Part 9

“Perhaps I was. Anyway, Steggles and me made a plot to get some of the medlars from the tree on the lawn, and we minched out after dark to do it. They’re simply allowed to fall and rot on the ground, which is a waste of good tuck, Steggles says. We went out about ten o’clock last night, past Browne’s study window; and we looked in from the shrubbery to see the window open, and soda-water and whiskey and pipes on the table; but no Browne, strange to say. Then we sneaked on, and Steggles suddenly heard something and got funky, but I kept him going. We reached the tree and Steggles lighted his bull’s-eye lantern, so as to collect the medlars, when suddenly out from behind the tree itself rushed a man. We hooked it like lightning, naturally, and I never saw Steggles go at such a pace in my life, and he stuck to his lantern, too; but I tripped and fell, and before I could get up the man had collared me. If you’ll believe it, the man was Browne! He asked me who the other chap was, and I said I couldn’t be quite sure; so he told me to go back to bed, which I did. That was last night; and the one medlar we had time to get Steggles had eaten before I got back, which shows what Steggles is. To-day Browne will tell the Doctor. He always chooses the evening after prayers, so that he can work the Doctor up with his stories and get a chap flogged right away; because it often happens when Doctor Dunston says he’ll flog a chap next day he doesn’t do it.”

“And what is Steggles going to do?”

“He says he is watching events. He also says that Browne was certainly stealing the Doctor’s medlars himself, and really we surprised him, not he us; but, of course, Steggles says it’s no good my telling the Doctor that. Steggles also says that he’s got an idea which may come to something. I don’t know; but he’s a very cute chap. I’ve got to keep out of the way after prayers to-night, and Steggles is going to watch Browne. He won’t tell me his plan. I thought once that perhaps he meant giving himself up for me, and I asked him, and he said I ought to know him better.”

Tomlin then cleared out, and as the Doctor took Slade and me for a short Greek lesson every evening after prayers, because of special examinations, I had the good luck to see the end of the business that very night.

We’d just got to work by the Doctor’s green-shaded reading-lamp when Browne came in with his grovelling way, pretending he was awfully sorry for having to round on Tomlin, but that his duty gave him no option, and so on.

“Last night,” he said, “I was sitting correcting exercises in my study when I fancied I saw a form steal across the grass outside. Thinking some vagabond might be in the grounds, I dashed out and followed as quickly as possible. Presently I saw a light, and noted two figures under the medlar-tree. Fearing they might be plotting against the house, I went straight at them, and, to my astonishment, saw that they were only boys. One darted away, and I failed to catch him; the other, I much regret to say, was Tomlin.”

That is how Browne put the affair.

“Tomlin again!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Positively that boy’s behavior passes the bounds of endurance.”

“Yes, taking the medlars of one who has always treated him as you have. I couldn’t trust myself to speak to him. He’s a very disappointing boy.”

“He’s a disgraceful, degenerate, disreputable boy! I can forgive much; but the stealing of fruit--and that _my_ fruit! Greediness, immorality, ingratitude in the person of one outrageous lad! I thank you, Browne. Yours was a zealous act, and argued courage of high order. Oblige me by sending Tomlin hither at once. There shall be no delay.”

Browne hurried off to find the wretched Tomlin; and Doctor Dunston, who always had to work up his feelings before flogging a chap, snorted like a horse, and took off his glasses, and went to the corner behind the book-case where canes and things were kept. He seemed to forget Slade and me, so we sat tight in the gloom outside the radius of light thrown by the green-shaded lamp, and waited with regret to see Tomlin catch it. The Doctor talked to himself as he brought out a birch and swished it through the air once or twice.

“Upon my soul,” he said, “Lord Golightly’s son was right. His knowledge of character is remarkable in so young a lad. Tomlin will have to be expelled; Tomlin must go; such consistent, such inherent depravity appears ineradicable. Pruning is of no avail; the branch must be sacrificed. My medlars under cover of darkness! And I would have given them freely had he but asked!”

