Mildred Arkell Volume Ii Part 32

"Perhaps he means to make a night of it?" suggested Lewis junior, opportunely enough, if he had but known it.

"Hold your tongue, Lewis junior," said Jocelyn. "He may have got leave from the master for the evening, and we not know it."

"I don't think he has, though," dissented young Wilberforce.

"We won't split upon him," eagerly spoke up Lewis--not the junior. "He has been a horrid sneak, especially in getting himself in with the dean's daughter; but it won't do to begin splitting one upon another."

"I should like to hear any of you attempting it," authoritatively spoke the senior boy. "I'd split you."

"We don't mean to. Don't be so sharp, Jocelyn."

"There's not the least doubt that he is at the deanery," decided Jocelyn. "I heard something said the other day about the master's having given him general leave to stop there, when asked, without coming home to say it."

"Who told you that, Jocelyn?" questioned Lewis, his ears turning red.

"I heard it, and that's enough. The master can depend upon Arkell, you know."

"Oh, can he though!" cried Lewis, ironically. "I'd lay a crown he's not at the deanery."

"Up to bed, boys," commanded Jocelyn.

The Lewises, senior and junior, and Henry Arkell slept in one room; the rest of the boys were divided into two others. The rooms in the quaint old house were not large. All had separate beds. Arkell's was in the corner behind the door. Marmaduke Lewis, the younger, was in bed immediately, schoolboy fashion, the process occupying about half-a-minute; but the elder did not seem inclined to be so quick to-night. He dawdled about the room, brushed his hair, held his mouth open to admire his teeth in the gla.s.s, tried how many different faces he could make, stuck pins in the candle, and, in short, seemed in anything but a bed humour. In the midst of this delay, he heard the voice of Mr.

Wilberforce, speaking to one of the servants, as he ascended the stairs.

What Lewis did, in his consternation, he hardly knew. The first thing was to turn the candle upside down in the candlestick, and jam it well in; the next was to fling some of his brother's clothes on to his own chair; and the third to bolt into bed with his own clothes on, and draw the counterpane over his head. Mr. Wilberforce opened the door.

"Are you in bed, boys?"

Lewis put part of his face out.

"Yes, sir. Good night, sir."

"Good night," repeated Mr. Wilberforce, and closed the door upon the room.

Lewis breathed a blessing upon all propitious stars, that he had not looked behind the door at the vacant bed. Then his going to let out Arkell was impossible, now Mr. Wilberforce was in: which had been the indecisive project agitating his brain.

And now we must return to Henry Arkell. The church of St. James the Less struck a quarter past five when Henry took his fingers from the keys of the organ. "Only a quarter past five," he soliloquized; "how the evenings draw in! Last week was moonlight, and I did not notice it so much. I don't see how I shall get my practising here these winter months, unless I s.n.a.t.c.h an hour between morning and afternoon school."

He felt for his music, for it was too dark to see, rolled it up, and then felt his way down the narrow and nearly perpendicular staircase, dark even in daylight. When he reached the bench at the entrance, he placed his hand on the spot where he had put the key. He could not feel it: he only supposed he had missed the spot by an inch or two, and groped about with his hands. He turned to the door to pull it open, and let in the light.

The door was closed, was fast; and Henry Arkell felt his face grow hot as the truth burst upon him, that he was fastened up in the church. He concluded that the old clerk had done it in mistake. "I must ring the bell," thought he, "and let them know somebody's in the church."

But he was doomed to fresh disappointment, for, on groping his way to the belfry, he found it fastened: cords, bells, and all were locked up.

Sometimes this door was locked, sometimes it was left open, just as the clerk remembered, or not, to fasten it.

"I can't stop here all night!" exclaimed he, his face growing more and more heated. "What in the world am I to do?"

What indeed? What would you have done, reader? Set on and shouted? But there was n.o.body to hear: the church was solitary, and its walls were thick. Thump at the door? But if you had nothing but your hands to thump with, little hope that any result would be obtained.

It was a novel and a disagreeable situation for the boy to be placed in--locked alone in the gloomy old church; gloomy in more than one sense of the word, and smelling of the dead. The small, confined windows were high up in the walls, and entirely inaccessible, and there was no other outlet. The vestry was only lighted by two panes of thick gla.s.s inserted into its roof; and, in short, the case was hopeless.

And the boy grew so. He shouted, and called, and thumped, just as you or I might have done, without any regard to its manifest inutility. He was a brave-spirited boy, owning a clear conscience; and he was a singularly religious boy, far more so than it is usual for those of his age to be, possessing an ever-present trust in G.o.d's good care and protection.

Still, disagreeable thoughts would intrude: his lonely situation stood out in exaggerated force, and recollections of a certain ghostly tale, connected with that church, rose up before him. It was a tale which had gone the round of Westerbury the previous year, and the ghostly-inclined put firm faith in it. The old clerk was an obstinate believer in it, for he had seen it with his own eyes; the s.e.xton had seen it with his, and two gravediggers had seen it with theirs. A citizen had died, and been buried in the middle aisle, not many yards from where Henry Arkell now stood. After his burial, suspicion arose that he had not come fairly to his end, and the coroner had issued his mandate for the disinterment of the body, and the s.e.xton and two gravediggers proceeded to their task.

They chose night to do it in, "not to be bothered with starers at 'em,"

they said; and the clerk chose to bear them company. At three o'clock in the morning the whole four rushed out of the church panic-stricken, made their way to the nearest street, and rose it with their frantic cries.

