Mr. Filcher puts an end to the doubt by putting his head in at the bedroom door, and saying, "Time for chapel, sir! Chapel," thought Mr. Filcher; "here is a chap ill, indeed! - Bain't you well, sir? Restless you look!"
Oh, the shame and agony that Mr. Verdant Green felt! The desire to bury his head under the clothes, away from Robert's and everyone else's sight; the fever that throbbed his brain and parched his lips, and made him long to drink up Ocean; the eyes that felt like burning lead; the powerless hands that trembled like a weak old man's; the voice that came in faltering tones that jarred the brain at every word! How he despised himself; how he loathed the very idea of wine; how he resolved never, never to transgress so again! But perhaps Mr. Verdant Green was not the only Oxford freshman who has made this resolution.
"Bain't you well, sir?" repeated Mr. Filcher, with a passing thought that freshmen were sadly degenerating, and could not manage their three bottles as they did when he was first a scout: "bain't you well, sir?"
"Not very well, Robert, thank you. I - my head aches, and I'm afraid I shall not be able to get up for chapel. Will the Master be very angry?"
"Well, he might be, you see, sir," replied Mr. Filcher, who never lost an opportunity of making anything out of his master's infirmities; "but if you'll leave it to me, sir, I'll make it all right for you, I will. Of course you'd like to take out an aeger, sir; and I can bring you your Commons just the same. Will that do, sir?"
"Oh, thank you; yes, any thing. You will find five shillings in my waistcoat-pocket, Robert; please to take it; but I can't eat."
"Thank'ee, sir," said the scout, as he abstracted the five shillings; "but you'd better have a bit of somethin', sir; - a cup of strong tea, or somethin'. Mr. Smalls, sir, when he were pleasant, he always had beer, sir; but p'raps you ain't been used to bein' pleasant, sir, and slops might suit you better, sir."
"Oh, any thing, any thing!" groaned our poor, unheroic hero, as he turned his face to the wall, and endeavoured to recollect in what way he had been "pleasant" the night before. But, alas! the wells of his memory had, for the time, been poisoned, and nothing clear or pure could be drawn therefrom. So he got up and looked at himself in the glass, and scarcely recognized the tangled-haired, sallow-faced wretch, whose bloodshot eyes gazed heavily at him from the mirror. So he nervously drained the water-bottle, and buried himself once more among the tossed and tumbled bed-clothes.
The tea really did him some good, and enabled him to recover sufficient nerve to go feebly through the operation of dressing; though it was lucky that nature had not yet brought Mr. Verdant Green to the necessity of shaving, for the handling of a razor might have been attended with suicidal results, and have brought these veracious memoirs and their hero to an untimely end.
He had just sat down to a second edition of tea, and was reading a letter that the post had brought him from his sister Mary, in which she said, "I dare say by this time you have found Mr. Charles Larkyns a very delightful companion, and I am sure a very valuable one; as, from what the rector says, he appears to be so steady, and has such nice quiet companions:" - our hero had read as far as this, when a great noise just without his door, caused the letter to drop from his trembling hands; and, between loud fanfares from a post-horn, and heavy thumps upon the oak, a voice was heard, demanding "Entrance in the Proctor's name."