Chapter Twenty Three.
Tom the Boat-boy earns four-and-sixpence.
Riddell, as he read over and over again the mysterious document in his hand, hardly knew what to make of it.
It looked like a clue, certainly. But who had sent it? Was it a friend or an enemy; and if the latter, might it not just as likely be a hoax as not?
He examined the disguised writing letter for letter, but failed to recognise in it the hand of any one he knew. He called back Cusack and cross-examined him as to how and when the letter was brought to his study; but Cusack could tell him nothing. All he knew was that when he went in to look after Riddell’s tea that afternoon, it was lying there on the table. He couldn’t say how long it had been there. He hadn’t been in the room since dinner, nor had Riddell.
Cusack was very curious to know what the letter was about concerning which the captain seemed so much excited; but Riddell declined to gratify him on this point, and put the paper away in his pocket and returned to his work.
“No,” said he to himself, “if it’s a hoax there’s no object in making it public property, and still less reason if there’s anything in it.”
Of one thing he was determined—he must go down to-morrow morning and have an interview with Tom the boat-boy. The thing might all be a hoax, but if there was the remotest chance of its being otherwise it was clearly his duty to do what he could to find out the miscreant who had brought such disgrace upon Willoughby. So he spent a somewhat uneasy evening, and even appeared absent-minded when young Wyndham, now a constant visitor to his study, paid his usual evening call.
“I say,” said the boy, with beaming face, as he entered, “isn’t it prime, Riddell? Bloomfield’s going to try me in the second-eleven, he says. You know I’ve been grinding at cricket like a horse lately, and he came down and watched me this afternoon, and I was in, and made no end of a lucky score off Dobson’s bowling. And then Bloomfield said he’d bowl me an over. My eye! what a funk I was in. I could hardly hold the bat. But I straightened up somehow, and his first ball went by. The next was frightfully swift, and dead on, but it broke a bit to the leg, and I was just in time to get at it and send it right away between long-leg and long-stop in the elms—a safe five if we’d been running. And old Bloomfield laughed and said he couldn’t wait till the ball was sent up, and said I could turn up at the second-eleven Big practice to-morrow and see how I got on there. I say, isn’t it prime, Riddell? I tell you, I shall stand on my head if I get into the team.”
Riddell had only partially heard this jubilant speech, for at that moment Tom the boat-boy was more in his thoughts even than Wyndham the Limpet. However, he had heard enough to gather from it that his young protégé was in a vast state of joy and content, and as usual he was ready with any amount of sympathy.
“It will be splendid if you do get in,” said he.
“Yes. They’ve only got eight places actually fixed, I hear, so I’ve three chances. I say, Riddell, I like Bloomfield, do you know? I think he’s an awfully good captain.”
Riddell could not help smiling at this artless outburst from the young candidate for cricket honours, and replied, “I like him too, for he came and watched our practice too, here at Welch’s.”
“Did he bowl you any balls?” demanded Wyndham.
“No, happily,” said Riddell; “but some one told me he told somebody else that I might possibly squeeze into the eleven against Rockshire if I practised hard.”
“What!” exclaimed Wyndham, in most uncomplimentary astonishment. “You in the first eleven! I say, it must be a mistake.”
“I’m afraid they’ll think it a mistake,” said Riddell, laughing; “but I certainly have heard something of the sort.”
“Why, you usen’t to play at all in our house,” said Wyndham.
“No more I did; but since I came here I’ve been going in for it rather more, though I never dreamt of such rapid promotion.”
“Well,” said Wyndham, quite patronisingly, “I’m jolly glad to hear it; but I wish you were in the schoolhouse instead of Welch’s. By the way, how are the ‘kids’ in your house getting on?”
“The ‘kids’ are getting on very well, I fancy,” said the captain. “They’ve a match with the Parrett’s juniors fixed already, and mean to challenge the schoolhouse too, I fancy.”
“I say, that’s coming it rather strong,” said Wyndham, half incredulously.
“It’s a fact, though,” said Riddell, “and what’s more, I have it on Parrett’s authority that they are getting to play very well together, and any eleven that plays them will have to look out for itself if it is to beat them.”
“Ho, ho! I guess our fellows will be able to manage that. Of course, you know, if I’m in the second-eleven, I shan’t be able to play with my house juniors.”
“That will be a calamity!” said Riddell, laughing, as he began to get out his books and settle himself for the evening’s work.
