"How are you, mother darling? It's only me."
And the Lady Augusta Yorke, between surprise at the meeting, a little joy, and vexation on the score of her diminishing supper, was somewhat overwhelmed, and sunk into a chair in screaming hysterics.
[CHAPTER XXXII.]
IN THE CATHEDRAL.
The college bell was tolling for morning prayers: and the Helstonleigh College boys were coming up in groups and disappearing within the little cloister gate, with their white surplices on their arms, just as Roland Yorke had seen them in his reminiscential visions the previous night. It was the first of November: a saint's day; and a great one, as everybody knows; consequently the school had a holiday, and the king's scholars attended divine service.
Roland was amidst them, having come out after breakfast to give as he said a "look round." The morning was well on when he awoke up from the conch prepared for him at Lady Augusta's--a soft bed with charming pillows, and not a temporary shake-down on the hearthrug. They had sat up late the previous night, after Lady Augusta's guests had left, talking of old times and new ones. Roland freely confessed his penniless state, his present mode of living, with all its shifts and drawbacks, the pound a week that Mrs. Jones made do for all, the brushing of his own clothes, the sometimes blacking of his own boots: which sent his mother into a fit of reproachful sobs. In his sanguine open-heartedness he enlarged upon the fortune that was sure to be his some time ("a few hundreds a-year and a house of his own"), and made her and his two sisters the most liberal promises on the strength of it. Caroline Yorke turned from him: he had lost caste in her eyes. Fanny, with her sweet voice and gentle smile, whispered him to work on bravely, never to fear. The two girls were essentially different. Constance Channing had done her utmost with them both: they had gone to Hazledon with her when she became William Yorke's wife; but her patient training had borne different fruit.
Roland dashed first of all into Mr. Galloway's, to ask if he had news of Arthur. No, none, Mr. Galloway answered with a groan, and it "would surely be the death of him." As Roland left the proctor's house, he saw the college boys flocking into the cloisters, and he went with them. Renovation seemed to be going on everywhere; beauty had succeeded dilapidations, and the old cathedral might well raise her head proudly now. But Roland did wonder when the improvements and the work would be finished; they had been going on as long as he could remember.
But the cloisters had not moved or changed their form, and Roland lost himself in the days of the past. One of the prebendaries, a fresh one since Roland's time, was turning into the chapter-house; Roland, positively from old associations, snatched off his hat to him. In imagination he was king's scholar again, existing in mortal dread, when in those cloisters, of the Dean and Chapter.
"I say--you," said he, seizing hold of a big boy, who had his surplice flung across his shoulder in the most untidy and crumpled fashion possible, "show me Joe Jenkins's grave."
"Yes, sir," answered the boy, wondering what fine imperative gentleman had got amidst them, and speaking civilly, lest it might be a connection of someone of the prebendaries. "It's round on the other side."