He evidently wasn’t going to expel Tomlin this time, but he meant doing all he knew with the birch; and as Tomlin was some while coming, the Doctor’s safety-valves were regularly humming before he turned up. When he did come he walked boldly in; and the Doctor, who had been striding up and down like a lion at the Zoo, didn’t wait for any remarks, but just went straight for him, seized him by the nape of the neck, nipped his hand round his back--in a way he did very neatly from long practice--and began to administer about the hottest flogging he’d given to any boy in his life.

“So--you--add--the--eighth--com--mand--ment--to--the--others--you--have--already--shattered--deplorable--boy!” roared the Doctor, giving Tomlin one between each smack. “You--would--purloin--steal--rob--the medlars--of your preceptor. You would lead others--to--share--your--sin. You would bring--tears--of--grief--to--a--good--mother’s--eyes!”

Here the Doctor stopped a moment for breath, but he still held on to Tomlin, who, much to my surprise, wriggled about a good deal. In fact, he shot out his legs over and over again at intervals, like a grasshopper does when it gets into the water; and when he got a chance he yelled back at the Doctor:

“It’s a lie--a filthy lie!” he shrieked out. “Beast--devil! Let me go! Let me go! I never touched your rotten old medlars--oh!--oh!”

Then the Doctor went off again.

“Silence, miserable child! Cease your blasphemies. Falsehood--will--not--save--you--now!”

“I never touched them, I tell you, you muddle-headed old beast! You’re killing me, and my father’ll imprison you for life for it. I wish they could hang you. I’ll make you smart for this if you only live till I grow up--devil!”

But the Doctor had shot his bolt. He gave Tomlin a final smack, then shook him off like a spider, picked up his mortar-board, which had fallen off in the struggle, and put the birch in its place.

“Now go, and don’t speak another word, or I shall expel you, wretched lad!”

Meantime Slade and I were fairly on the gasp, for from the time that Tomlin, as we thought, had called the Doctor a devil we realized the truth. Now his passion nearly choked him; he danced with pain and rage; only when the Doctor took a stride towards him he opened the door and hooked it.

The Doctor puffed and grunted like a traction-engine trying to get up a hill.

“These are the black days in a head-master’s life, Slade,” he said. “That misguided lad thinks that I enjoyed administering his punishment, yet both mentally and physically the operation caused me far greater suffering than it brought to him. I am wounded--wounded to the heart--and the exertion causes and will cause me much discomfort for hours to come, owing to its unusual severity. I may say that not for ten years has it been necessary for me to flog a boy as I have just flogged George Tomlin. Now let us proceed.”

I couldn’t have broken it to him, but Slade did. He said:

“Please, sir, it wasn’t Tomlin.”

“Not Tomlin--not Tomlin! What d’ you mean, boy? Who was it, then?” said the Doctor, his eyebrows going up on to his forehead, which was all quite dewy from the hard work.

“It was young Carlo--I mean Westonleigh,” said Slade.

“Viscount Westonleigh!” gasped the Doctor, his mouth dropping right open in a very rum way by itself, if you understand me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then why in the name of Heaven didn’t you say so? How _dare_ you stand there and watch me commit an offence against law and justice? How did you dare to watch me ignorantly torture an innocent boy, and that boy-- Go! go both of you--you, Slade, and you, Butler, also. Go instantly, and send Browne and Viscount Westonleigh to me. Good God! this is terrible--terrible!”

So that was his howler, and to see him in his chair looking so old and haggard and queer was rather frightful. He seemed suddenly struck with limpness, and his hands shook like anything, and so did his bald head; and he puffed as if he’d been running miles; and Slade said afterwards that he looked jolly frightened too. He put his face in his hands as we went out, and we heard him say something about Lord Golightly and ruin, and universal opprobrium on his gray hairs, though really he had none worth mentioning; and Slade said he almost thought the Doctor was actually going to cry, if such a thing could be possible.

