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 with him? 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 for her home 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 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 propo............