Chapter Eight.

The Burnt Manuscript.

                                     All
All my poor scrapings, from a dozen years
Of dust and desk-work.
 
Sea Dreams.

It may be supposed that during chapel the next morning, and when he went into early school, Walter was in an agony of almost unendurable suspense; and this suspense was doomed to be prolonged for some time, until at last he could hardly sit still. Mr Paton did not at once notice that his desk was broken. He laid down his books, and went on as usual with the morning lesson.

At length Tracy was put on. He stood up in his usual self-satisfied way, looking admiringly at his boots, and running his delicate white hand through his scented hair. Mr Paton watched him with a somewhat contemptuous expression, as though he were thinking what a pity it was that any boy should be such a little puppy. Henderson, with his usual quick discrimination, had nicknamed Tracy the “Lisping Hawthornbud.”

“Your fifth failure this week, Tracy; you must do the usual punishment,” said Mr Paton, taking up his key to unlock the desk.

“Now for it,” thought all the form, looking on with great anxiety.

The key caught hopelessly in the broken lock. Mr Paton’s attention was aroused; he pushed the lid off the desk, and saw at once that it had been broken open.

“Who has broken open my desk?”

No answer.

He looked very grave, but said nothing, looking for his imposition-book.

“Where is my imposition-book?”

No answer.

“And where is my—?”

Mr Paton stopped, and looked with the greatest eagerness over every corner of the desk.

“Where is the manuscript I left here with my imposition-book?” he said in a tone of the most painful anxiety.

“I do hope and trust,” he said, turning pale, “that none of you have been wicked enough to injure it,” and here his voice faltered. “When I tell you that it was of the utmost value, I am sure that if any of you have concealed or taken it, you will give it back at once.”

There was deep silence.

“Once again,” he asked, “where is my imposition-book?”

“Burnt, sir; burnt, sir,” said one or two voices, hardly above a whisper.

“And my manuscript?” he asked, in a louder voice, and in still greater agitation. “Surely, surely, you cannot have been so thoughtless, so incredibly unjust as to—”

Walter stood up in his place, with his head bent, and his face covered with an ashy whiteness. “I burnt it, sir,” he said, in an almost inaudible voice, and trembling with fear.

“Come here,” said Mr Paton impetuously; “I can’t hear what you say. Now, then,” he continued, as Walter crept up beside his desk.

“I burnt it, sir,” he said, in a whisper.

“You—burnt—it!” said Mr Paton, starting up in uncontrollable emotion, which changed into a burst of anger as he gave Walter a box on the ear which sounded all over the room, and made the boy stagger back to his place. But the flash of rage was gone in an instant; and the next moment Mr Paton, afraid of trusting himself any longer, left his desk and hurried out, anxious to recover in solitude the calmness of mind and action which had been so terribly disturbed.

Mr Percival, who taught his form in another part of the room, seeing Mr Paton box Walter so violently on the ear, and knowing that this was the very reverse of his usual method, since he had never before touched a boy in anger, walked up to see what was the matter, just as Mr Paton, with great hurried strides, had reached the door.

“What is the matter with Mr Paton?” he asked.

There was a general murmur through the form, out of which Mr Percival caught something about Mr Paton’s papers having been burnt.

Anxious to fend him, to ask what had happened, Mr Percival, leaving the room, caught sight of him pacing with hasty and uneven steps along a private garden walk which belonged to the masters.

“I hope nothing unpleasant has occurred,” he said, overtaking him.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” said Mr Paton, with quivering lip, as he turned aside. And then, suppressing his emotion by a powerful effort of self-control, “It is only,” he said, “that the hard results of fifteen years’ continuous labour are now condensed into a heap of smut and ashes in the schoolroom fire.”

“You don’t mean to say that your Hebrew manuscripts are burnt?” asked Mr Percival in amazement.

“You know how I have been toiling at them for years, Percival; you know that I began them before I left college, that I regarded them as the chief work of my life, and that I devoted to them every moment of my leisure. You know, too, the pride and pleasure which I took in their progress, and the relief with which I turned to them from the vexations and anxieties of one’s life here. To work at them has been for years my only recreation and delight. Well, they were finished at last; I was only correcting them for the press; they would have gone to the printer in a month, and I should have lived to complete a toilsome and honourable task. Well, the dream is over, and a handful of ashes represents the struggle of my best years.”

Mr Percival knew well that his coadjutor had been working for years at a commentary on the Hebrew text of the Four Greater Prophets. It had been the cherished and chosen task of his life; he had brought to it great stores of learning, accumulated in the vigour of his powers, and the enthusiasm of a youthful ambition, and he had employed upon it every spare hour left him from his professional duties. He looked to it as the means of doing essential service to the church of which he was an ordained member, and, secondarily, as the road to reputation and well-merited advancement. And in five minutes the hand of one angry boy had robbed him of the fruit of all his hopes.

