The Channings | Page 6

wigs will be soliciting
your photograph as a keepsake."
"I hope they'll set it in diamonds," retorted Hurst.
The boys began to file out, putting on their trenchers, as they clattered

down the steps. Charley Channing sat himself down in the cloisters on
a pile of books, as if willing that the rest should pass out before him.
His brother saw him sitting there, and came up to him, speaking in an
undertone.
"Charley, you know the rules of the school: one boy must not tell of
another. As Bywater says, 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