It took nearly five minutes more to explain the situation, and the only boy whose conduct in delivering the various messages seemed not wholly inexplicable appeared to be Peter. For the principal good-naturedly came to the conclusion that it must have been Peter that he met, not Tod, and that Peter had misunderstood him.
Such a charitable view of Peter’s conduct, however, could not last long, seeing that six angry masters rushed back to their respective forms to inflict lines upon six perfectly innocent boys, who were not slow to protest that the message was entrusted to them by another.
During the morning three young gentlemen from the Modern and four from the Classical received a summons “to the principal at twelve,” and of course Tod and Peter were of the number, both looking so seraphically innocent that the principal was perfectly sure that it was “a put-up thing.” In this instance the innocent suffered with the guilty, for Tod got five hundred lines as well as Peter. But they both agreed that to have so scored off seven “brushers” at one time was well worth the lines.
Three days afterward Tod’s nose bled toward the end of morning school and he was dismissed to his house to clean up. As he raced along the corridor he noticed that the door of the little room into which the rope of the school bell descended was left open, and, peeping in, he discovered that Hooper, the trusty porter, was not within.
In far less time than it takes to write the words, Tod had rushed in, and the great school bell that dismisses morning school rang loud and clear over the peaceful playing-fields surrounding the school buildings, still humming with the busy life within.
Every boy and every master stopped short in what he was doing and looked at the clock. Those possessed of watches consulted them, shook them, listened to them, dubiously pressing them to unbelieving ears. And as the clocks in that school are by no means beyond reproach, being worked by a system of electricity that is, to say the least of it, capricious in its conduct, all came, not unwillingly, to the conclusion that morning work had indeed ended. Only the Head of the Modern, that man of iron endurance, whose whole scheme of creation seemed bounded by the exigencies of the Civil Service Commissioners, refused to believe that his watch was wrong, and continued to discuss the “directrix and eccentric” of a certain angle until it was really twelve o’clock; while one of the French masters, hailing from Geneva, proclaimed the unreliability of English clocks in general.
Meanwhile Hooper, who had gone down to the lodge to speak to his wife, could hardly believe his ears when his own sacred bell clanged, somewhat irresponsibly and gaily it is true, without his agency.
He rushed up the drive to discover the perpetrator of this extraordinary outrage, only to meet a throng of masters and boys streaming out into the playground full twenty minutes before the appointed hour.
Tod was nearly at his house by this time, and when he did arrive, hastened to the matron to descant upon the terrific hemorrhage that had occurred in his nose.
But Nemesis was never very leaden-footed where the twins were concerned.