The Channings: A Story

by Mrs. Henry Wood

“Of course it must,” acquiesced Bywater.

“I know a boy in our village that they served out like that,” interposed Bill Simms, who was a country lad, and boarded in Helstonleigh. “They got a great big turnip, and scooped it out and made it into a man’s face, and put a light inside, and stuck it on a post where he had to pass at night. He was so frightened that he died.”

“Cram!” ejaculated Tod Yorke.

“He did, though,” repeated Simms. “They knew him before for an awful little coward, and they did it to have some fun out of him. He didn’t say anything at the time; didn’t scream, or anything of that sort; but after he got home he was taken ill, and the next day he died. My father was one of the jury on the inquest. He was a little chap with no father or mother—a plough-boy.”

“The best thing, if you want to make a ghost,” said Tod Yorke, “is to get a tin plate full of salt and gin, and set it alight, and wrap yourself round with a sheet, and hold the plate so that the flame lights up your face. You never saw anything so ghastly. Scooped-out turnips are all bosh!”

“I could bring a sheet off my bed,” said Bywater. “Thrown over my arm, they’d think at home I was bringing out my surplice. And if—”

A wheezing and coughing and clanking of keys interrupted the proceedings. It was Mr. Ketch, coming to lock up the cloisters. As the boys had no wish to be fastened in, themselves, they gathered up their books, and waited in silence till the porter was close upon them. Then, with a sudden war-whoop, they sprang past him, very nearly startling the old man out of his senses, and calling forth from him a shower of hard words.

The above conversation, puerile and school-boyish as it may seem, was destined to lead to results all too important; otherwise it would not have been related here. You very likely may have discovered, ere this, that this story of the Helstonleigh College boys is not merely a work of imagination, but taken from facts of real life. Had you been in the cloisters that night with the boys—and you might have been—and heard Master William Simms, who was the son of a wealthy farmer, tell the tale of a boy’s being frightened to death, you would have known it to be a true one, if you possessed any knowledge of the annals of the neighbourhood. In like manner, the project they were getting up to frighten Charles Channing, and Charles’s unfortunate propensity to be frightened, are strictly true.

Master Tod Yorke’s account of what had imbued his mind with this fear, was a tolerably correct one. Charley was somewhat troublesome and fractious as a young child, and the wicked nurse girl who attended upon him would dress up frightful figures to terrify him into quietness. She might not have been able to accomplish this without detection, but that Mrs. Channing was at that time debarred from the active superintendence of her household. When Charley was about two years old she fell into ill health, and for eighteen months was almost entirely confined to her room. Judith was much engaged with her mistress and with household matters, and the baby, as Charley was still called, was chiefly left to the mercies of the nurse. Not content with frightening him practically, she instilled into his young imagination the most pernicious stories of ghosts, dreams, and similar absurdities. But, foolish as we know them to be, they are not the less horrible to a child’s vivid imagination. At two, or three, or four years old, it is eagerly opening to impressions; and things, solemnly related by a mother or a nurse, become impressed upon it almost as with gospel truth. Let the fears once be excited in this terrible way, and not a whole lifetime can finally eradicate the evil. I would rather a nurse broke one of my children’s limbs, than thus poison its fair young mind.

In process of time the girl’s work was discovered—discovered by Judith. But the mischief was done. You may wonder that Mrs. Channing should not have been the first to discover it; or that it could have escaped her notice at all, for she had the child with her often for his early religious instruction; but, one of the worst phases of this state of things is, the shrinking tenacity with which the victim buries the fears within his own breast. He dare not tell his parents; he is taught not; and taught by fear. It may not have been your misfortune to meet with a case of this sort; I hope you never will. Mrs. Channing would observe that the child would often shudder, as with terror, and cling to her in an unaccountable manner; but, having no suspicion of the evil, she attributed it to a sensitive, timid temperament. “What is it, my little Charley?” she would say. But Charley would only bury his face the closer, and keep silence. When Martha—that was the girl’s name: not the same Martha who was now living at Lady Augusta’s—came for him, he would go with her willingly, cordially. It was not her he feared. On the contrary, he was attached to her; she had taught him to be so; and he looked upon her as a protector from those awful ghosts and goblins.