The Channings | Page 6

you'd get pummelled to powder."
"Look here, Tom. I tell you--"
"Hold your tongue, boy!" sharply cried Tom Channing. "Do you forget that I am a senior? You heard the master's words. We know no brothers in school life, you must remember."
Charley laughed. "Tom, you think I am a child, I believe. I didn't enter the school yesterday. All I was going to tell you was this: I don't know any more than you who inked the surplice; and suspicion goes for nothing."
"All right," said Tom Channing, as he flew after the rest; and Charley sat on, and fell into a reverie.
The senior boy of the school, you have heard, was Gaunt. The other three seniors, Tom Channing, Harry Huntley, and Gerald Yorke, possessed a considerable amount of power; but nothing equal to that vested in Gaunt. They had all three entered the school on the same day, and had kept pace with each other as they worked their way up in it, consequently not one could be said to hold priority; and when Gaunt should quit the school at the following Michaelmas, one of the three would become senior. Which, you may wish to ask? Ah, we don't know that, yet.
Charley Channing--a truthful, good boy, full of integrity, kind and loving by nature, and a universal favourite--sat tilted on the books. He was wishing with all his heart that he had not seen something which he had seen that day. He had been going through the cloisters in the afternoon, about the time that all Helstonleigh, college boys included, were in the streets watching for the sheriff's procession, when he saw one of the seniors steal (Bywater had been happy in the epithet) out of the cathedral into the quiet cloisters, peer about him, and then throw a broken ink-bottle into the graveyard which the cloisters enclosed. The boy stole away without perceiving Charley; and there sat Charley now, trying to persuade himself by some ingenious sophistry--which, however, he knew was sophistry--that the senior might not have been the one in the mischief; that the ink-bottle might have been on legitimate duty, and that he threw it from him because it was broken. Charles Channing did not like these unpleasant secrets. There was in the school a code of honour--the boys called it so--that one should not tell of another; and if the head-master ever went the length of calling the seniors to his aid, those seniors deemed themselves compelled to declare it, if the fault became known to them. Hence Tom Channing's hasty arrest of his brother's words.
"I wonder if I could see the ink-bottle there?" quoth Charles to himself. Rising from the books he ran through the cloisters to a certain part, and there, by a dexterous spring, perched himself on to the frame of the open mullioned windows. The gravestones lay pretty thick in the square, enclosed yard, the long, dank grass growing around them; but there appeared to be no trace of an ink-bottle.
"What on earth are you mounted up there for? Come down instantly. You know the row there has been about the walls getting defaced."
The speaker was Gerald Yorke, who had come up silently. Openly disobey him, young Channing dared not, for the seniors exacted obedience in school and out of it. "I'll get down directly, sir. I am not hurting the wall."
"What are you looking at? What is there to see?" demanded Yorke.
"Nothing particular. I was looking for what I can't see," pointedly returned Charley.
"Look here, Miss Channing; I don't quite understand you to-day. You were excessively mysterious in school, just now, over that surplice affair. Who's to know you were not in the mess yourself?"
"I think you might know it," returned Charley, as he jumped down. "It was more likely to have been you than I."
Yorke laid hold of him, clutching his jacket with a firm grasp. "You insolent young jackanapes! Now! what do you mean? You don't stir from here till you tell me."
"I'll tell you, Mr. Yorke; I'd rather tell," cried the boy, sinking his voice to a whisper. "I was here when you came peeping out of the college doors this afternoon, and I saw you come up to this niche, and fling away an ink-bottle."
Yorke's face flushed scarlet. He was a tall, strong fellow, with a pale complexion, thick, projecting lips, and black hair, promising fair to make a Hercules--but all the Yorkes were finely framed. He gave young Channing a taste of his strength; the boy, when shaken, was in his hands as a very reed. "You miserable imp! Do you know who is said to be the father of lies?"
"Let me alone, sir. It's no lie, and you know it's not. But I promise you on my honour that I won't split. I'll keep it in close;