Windows were thrown up in alarm, and nightcaps stretched out--what on earth was the matter? The buried man's ghost had appeared to them in a sea of blue flame, was the trembling tale they told, and which went forth to Westerbury. The blue flame was accounted for; the ghost, never.

They had a basin full of gin with them, and, in lighting a pipe, they had managed to set light to the gin, which immediately ascended in a ghastly stream. The men, it was found, had a little gin on board themselves, as well as in the basin; and to that, no doubt, in conjunction with the blue flames, the ghost owed its origin.

Now a ghost in broad daylight, with all the bustle and reality of mid-day life about us, and a ghost fastened up with oneself in a church at night-time, bear two widely different aspects. Henry Arkell had heartily laughed at the story, had made merry over the consternation of the half-drunken men, but he did not altogether enjoy being so near the ghostly spot now; for though reason tried to be heard, imagination had got fast hold of the reins. He lifted his eyes, with a desperate effort, and looked round the church: he began to calculate which was the very spot, in the gloom of the middle aisle: he grasped the door of a pew near where he stood, and bent his face down upon it in an agony of terror.

"And I must be here until morning," his conviction whispered. "O G.o.d!

keep this terror from me! Send thine Holy Spirit to come near and strengthen me! Oh, yes, yes," he resumed, after a pause; "I shall be all right if I do but trust in G.o.d. He is everywhere; He is with me now.

I will go up to the organ again."

He groped his way up, sat down, and began to play as well as he could in the perfect darkness. He played some of the cathedral chants, and sang to them; it was a curious sound, echoing there in the dark and lonely night; and it was a positive fact that, in so doing, his superst.i.tious alarm pa.s.sed, from his mind.

But oh, how long the hours were! how long the quarters, as the slow clock gave them out! He still kept on playing, dreading to leave off lest the terror should come back again. When it struck nine, he could have thought it four in the morning, judging by the dreary time that seemed to have elapsed. "The boys will be going up to bed directly," he said, thinking of the master's; "oh, why don't they send out to look for me? But they'd never think of looking here!"

He kept on playing. About ten o'clock he knelt down to say his prayers, as if preparing to retire for the night, and then ensconced himself as comfortably as he could on the seat of the singers, which was well cushioned. "If I could but go to sleep, and sleep till daylight,"

thought he, "there would be no chance of that foolish terror coming back again. Foolish indeed! How very absurd I am!"

He fell into a train of thought; not happy thought: schoolboys have trouble as well as grown people: and Henry Arkell had plenty just then, as you know. The superst.i.tious feeling did not come back, and at length he sank into sleep.

He did not know what roused him: something did. The first thing he heard distinctly was a scuffling noise, followed by a "hush-sh-sh!" breathed from a human voice. He felt a cramped sensation all over, but that arose from his inconvenient couch, and he could not for the life of him remember where he was.

He stretched out his hand, and it came in contact with the front of the gallery; it was close to him, for the singers' seat was very narrow: he raised himself to look over, still not remembering what had pa.s.sed. He seemed to be in a church, for one of two male figures, walking up the aisle, carried a lighted taper, which threw its glimmering upon the pews, though the man shaded it with his hand. Whether Henry Arkell had been dreaming of robbers, certain it is, he judged these men to be such: they turned off to the vestry, which was on the side of the church, nearly at the top; and he rubbed his eyes, and full recollection returned to him.

"What has put robbers in my head?" he debated. "They are not robbers: they must be come to look for me. But they stole up as if they were robbers!" he added after a pause. "And why did they not call out to me?"

An impulse took him down from the gallery and up the church; he moved as silently as the men had done. The vestry door was open, and he stood outside on the matting and peeped in, secure of not being seen in the darkness. To his surprise, he recognised faces he knew--gentlemen's faces, not robbers'. One of them was George Prattleton; and the other was the stranger he had seen with him the previous night. What were they doing in the vestry at that hour?

"Now make haste about it, Rolls," George Prattleton was saying, as Henry gazed in. "I don't half like the work, and if I had not been more hard up than any poor devil ever was yet, you would never have got me on to it. There's the register."

George Prattleton had unlocked a safe and taken a book from it, which he put on the table. "Mind, Rolls, you are not to copy anything; that was the agreement."

"I don't want to copy anything: I gave you my word, didn't I?" was the reply of Mr. Rolls, who had seized upon the book. "I only want to see whether a certain entry is here, or whether it is not, and I give you 20_l._ for getting me the sight: and a deuced easy way it is of earning 20_l._, Prattleton."

Rolls had drawn a chair to the table, and was poring over the register, as he spoke, turning the leaves one by one. Prattleton stood by, and held the candle, not very steadily.

"I can't see, if you whiffle it like that, Prat," cried Mr. Rolls, taking the candlestick from his hand and setting it on the table.

"How long shall you be?"

"Why, I have hardly begun. Don't be impatient. Sit down on that other chair and take a nap, if you are tired."

Prattleton continued to stand at the table, but his impatience was evidently great. His back was to Henry Arkell, but the boy had full view of the countenance and movements of the other: his interest, in what was pa.s.sing, was not less than his astonishment.

"You say you know the date, so where's the use of being so dilatory?"

cried Mr. Prattleton. "You turn over the leaves as slow as if you were going to execution. Ah, you have it now, I think."