We sent Browne off to him, but Carlo wasn’t to be found. He’d been seen yelling somewhere, but couldn’t be traced. What had happened was this: Tomlin, in obedience to Steggles, had kept rather close after prayers; in fact, he had spent the half-hour to bed-time in a cupboard in the gymnasium, under the rubber shoes. So Browne, not finding him, had told the first boy he saw to do so; and that boy happened to be Steggles, who had been at his heels ever since he went to the Doctor. Steggles is a miserable, unwholesome thing, but his strategy certainly comes off. Once having the message, all was easy, because Steggles merely found Carlo, and told him the Doctor wanted him. The result was much better than even Steggles hoped; because, though the Doctor generally fell on a chap who came to be flogged straightaway, like he did on Carlo, it wasn’t often anybody got such a frightful strong dose as Carlo had. Afterwards, when taxed, Steggles swore, of course, that he thought he was talking to Tomlin. Seeing the likeness, this might have been perfectly true, though in their secret hearts everybody knew Steggles too jolly well to really believe it.

Carlo didn’t turn up, and after an hour or more of frantic rushing about, somebody said perhaps he’d jumped down the garden well owing to the indignity of what he’d got. But soon afterwards, in reply to a special telegram sent for the Doctor by the people at the railway station, an answer came from Golightly Towers, twenty miles off, where the purple-veined lord, father of Carlo, hung out. The kid, it seemed, had sloped down to Merivale railway station after his licking, and taken a ticket right away for Golightly, and gone home by the last train but one that night. He never returned either, but next day his father dropped in on Doctor Dunston, and Fowle managed to hear a little of what went on through the key-hole. He said that as far as he could make out the lord didn’t think much of the matter, and said one thrashing more or less wouldn’t mar Carlo. But the lord’s wife, who didn’t come, evidently took the same view as Carlo, for he never returned to Dunston’s again. The Doctor’s howler ended in his losing the little bounder altogether, which, with his views about lords in general, and especially earls, must have been frightfully rough on him.

As to Tomlin, actually the Doctor never flogged him after all! I think his spirit had got a bit broken, and though Tomlin went at the end of the term, he wasn’t expelled, but withdrawn by mutual consent, like you hear of things in Parliament sometimes. He wouldn’t have gone at all, but he refused to say who was under the medlar-tree with him, and stuck to it; and Steggles absolutely declined to give himself up, because, as he truly said, he had more than kept his promise to Tomlin about helping him out of the mess.

So Tomlin went. He was a very decent little chap indeed, and nearly all the fellows at Dunston’s promised faithfully to buy their hats entirely at his place in Bond Street, London, when they left school; which will be very good business for him if they do. As for the Doctor, it’s a peculiar fact that for a whole term after Carlo’s affair he never flogged a single chap. He didn’t seem to have any heart in him, somehow, owing to the rum way the howler told upon his spirit.

Morrant’s Half-Sov.

Of course, as Steggles said truly, the rummest thing about the whole story of Morrant’s half-sov. was that he should have one. Morrant, in fact, never got any pocket-money in his life, owing to his father being a gentleman farmer. Not that he had nothing. On the contrary, his hampers were certainly the best, except Fowle’s, that ever came to Dunston’s, both for variety and size and fruit. The farming business, Morrant said, was all right from his point of view in the holidays, as the ferreting, both rats and rabbits, was good enough for anything, and three packs of hounds met within walking distance of his farm, one pack being harriers, which Morrant, by knowing the country well, could run with to a certain extent while they hunted. But Morrant’s father was so worried about chemical manures and other farming things, including the price of wheat, that he didn’t see his way to giving Morrant any pocket-money. He explained to Morrant once that he was putting every halfpenny he could spare into Morrant’s education, so as to save him from having to become a gentleman farmer too when he grew up.