“If they wanted to display the hatred which I well know that they feel,” said Mr Paton bitterly, “they might have chosen any way, literally any way, but that. They might have left me, at least, that which was almost my only pleasure and object in life, and which had no connection with them or their pursuits.” And his face grew haggard as he stopped in his walk, and tried to realise the extent of what he had lost. “I would rather have seen everything I possess in the whole world destroyed than that,” he said slowly, and with strong emotion.

“And was it really Evson who did this?” asked Mr Percival, filled with the sincerest pity for his colleague’s wounded feelings.

“It matters little who did it, Percival; but, yes, it was your friend Evson.”

“The little, graceless, abominable wretch!” exclaimed Mr Percival with anger, “he must be expelled. But can’t you recommence the task?”

“Recommence?” said Mr Paton, in a hard voice; “and who will give me back the hope and vigour of the last fifteen years? how shall I have the heart again to toil through the same long trains of research and thought? where are the hundreds of references which I had sought out and verified with hours of heavy midnight labour? how am I to have access again to the scores of books which I consulted before I began to work? The very thought of it sickens me. Youth and hope are over. No, Percival, there is no more to be said. I am robbed of a life’s work. Leave me, please, alone for a little, until I have learnt to say less bitterly, ‘God’s will be done.’”

                            “‘He needeth not
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke they please him best,’”

said Mr Percival, in a tone of kind and deep sympathy, as he left him to return to the schoolroom.

But once in sight of Mr Paton’s open and rifled desk, Mr Percival’s pent-up indignation burst forth into clear flame. Stopping in front of Mr Paton’s form, he exclaimed, in a voice that rang with scorn and sorrow—

“You boys do not know the immense mischief which your thoughtless and worthless spite and folly have caused. I say ‘boys,’ but I believe, and rejoice to believe, that one only of you is guilty, and I rejoice too, that that one is a new boy, who must have brought here feelings and passions more worthy of an ignorant and ill-trained plough-boy than of a Saint Winifred’s scholar. The hand that would burn a valuable manuscript would fire a rick of hay.”

“O sir,” said Henderson, starting up and interrupting him, “we were all very nearly as bad. It was the rest of us that burnt the imposition-book; Evson had nothing to do with that.” Henderson had forgotten for the moment that he at least had had no share in burning the imposition-book, for his warm quick heart could not bear that these blows should fall unbroken on his friend’s head.

But his generous effort failed; for Mr Percival, barely noticing the interruption, continued, “The imposition-book? I know nothing about that. If you burnt it you were very foolish and reckless; you deserve no doubt to be punished for it, but that was comparatively nothing. But do you know, bad boy,” he said, turning again to Walter, “do you know what you have done? Do you know that your dastardly spitefulness has led you to destroy writings which had cost your master years and years of toil that cannot be renewed? He treated you with unswerving impartiality; he never punished you but when you deserved punishment, and when he believed it to be for your good, and yet you turn upon him in this adder-like way; you break open his desk like a thief, and, in one moment of despicable ill-temper, you rob him and the world of that which had been the pursuit and object of his life. You, Evson, may well hide your face”—for Walter had bent over the desk, and in agonies of shame and remorse had covered his face with both hands—“you may well be ashamed to look either at me or at any honest and manly and right-minded boy among your companions. You have done a wrong for which it will be years hence a part of your retribution to remember that nothing you can ever do can repair it, or do away with its effects. I am more than disappointed with you. You have done mischief which the utmost working of all your powers cannot for years counterbalance, if, instead of being as base and idle as you now appear to be, you were to devote your whole heart to work. I don’t know what will be done to you; I, for my part, hope that you will not be suffered to remain with us; but, if you are, I am sure that you will receive, as you richly deserve, the reprobation and contempt of every boy among your schoolfellows who is capable of one spark of honour or right feeling.”

Every word that Mr Percival had said came to poor Walter with the most poignant force; all the master’s reproaches pierced his heart and let blood. He sat there not stirring, stunned and crushed, as though he had been beaten by the blows of a hammer. He quailed and shuddered to think of the great and cruel injustice, the base and grievous injury into which his blind passion had betrayed him, and thought that he could never hold up his head again.

Mr Percival’s indignant expostulation passed over the other culprits who heard it like a thunderstorm. There was a force and impetuosity in this gentleman’s manner, when his anger was kindled, which had long gained for him among the boys, with whom he was the most popular of all the masters, the half-complimentary soubriquet of “Thunder-and-lightning.” But none of them had ever before heard him speak with such concentrated energy and passion, and all except generous little Henderson were awed by it into silence. But Henderson at that moment was wholly absorbed in Walter’s sorrows.

