Tom looked at me again wildly, and then, with his brow all wrinkled up, he said in a hopeless tone full of sadness,—
“No, sir—no, sir; I didn’t know it was there.”
My hands clenched, and a burst of rage made me turn giddy for the moment. For I felt as if I could have dashed at him, dragged him to his knees, and made him speak the truth.
But that passed off as quickly as it came, and a feeling of pity came for the boy who, in his horror of detection, had felt himself bound to save himself at another’s expense, and I found myself wondering whether under the circumstances I should not have done the same.
These thoughts darted through my mind like lightning, and so did those which followed.
“I want to save him,” I said to myself, in the midst of the painful silence during which the Doctor stood thinking and softly wiping his forehead and then the palms of his hands upon his white pocket handkerchief; “but I can’t take the credit of it all. It is too horrible. But if I tell all I know, he will be expelled, and it will ruin him. Oh, why don’t he confess?—why don’t he confess?”
It was as if the Doctor had heard these last words as I thought them, for he said now in a deep, grave voice, as he turned to me, just as I was feeling that it would be too cruel to denounce my companion,—
“This is a sad—a painful affair, Burr junior. I wanted to disbelieve in your guilt, I wanted to feel that there was no young gentleman in my establishment who could stoop to such a piece of base pilfering; but the truth is so circumstantially brought home through the despicable meanness of a boy of whose actions I feel the utmost abhorrence, that I am bound to say to you that there is nothing left but for you to own frankly that you have been led into temptation—to say that you bitterly repent of what you have done, and throw yourself upon my mercy. Do this at once, boy, for the sake of those at home who love you.”
I felt my face twitch at these words and the picture they evoked, and then, numbed as it were, I stood listening, slightly buoyed up by the feeling that Mercer would speak directly and clear me.
“You were entrusted to my care, Burr junior,” continued the Doctor, “as a youth who was in future to enter upon one of the most honourable of careers, that of a soldier; but now that you have disgraced yourself like this—”