Despite all the boy’s juvenile conceit and self-assurance, Riddell rejoiced to find him grown enthusiastic about anything so harmless as cricket. Wyndham had been working hard the last week or so in a double sense—working hard not only at cricket, but in striving to act up to the better resolutions which, with Riddell’s help, he had formed. And he had succeeded so far in both. Indeed, the cricket had helped the good resolutions, and the good resolutions had helped the cricket. As long as every spare moment was occupied with his congenial sport, and a place in the second-eleven was a prize within reach, he had neither time nor inclination to fall back on the society of Silk or Gilks, or any of their set. And as long as the good resolutions continued to fire his breast, he was only too glad to find refuge from temptation in the steady pursuit of so honourable an ambition as cricket.
He was, if truth must be told, more enthusiastic about his cricket than about his studies, and that evening it was a good while before Wyndham could get his mind detached from bats and balls and concentrated on Livy.
Riddell himself, too, found work more than ordinarily difficult that night, but his thoughts were wandering on far less congenial ground than cricket.
Supposing that letter did mean something, how ought he to act? It was no pleasant responsibility to have thrown on his shoulders the duty of bringing a criminal to justice, and possibly of being the means of his expulsion. And yet the honour of Willoughby was at stake, and no squeamishness ought to interfere with that. He wished, true or untrue, that the wretched letter had been left anywhere but in his study.
“I say,” said young Wyndham, after about an hour’s spell of work, and strangely enough starting the very topic with which Riddell’s mind was full—“I say, I think that boat-race business is blowing over, do you know? You don’t hear nearly so much about it now.”
“The thing is, ought it to blow over?” said the captain, gravely.
“Why, of course! Besides, after all it may have been an accident. I broke a bit of cord the other day, and it looked just as if it had been partly cut through. Anyhow, it’s just as much the Parretts business as ours, and they aren’t doing anything, I know.”
“It would be a good deal more satisfactory to have it cleared up,” said Riddell.
“It would do just as well to have a new race, and settle the thing right off—even if they were to lick us.”
Wyndham went soon afterwards. Riddell was too much occupied with his own perplexities to think much just then of the boy’s views on this burning question. And after all, had he thought of them, he would probably have guessed, as the reader may have done, that Wyndham’s present cricket mania made him dread any reopening of the old soreness between Parrett’s and the schoolhouse, which would be sure to result, among other things, in his exclusion, as a member of the latter fraternity, from the coveted place in the second-eleven.
The next morning the captain was up early, and on his way to the boat-house. Ever since the race the river had been almost deserted, at any rate in the early mornings.
Consequently when Riddell arrived at the boat-house he found no one up. After a good deal of knocking he managed to rouse the boatman.
“I want Tom,” he said, “to steer me up to the Willows.”
“You might have let me known you’d want the gig yesterday,” said the man, rather surlily; “I’d have left it out for you overnight.”
Had it been Bloomfield or Fairbairn, or any other of the boating heroes of Willoughby, Blades the boatman would have sung a very different song. But a boatman does not know anything about senior classics.
“You’ll find a boat moored by the landing there,” said that functionary; “and give a call for young Alf, he’ll do to steer you.”
But this would not suit Riddell at all. “No,” said he; “I want Tom, please, and tell him to be quick.”
The man went off surlily, and Riddell was left to kick his heels for twenty minutes in a state of very uncomfortable suspense.
At length, to his relief, Tom, a knowing youth of about fourteen, appeared, with a cushion over one shoulder and a pair of sculls over the other, and the embarkation was duly effected.
Tom was a privileged person at Willoughby. In consideration of not objecting to an occasional licking, he was permitted to be as impudent and familiar as he pleased to the young gentlemen in whose service he laboured. Being a professional waterman, he considered it his right to patronise everybody. Even old Wyndham last season had received most fatherly encouragement from this irreverent youngster, while any one who could make no pretensions to skill with the oars was simply at his mercy.
This being so, Riddell had made up his mind for a trying time of it, and was not disappointed.
“What! so you’re a-goin’ in for scullin’ then?” demanded the young waterman as the boat put off.
“Yes; I want to try my hand,” said the captain.
“You’ll never do no good at it, I can tell yer, before yer begins,” said the boy.
So it seemed. What with inexperience of the sculls, and nervousness under the eye of this ruthless young critic, and uneasiness as to the outcome of this strange interview, Riddell made a very bad performance.
“Ya-ow! I thought it would come to that!” jeered Tom when, after a few strokes, the captain got his sculls hopelessly feathered under water and could not get them up again. “There you are! That comes of diggin’! Always the way with you chaps!”