“Tell him,” said he in Walter’s ear, “tell him it was all a mistake, that you thought the papers were old exercises. Dear Walter, tell him before he goes.”

But Walter still rested with his white cheeks on his hands upon the desk, and neither moved nor spoke. And Mr Percival, turning indignantly upon his heel, with one last glance of unmitigated contempt, had walked off to his own form.

“Walter, don’t take it to heart so,” said Henderson, putting his arm round his neck; “you couldn’t help it; you made a sad mistake, that’s all. Go and tell Paton so, and I’m sure he’ll forgive you.”

A slight quiver was all that showed that Walter heard. Henderson would have liked to see his anguish relieved by a burst of tears; but the tears did not come, and Walter did not move.

At last a hand touched him, and he heard the voice of the head boy say to him, “Get up, Evson; I’m to take you to Dr Lane with a note from Mr Percival.”

He rose and followed mechanically, waiting in the headmaster’s porch while the monitor went in.

“Dr Lane won’t see you now,” said Somers, coming out again. “Croft,” (addressing the school Famulus), “Dr Lane says you’re to lock up Mr Evson by himself in the private room.”

Walter followed the Famulus to the private room, a little room at the top of the house, where he knew that boys were locked previous to expulsion, that they might have no opportunity for doing any mischief before they went.

The Famulus left him here, and returned a few minutes after with some dry bread and milk, which he placed on the deal table, which, with a wooden chair, constituted the sole furniture of the room; he then locked the door, and left Walter finally to his own reflections.

Then it was that flood after flood of passionate tears seemed to remove the iron cramp which had pained his heart. He flung himself on the floor, and as he thought of the irreparable cruelty which he had inflicted on a man who had been severe indeed, but never unkind to him, and of the apparent malignity to which all who heard it would attribute what he had done, he sobbed and sobbed as though his heart would break.

At one o’clock the Famulus returned with some dinner. He found Walter sitting at a corner of the room, his head resting against the angle of the wall, and his eyes red and inflamed with long crying. The morning’s meal still lay untasted on the table.

He looked round with a commiserating glance. “Come, come, Master Evson,” he said, “you’ve no call to give way so, sir. If you’ve done wrong, the wrong’s done now, and frettin’ won’t help it. There’s them above as’ll forgive you, and make you do better next time, lad, if you only knew it. Here, you must eat some of this dinner, Master Evson, and leave off cryin’ so; cryin’s no comfort, sir.”

He stood by and waited on Walter with the greatest kindness and respect, till he had seen him swallow some food, not without difficulty, and then with encouraging and cheerful words left him, and once more locked the door.

The weary afternoon wore on, and Walter sat mournfully alone with nothing but miserable thoughts—miserable to whatever subject he turned them, and more miserable the longer he dwelt on them. As the shades of evening drew in he felt his head swimming, and the long solitude made him feel afraid as he wondered whether they would leave him there all night. And then he heard a light step approach the door, and a gentle tap. He made no answer, for he thought he knew the step, and he could not summon up voice to speak for a fit of sobbing which it brought on. Then he heard the boy stoop down, and push a note under the door.

He took it up when he heard the footsteps die away, and by the fast failing light was just able to make it out. It ran thus—

“Dear Walter,—You can’t think how sorry, how very, very sorry I am for you. I wish I could be with you and take part of your punishment. Forgive me for being cold and proud to you. I have been longing to speak to you all the time, but felt too shy. It was all my fault. I will never break with you again. Good-bye, dear Walter, from your ever and truly affectionate, Harry Kenrick.”

“He will never break with me again,” thought Walter. “If I’m to go to-morrow I’m afraid he’ll never have the chance.” And then his saddest thoughts reverted to the home which he had left so recently for the first time, and to which he was to return with nothing but dishonour and disgrace.

At six o’clock the kind-hearted Famulus brought him a lamp, some tea, and one or two books, which he had no heart to read. No one was allowed to visit the private room under heavy penalties, so that Walter had no other visitor until eight, when Somers, the monitor who had taken him to Dr Lane, looked in and icily observed, “You’re to sleep in the sickroom, Evson; come with me.”

“Am I expelled, Somers?” he faltered out.

“I don’t know,” said Somers in a freezing tone; “you deserve to be.”

True! oh lofty and pitiless Somers. But is that all which you could find to say to the poor boy in his distress? And if we all had our deserts...?

“At any rate,” Somers added, “I for one won’t have you as a fag any longer, and I shouldn’t think that anyone else would either.”

With which cutting remark he left Walter to his reflections.