round Brittle, looking over his shoulder, as he read the composition aloud for the benefit of those who could not elbow space to see.
“It wouldn’t be bad,” said Huntley, critically, “if it were done into good grammar.”
“Into what?” roared Brittle. “The grammar’s as good as you can produce any day, Huntley. Come!”
“I’ll correct it for you,” said Huntley, coolly. “There are a dozen faults in it.”
“The arrogance of those upper-desk fellows!” ejaculated Brittle. “The stops are not put in yet, and they haven’t the gumption to allow for them. You’ll see what it is when it shall be written out properly, Huntley. It might be sent to the British Museum as a model of good English, there to be framed and glazed. I’ll do it to-night.”
“It’s no business of yours, Mr. Brittle, that you should interfere to take an active part in it,” resumed Gerald Yorke.
“No business of mine! That’s good! When I’m thinking of going in for the seniorship myself another time!”
“It’s the business of the whole batch of us, if you come to that!” roared Bywater, trying to accomplish the difficult feat of standing on his head on the open mullioned window-frame, thereby running the danger of coming to grief amongst the gravestones and grass of the College burial-yard. “If Pye does not get called to order now, he may lapse into the habit of passing over hard-working fellows with brains, to exalt some good-for-nothing cake with none, because he happens to have a Dutchman for his mother. That would wash, that would!”
“You, Bywater! do you mean that for me?” hotly demanded Gerald Yorke.
“As if I did!” laughed Bywater. “As if I meant it for any cake in particular! Unless the cap happens to fit ‘em. I don’t say it does.”
“The thing is this,” struck in Hurst: “who will sign the paper? It’s of no use for Brittle, or any other fellow, to be at the bother of writing it out, if nobody can be got to sign it.”
“What do you mean? The school’s ready to sign it.”
“Are the seniors?”
With the seniors there was a hitch. Gaunt put himself practically out of the affair; Gerald Yorke would not sign it; and Channing could not. Huntley alone remained.
Why could not Channing sign it? Ah, there was the lever that was swaying and agitating the whole school this afternoon. Poor Tom Channing was not just now reposing upon rose-leaves. What with his fiery temper and his pride, Tom had enough to do to keep himself within bounds; for the school was resenting upon him the stigma that had fallen upon Arthur. Not the whole school; but quite sufficient of it. Not that they openly attacked Tom; he could have repaid that in kind; but they were sending him to Coventry. Some said they would not sign a petition to the master headed by Tom Channing: — Tom, you remember, stood on the rolls next to Gaunt. They said that if Tom Channing were to succeed as senior of the school, the school would rise up in open rebellion. That this feeling against him was very much fostered by the Yorkes, was doubted. Gerald was actuated by a twofold motive, one of which was, that it enhanced his own chance of the seniorship. The other arose from resentment against Arthur Channing, for having brought disgrace upon the office which contained his brother Roland. Tod fraternized in this matter with Gerald, though the same could not be said of him in general; no two brothers in the school agreed less well than did the Yorkes. Both of them fully believed Arthur to be guilty.
“As good have the thing out now, and settle it,” exclaimed Griffin, who came next to Gerald Yorke, and would be fourth senior when Gaunt should leave. “Are you fellows going to sign it, or not?”
“To whom do you speak?” demanded Gaunt.
“Well, I speak to all,” said Griffin, a good-humoured lad, but terribly mischievous, and, for some cause best known to himself, warmly espousing the cause of Gerald Yorke. “Shall you sign it, Gaunt?”
“No. But I don’t say that I disapprove of it, mind you,” added Gaunt. “Were I going in for the seniorship, and one below me were suddenly hoisted above my head and made cock of the walk, I’d know the reason why. It is not talking that would satisfy me, or grumbling either; I’d act.”
“Gaunt doesn’t sign it,” proceeded Griffin, telling off the names upon his fingers. “That’s one. Huntley, do you?”
“I don’t come next to Gaunt,” was Huntley’s answer. “I’ll speak in my right turn.”
Tom Channing stood near to Huntley, his trencher stuck aside on his head, his honest face glowing. One arm was full of books, the other rested on his hip: his whole attitude bespoke self-possession; his looks, defiance. Griffin went on.
“Gerald Yorke, do you sign it?”
“I’d see it further, first.”
“That’s two disposed of, Gaunt and Yorke,” pursued Griffin. “Huntley, there’s only you.”
Huntley gave a petulant stamp. “I have told you I will not speak out of my turn. Yes, I will speak, though, as we want the affair set at rest,” he resumed, changing his mind abruptly. “If Channing signs it, I will. There! Channing, will you sign it?”
“Yes, I will,” said Tom.
Then it was that the hubbub arose, converting the cloisters into an arena. One word led to another. Fiery blood bubbled up; harsh things were said. Gerald Yorke and his party reproached Tom Channing with being a disgrace to the school’s charter, through his brother Arthur. Huntley and a few more warmly espoused Tom’s cause, of whom saucy Bywater was one, who roared out cutting sarcasms from his gymnasium on the window-frame. Tom controlled himself better than might have been expected, but he and Gerald Yorke flung passionate retorts one to the other.
