"Wretched! Wretched! Wretched!"
The Principal had at length settled himself at his desk, and was taking up some of the examination papers, when he uncovered a small white packet. Obviously a chemist's packet, sealed with red wax and tied with blue string. Not having seen it before he picked it up, and looked at it. It was addressed to himself, and was marked "By Passenger Train—to be called for."
The Principal felt his thin hair rising from his scalp. Something he had forgotten had come back upon him with the force and suddenness of a blow. Off and on for a week he had suffered from nervous headaches. Somebody had recommended an American patent medicine and he had written to Douglas for it. The Douglas chemist had replied that it was coming by the afternoon steamer, and he would send it on to Castletown by the last train. The letter had arrived when he was in class, and Jamieson the valet, being out of reach, he had asked Stowell, who was at hand, to go to the Station for the parcel after preparation and leave it on his Library table. And then the headache had passed off, and in the pressure of the examination he had forgotten the whole matter!
The Principal got up again. His limbs felt rigid, and he had the sickening sensation of his body shrinking into insignificance. At that moment there came a knocking at his door. He could not answer at first and the knocking was repeated.
"Come in then," he said, and Gell entered, his face flooded with tears.
He knew the boy as one who was nearly always in trouble, and his first impulse was to drive him out.
"Why do you come here? Go to your house-master, or to your head, or...."
"It's about Stowell himself, Sir. He's innocent," said Gell.
"Innocent?"
"Yes, Sir—it was I," said Gell. And then came a flood of words, blurted out like water from an inverted bottle. It was true that he was with the girl last night, but it was a lie that he had made a practice of walking out with her. She came from the north of the island, a farm near his home, and he hadn't known she was living in Castletown until he met her in the town yesterday afternoon. They were on the Darby Haven Road, just beyond the college cricket ground, about nine o'clock, when the blackguards dropped out on them from the Hango Hill ruins and started to rag him. It was true he smashed them and he would do it again, and worse next time, but it was another lie that he had done it with a stick. They had the stick, and it was just when he was knocking out one of them that the other aimed a blow at him which fell on his chum instead and tumbled him over insensible. The girl had gone off screaming before that, and seeing the police coming up he had leapt into the cricket ground and got back into school by the lavatory window.