“Suppose, instead of going on like that,” said Riddell, getting up the blades of his sculls with a huge effort, “you show me the way to do it properly!”
“What’s the use of showing you? You could never learn, I can see it by the looks of you!”
After this particularly complimentary speech Riddell rowed ploddingly on for a little distance, Tom whistling shrilly in the stern all the way in a manner most discouraging for conversation.
But Riddell was determined, come what would, he would broach the unpleasant subject. Consequently, after some further progress up-stream, he rested on his oars, and said, “I’ve not been out on the water since the day of the boat-race.”
“Aren’t you, though?” said Tom.
A pause.
“That was a queer thing, the rudder-line breaking that day,” said Riddell, looking hard at his young companion.
Tom apparently did not quite like it. Either it seemed as if Riddell thought he knew something about the affair, or else his conscience was not quite easy.
“In course it was,” replied he, surlily. “I knows nothink about it.”
Riddell, for a quiet, nervous boy, was shrewd for his age, and there was something in Tom’s constrained and uncomfortable manner as he made this disclaimer that convinced him that after all the mysterious letter had something in it.
It was a bold step to take, he knew, and it might end in a failure, but he would chance it at any rate.
“You do know something about it, Tom!” said he, sternly, and with a searching look at the young waterman.
Tom did! He didn’t say so! Indeed he violently denied that he did, and broke out into a state of most virtuous indignation.
“Well I ever, if that ain’t a nice thing to say to a chap. I tell you, I knows nothink about it. The idea! What ’ud I know anythink about it for? I tell you you’re out, governor. You’re come to the wrong shop—do you hear?”
Riddell did hear; and watching the boy’s manner as he hurried out these protests, he was satisfied that he was on the right tack.
It had never occurred to him before. Perhaps the culprit was Tom himself; perhaps it was he who, for some reason of his own, had cut the line and caused all the mischief.
If that were so, what a relief and what a satisfaction it would be! Riddell felt that if Tom himself were the wrong-doer he could almost embrace him, so great would be his joy at knowing that no Willoughby boy was guilty of the crime. But it was too good a notion to be true, and Tom soon dispelled it.
“I tell you,” continued he, vehemently, but looking down so as to avoid the captain’s eye. “I tell you I aren’t done it, there. It’s no use your trying to fix it on me. Do you suppose I wouldn’t know if I’d done it? You blame the right parties, governor, do you hear? I ain’t done it.”
“I never said you did,” replied Riddell, feeling he had by this time got the upper hand in the argument, “but you know who did.”
“There you go. How do I know? I don’t know, and I ain’t done it.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Riddell, “the lines could have been cut and you not know it? Don’t you sleep in the boat-house?”
“In course I do—but I ain’t done it, there!”
“Don’t be a young fool, Tom,” said Riddell, sternly. “What I want to know is who did do it.”
“How do you suppose I know?” demanded the boy.
“Who did do it?” again repeated Riddell.
“I don’t know, there!” retorted Tom. “I never see his face.”
“Then some one did come to the boat-house that night?” said Riddell.
“How do I know? Suppose they did?”
“Suppose they did? I want to know who it was.”
“I tell you I don’t know. It was pitch dark, and I ain’t seen his face, there; and what’s more, I don’t know the chap.”
“But you let him into the boat-house?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Tom, whose strong point was evidently not in standing cross-examination. “That’s where you’re wrong again. You’re all wrong.”
“You knew he was there, at any rate,” said Riddell.
“No, I didn’t. You’re wrong agin. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. How could I know he was there, when I worn’t there myself?”
“What! did he get in while you were away?”
“In course he did. Do you suppose I goes to bed like you kids at eight o’clock? No fear. Why, I don’t get my supper at Joe Blades’s till ten.”
“Then you found some one in the boat-house when you went there, after supper, to go to bed?”
“There you are, all wrong agin. How do you suppose I’d find him when he got out of the window?”
“Then he came in and went out by the window?” asked Riddell.
“Why, you don’t suppose he could come down the chimbley, do you?” retorted Tom, scornfully, “and there’s no way else.”
“You had the key of the door all the time, of course,” said Riddell.
“In course. Do you suppose we leaves the boat’us open for anybody as likes to come in without leave?”
“Then it was seeing the window open made you know some one had been in?” continued the captain.
“Wrong agin! Why, you aren’t been right once yet.”
“Do you mean you really saw some one there?”
“How could I see him when he was a-hoppin’ out of the winder just as I comes in? I tell you I didn’t see him. You couldn’t have sor him either, not with all your learnin’.”
“Then you’ve no idea who it was?”