But Morrant didn’t get a farthing in a general way; so when there arrived a hamper with an envelope in it, and in the envelope a bit of paper, and in the paper a half-sovereign, Morrant was naturally extremely surprised and also pleased. It came from his godfather, who had never taken any notice of Morrant for thirteen years, though he was a clergyman. But the previous term Morrant had got a prize for Scripture history, and when that came to his godfather’s ears, through Morrant’s mother mentioning it in a letter, he wrote and said it was good news, and very unexpected. So he sent the money; and really Morrant was quite bewildered with it, being so utterly unaccustomed to tin even in the meanest shape.

He had a friend by the name of Ferrars, who was much more religious than Morrant himself, and knew even more Scripture history; and as a first go-off he asked Ferrars what he ought to do with the money. And Ferrars said that before everything Morrant ought to give a tithe to charity. But when it was explained to Morrant that this meant chucking away a shilling on the poor, he didn’t take to the idea an atom. He said his father had set him against giving tithes, not believing in them very much.

So Morrant went to Gideon, who knew much more about money than Ferrars, and he said on no account to give a penny away in charity, because Morrant wasn’t up in the subject, and might do more harm than good. He also said that in the case of a chap who had never had a half-sovereign in his life before, it was a great question whether he could be expected to give away any; and Morrant said there was no question about it at all, because he wasn’t going to. And it made even a difference in his feeling towards Ferrars, for, as he very truly said, a chap who advised him like Ferrars had couldn’t be much of a friend.

Having decided to keep it, the point was what to do with it. The novelty of the thing staggered him, and, knowing he would probably never have another half-sovereign till he grew up, Morrant felt the awful importance of spending it right, because an affair once bought could never be replaced if lost. And, as Bray said, “If you get used to a thing, like a watch-chain or a tie-ring, and then lose it, the feeling you get is much worse than if you had never had it at all.”

I thought about it too for Morrant, as he once sent me a brace of rabbits by post, shot by himself in the holidays. I pointed out to him that half a sovereign was a most difficult sum really, being, as it were, not small and not exactly huge, and yet too much to make light of, especially in Morrant’s case. If he had got a sovereign, for instance, he might have bought a silver watch-chain to take the place of one which he had. It was made of the hair of his grandmother when she was young, and Morrant didn’t much like it, and had often tried to sell it and failed. But ten bob wouldn’t buy a silver chain worth having. Morrant had an idea about braces, and of course he might have bought such braces for the money as would have been seldom seen and very remarkable; but braces are a poor thing to put good money into, and I dissuaded him.

There came a change in Morrant after he had had the half-sovereign for four days and not thought of anything to buy. He began to worry, because time was going on and nothing being done. Fellows gave him many ideas, some of which he took for an hour or two, but always abandoned after a while. Murray told him of a wonderful box of new conjuring tricks which was to be had, and he nearly bought it, but luckily remembered just in time that the new tricks would get old after a while, and some might be guessed and would become useless. Then Parkinson had a remarkably swagger paint-box, and knew where Morrant could get another with only three paints less for ten shillings. And Morrant as near as a toucher bought that, but happened to remember he couldn’t paint, and didn’t care in the least about trying to. Corkey minimus said he would run the risk and sell Corkey minor’s bat to Morrant for ten bob, the bat having cost twelve. The bat was spliced and Corkey minor was in Australia, having, luckily for him, sailed to sea just before an exam., owing to a weak lung. If Morrant had played cricket he would certainly have bought the bat; but there again, even though Gideon told him he might easily get ten-and-six or eleven shillings for the bat next term, he hesitated, and finally Gideon bought the bat himself--as an investment, he said.

Well, there was Morrant stuck with his tin. He wouldn’t even change it, because Gideon warned him against that, and told him his father knew men who had made large fortunes simply by not changing gold when they had it. Gideon said there was nothing like never changing gold; so Morrant didn’t, only of course there was no good in keeping the money specially stitched into a private and unknown part of his trousers, as he did, for safety.

