“There’s one other thing I want to speak about,” said Mansfield. “There’s been a lot of breaking bounds lately among the juniors. I caught your fag yesterday, Cresswell, and gave him lines. Your fag too, Pledge, I have seen several times lately going out without leave.”
“Dear me! how shocking!” said Pledge.
“If monitors don’t see that their own fags keep the rules,” said Mansfield, “there’s not much chance of getting the school generally to keep them. In your case, Pledge, I happen to know you yourself gave Heathcote leave to go out more than once this term. I’m going to put a stop to that.”
“Are you really?” said Pledge.
“Yes,” said Mansfield, flashing with his eyes, but otherwise cool.
Whereupon the meeting broke up.
Freckleton had by no means a congenial task before him.
All this term he had been unable to settle down in his hermit’s cell. Mansfield had always been bringing him out for this and that special duty, till he was becoming quite a public character; and, unfortunately for him, he had done the few services for which he had been told off so well, that Mansfield had no notion whatever of letting him crawl back to obscurity.
The Captain knew what he was about in selecting the Hermit to open the campaign against the “Select Sociables.” A secret lawless society in a school is like a secret lawless society in a country—a pest to be dealt with carefully. Mansfield knew well enough that he himself was not the man to do it; nor was the downright Cresswell, nor the hot-headed Cartwright. It needed the wisdom of the serpent as well as the paw of the lion to do it, and if anyone was likely to succeed, it was Freckleton.
For Freckleton, hermit as he was, seemed to know more about every fellow in Templeton than anyone else. Where and when he made their acquaintance, no one knew and no one inquired. But certain it was no one knew the weak points of this boy and the good points of that better than he. And, as we have seen already, he was a “dark” man; hardly anyone knew him. They knew he had won the Bishop’s Scholarship and was reputed prodigiously learned. For the rest, except that he was harmless and kindly, fellows hardly seemed to know him at all. The “Select Sociables” were in full congress. They had instituted a fine of a penny for non-attendance, which had worked wonders. And to-night every member was in his place, except only Heathcote and Coote, who, as the reader knows, had something else to think of just then.