Chapter Three.
The Vacant Captaincy.
Who was to be the new captain of Willoughby? This was a question it had occurred to only a very few to ask until Wyndham had finally quitted the school. Fellows had grown so used to the old order of things, which had continued now for two years, that the possibility of their bowing to any other chief than “Old Wynd” had scarcely crossed their minds. But the question being once asked, it became very interesting indeed.
The captains of Willoughby had been by long tradition what is known as “all-round men.” There was something in the air of the place that seemed specially favourable to the development of muscle and classical proficiency at the same time, and the consequence was that the last three heads of the school had combined in one person the senior classic and the captains of the clubs. Wyndham had been the best of these; indeed he was as much ahead of his fellows in the classical school as he was in the cricket-field and on the river, which was saying not a little. His predecessors had both also been head boys in classics; and although neither of them actually the best men of their time in athletics, they had been sufficiently near the best to entitle them to the place of honour, which made the Willoughby captain supreme, not only in school, but out of it. So that in the memory of the present “generation”—a school generation being reckoned as five years—the Willoughby captain had always been cock of the school in every sense in which such a distinction was possible.
But now all of a sudden the school woke up to the fact that this delightful state of things was not everlasting. Wyndham had left and his mantle had fallen from him in two pieces.
The new head classic was Riddell, a comparatively unknown boy in the school, who had come there a couple of years ago from a private school, and about whom the most that was known was that he was physically weak and timid, rarely taking part in any athletic exercises, having very few chums, interfering very little with anybody else, and reputed “pi.”—as the more irreverent among the Willoughbites were wont to stigmatise any fellow who made a profession of goodness. Such was the boy on whom, according to strict rule, the captaincy of Willoughby would devolve, and it need hardly be said that the discovery spread consternation wherever it travelled.
Among the seniors the idea was hardly taken seriously.
“The doctor would never be so ridiculous,” said Ashley to Coates, as they talked the matter over in the study of the former. “We might as well shut up the school.”
“The worst of it is, I don’t see how he can help it,” replied Coates.