“Yes, sir,” said Julius.
“It’s very serious,” continued Martin, more excitedly, and apparently uncertain how to drive home his advantage, “it’s very distressing—er—to find you, LeVallon, Head of the School, guilty of mischief like a Fourth-Form boy—at this hour of the night too!”
The reference to the lower form was, of course, intended to be crushing. But Julius in his inimitable way turned the tables astonishingly.
“Very good, sir,” he said calmly, “but I was only trying to get the light of Venus, and her sound, into Goldingham’s head—into his system, that is—by reflecting it in the looking-glass; and it fell off the ledge. It’s an experiment of antiquity, as you know, sir. I’m exceedingly sorry....”
Martin stared. He was a little afraid of LeVallon; the boy’s knowledge of mathematics had compelled his admiration as often as his questions, sometimes before the whole class, had floored him.
“It’s an old experiment,” the boy added, his pale face very grave, “healing, you know, sir, by the rays of the planets—forgotten star-worship—like the light-cures of to-day——”
Martin’s somewhat bewildered eye wandered to the flat tin bath still propped against Goldingham’s bedside.
“... and using gongs to increase the vibrations,” explained Julius further, noticing the glance. “We were trying to make it do for a gong—the scientists will discover it again before long, sir.”
The master hardly knew whether to laugh or scold. He stood there in his shirt-sleeves looking hard at LeVallon who faced him with tumbled hair and shining eyes in his woolly red dressing-gown. Erect, dignified, for all the absurdity of the situation, the flush of his strange enthusiasm emphasising the delicate beauty of his features, I remember feeling that even the stupid Martin must surely understand that there was something rather wonderful about him, and pass himself beneath the spell.
“I was the priest,” he said.