That half-sovereign acted like a regular cloud on Morrant’s mind; and then came an extraordinary day when it acted more like a cloud than ever, owing to its disappearing.

Morrant had sewn it, with a needle and thread borrowed from the housekeeper, into a spot at the bottom of his left trouser-pocket, and from this spot it mysteriously vanished in the space of two hours and a half. He had changed in the dormitory for “footer,” and left his trousers on his bed at three o’clock, returning to them at 4.45. Then, naturally feeling for his half-sovereign, he missed it altogether, and when he examined the spot he found his money had been cut out of the bottom of the pocket with a knife.

Very wisely Morrant, seeing what a tremendous thing had happened, did not make a lot of row, but just told about ten chaps and no more. I was one. My name is Newnes. I said:

“The first question is, Who knew your secret hiding-place?” and Butler said it was a very good question and showed sense in me. Butler is, of course, high in the Sixth.

Morrant, on thinking it over, decided that three chaps, or four at the outside, knew his hiding-place. They were Ferrars, Gideon, Fowle, and, Morrant thought, Phipps. So first Butler, who very kindly undertook the affair for Morrant, had Phipps brought up. Phipps stammers even when most calm and collected, and, being sent for by Butler, caused him so much excitement that Butler made him write down the answers to his questions, and even then Phipps lost his nerve so that he spelled “yes” with two s’s. But he solemnly put down and signed that Morrant had never told him where he kept his half-sovereign; and after he had gone Morrant said that, now he came to think about it, he felt sure Phipps was right. Which reduced the matter to Ferrars, Gideon, and Fowle; and the first two were set aside by Morrant because Ferrars was, of course, his personal friend, despite the passing coldness about Ferrars’ advice, and Gideon, though very keen about money and a great judge of it, was known to be absolutely straight, and had never so much as choused a kid out of a marble.

Butler said:

“That leaves Fowle; and if you told Fowle you were a little fool.”

And Morrant said:

“We were both Roman Catholics by religion, and that makes a great tie; and though many chaps hate Fowle pretty frightfully, I’ve never known him try to score off me, except once, when he failed and apologized.”

And Butler said:

“That’s all right, I dare say; but he’s a little beast and a cur, and also a sneak of the deadliest dye. I don’t say he’s taken the money, because that’s a libel, and he might, I believe, go to law against me; but I do say that only one out of three people could have taken it, and we know two didn’t, therefore Q.E.D. the other must have.”

Morrant didn’t follow this very clever reasoning on the part of Butler. He only thought that Fowle, being a Roman Catholic, would never rob another; and Butler said he would, because it wasn’t like Freemasons, who wouldn’t score off one another for the world. He explained that history was simply choked up with examples of Roman Catholics scoring off one another.

Butler said:

“Religion’s quite different. One Buddhist is often known to have done another Buddhist in the eye, so why shouldn’t one Roman do another? In fact, they have thousands of times, as you’ll know when you come to read a little history and hear about the Spanish Inquisition. Especially this may have happened seeing that Fowle is the chap. I tell you candidly that, in my opinion, after a good deal of experience of fellows in general, I take Fowle to be the most likely boy in Merivale to have done it; and knowing him to have had the secret of the private pocket reduces it to a certainty in my mind. Tax him with it suddenly in the night, and you’ll see.”

Morrant slept in the same dormitory with Fowle, and that night the whole room was woke up at some very late hour by the sound of Morrant taxing Fowle. Fowle took a long time to realize what was being said, and when he was awake enough to realize what Morrant was getting at, he showed tremendous indignation, and asked what he had ever done that such a charge should be brought against him, especially at such a time. He reminded Morrant that they were of the same way of thinking in holy affairs, and said he was extremely sick with Morrant, and thought Morrant’s religion must be pretty rocky if it allowed him to wake a chap up in the night and charge him with such a crime. In fact, Fowle went on so that Morrant finally apologized rather humbly.