“Ain’t I? that’s all you know.”
“Why, you say you never saw him. Did you hear his voice?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Has some one told you? Has he come and told you himself?”
“No, he ain’t. Wrong agin.”
“Did he leave anything behind that you would know him by, then?”
The boy looked up sharply at Riddell, who saw that he had made a point, and followed it up.
“What did he leave behind? His cap?” he asked.
“His cap! Do you suppose chaps cut strings with their caps? Why, you must be a flat.”
“His knife, was it?” exclaimed Riddell, excitedly. “Was it his knife?”
“There you go; you’re so clever. I as good as tell yer, and then you go on as if you guessed it yourself! You ain’t got as much learnin’ as you think, governor.”
“But was it his knife he left behind?” inquired Riddell, too eager to attend to the sarcasms of his companion.
“What could it ’a been, unless it might be a razor. You don’t cut ropes with your thumb-nails, do you? Of course it was his knife.”
“And have you got it still, Tom?”
Here Tom began to get shy. As long as it was only information that the captain wanted to get at he didn’t so much mind being cross-examined, but directly it looked as if his knife was in peril he bristled up.
“That’ll do,” said he gruffly; “my knife’s nothink to do with you.”
“I know it isn’t, and I don’t want to take it from you. I only want to look at it.”
“Oh, yes; all very fine. And you mean to make out as it’s yourn and you was the chap I saw hoppin’ out of the winder, do yer? I know better. He weren’t your cut, so you needn’t try to make that out.”
“Of course it wasn’t I,” said Riddell, horrified even at the bare suspicion, still more at the idea of any one confessing to such a crime for the sake of getting a paltry knife.
Still Tom was obdurate and would not produce his treasure. In vain Riddell assured him that he made no claim to it, and, even if the knife were his own, would not dream of depriving the boy of it now. Tom listened to it all with an incredulous scowl, and Riddell was beginning to despair of ever setting eyes on the knife, when the boy solved the difficulty of his own accord.
“What do you want to look at it for?” he demanded. “Only to see if I knew whose it was once.”
“Well, I ain’t a-goin’ to let yer see it unless you lay a half-a-crown down on that there seat. There! I ain’t a-going to be done by you or any of your scholars.”
Riddell gladly put down the money and had the satisfaction at last of seeing Tom fumble in his pockets for the precious weapon.
It was a long time coming to light, and meanwhile the boy kept a suspicious eye on the money, evidently not quite sure whether, after all, he was safe.
At length from the deepest depth of his trouser pocket his hand emerged, bringing with it the knife.
Had Tom not been so intent on the half-crown which lay on the seat he would have been amazed at the sudden pallor which overspread the captain’s face and the half-suppressed gasp which he gave as his eyes fell on—young Wyndham’s knife!
There was no mistaking it. Riddell knew it well. Wyndham when first he possessed it was never tired of flourishing it proudly before all his acquaintances, and finding some pretext for using it or lending it every five minutes of the day.
Riddell had often had it pressed upon him. Yes, and now, with a shock that was almost sickening, he recollected that he had had it in his hand that very night before the boat-race.
And with the thought there rushed in upon him the whole memory of that evening. How excited, how restless the boy had been, how impossible he had found it to work, how wildly he had talked about the coming race, and how he had set his mind on the schoolhouse boat winning. Riddell remembered every word of it now, and how Wyndham’s excitement had baulked him of his desire for a serious talk that evening. And then he remembered how abruptly the boy had left him, returning hurriedly a moment after for his knife—this very knife which less than two hours afterwards had been dropped on the boat-house floor in the culprit’s hurried retreat by the window!
Riddell felt literally sick as it all rushed through his mind at the sight of the knife in Tom’s hand.
“Have you seen it enough?” demanded the youth, still eyeing the half-crown.
“Yes,” murmured Riddell. And surely he never uttered a truer word.
Tom, startled by his voice, looked up.
“Hullo,” said he, “what’s up? One would think you’d never saw a knife afore!”
Riddell tried feebly to smile and recover himself.
“Tell you what,” said Tom, struck with a brilliant idea—“tell you what, governor. You lay another two bob on the top of that there half-a-crown and it’s your’s. Come!”
Riddell mechanically took out his purse and produced the florin. It was almost the last coin that remained of his pocket-money for that term, but he was too miserable even to think of that.
Tom grabbed at the money eagerly, and deposited the knife in Riddell’s hand in exchange.
Then, with a load on his heart such as he had never felt before, the captain turned the boat’s head and rowed slowly back to Willoughby.