Ferrars didn’t take warning by me, but after he really did win the Old Testament prize, and there really was a question about Jezebel, he made a sort of idol out of the rat, and some chaps declared he said his prayers to it. I know he constantly bought it cocoa-nut chips, which it was very fond of. He trained it, too, to live in his breast-pocket, and I often saw him glancing down in class just to get a glimpse of its little eyes looking up at him. That taking the piebald rat into class shows the lengths Ferrars ran. The whole thing was very peculiar. Some chaps said there was a strong likeness growing up between Ferrars and the rat; and certainly his thin, white face had a rattish look sometimes. Other fellows told him his rat was an evil spirit, and would end by doing him a bad turn, but Ferrars turned upon them and jawed them with such frightful language that they never said it again. Meanwhile the Doctor went on taking to Ferrars more and more, and there seemed every chance of his getting the whole Bible by heart before he left Merivale.
Then came the end of the affair like this. Ferrars was so dependent on his rat now that he wouldn’t do a lesson without it, and he lugged it fearlessly into the Doctor’s study at those times, fortunately rare, when the Doctor took our class himself in Scripture. But Ferrars was such a flyer that we all got tarred with the same brush; and the Doctor, after questioning Ferrars for half an hour about Bible people we’d never even heard of, and getting a string of dead-right answers out of him, would dismiss us all in great good temper, forgetting that he’d only been having a go at one chap.
A day came when the Doctor left us for five minutes in the middle of this class, and while most of us had a hurried dip into the plagues of Egypt, which was the business in hand, Ferrars, who knew as much about the plagues as ever Moses did, just got out his rat and gave it a bit of almond and a short breather of a yard or so along the floor. But, the Doctor coming back suddenly, he had only just time to pop it into his pocket, and even then he put the rat into an unusual pocket which it was not accustomed to, and didn’t like, namely, a trouser-pocket. Ferrars also shoved a handkerchief down in the pocket to steady the rat.
Then I saw an awful rum expression come over him, and he grabbed at the pocket and his mouth fell open, and his face got the color of new putty. At the same time I saw his eyes turn to a big bookshelf with glass doors against the side of the room.
“What’s the matter, Ferrars?” said the Doctor. “You appear unwell.”
“Nothing, sir; merely a little passing sickness, I think.”
“Then withdraw, my boy, and ask the matron to give you a few drops of brandy and water. You need not dine to-day,” said the Doctor, very kindly.
But Ferrars wouldn’t withdraw. He knew “Mayne Reid” had got through his pocket and down his trouser-leg; he also knew it was now behind the bookshelf, and might reappear at any moment. So he said he was better, and, actually! that it would be a grief to him to miss one of the Doctor’s own lessons.
But afterwards, when the rat didn’t come out and the class was dismissed, Ferrars was frightful to see. His hair all got on end somehow, and his eyes swelled and stuck out of his head like glass beads, and his cheeks got hollow. He ran awful risks going into the Doctor’s study that day, but the rat wouldn’t come out, and Ferrars looked old enough to be a master when he went to bed, though only eleven and a half really.
“One of two things has happened,” he said to me, for we were in the same dormitory; “either it’s got wedged in behind the bookshelf and will die if not let out, or else there was a rat-hole there, and it went down and has joined common rats, and become a sort of king rat among them.”