“Wouldn’t he open his eyes,” thought I, “if I told him what the nightmare was! But I won’t do it.”
I therefore relapsed into my toilet, and, as time was nearly up, left the unconscious sleep-walker to finish his in silence.
Dr Plummer’s “select young gentlemen” only numbered thirty, all told—chiefly sons of the trading community, who received at the establishment at Hampstead all the advantages of a good commercial education, combined with some of the elegances of a high-class preparatory school. Tipton’s father, who was an extensive draper in an adjoining suburb, was rather fond, I believe, of telling his friends that he had a boy at Dangerfield College. It sounded well, especially when it was possible to add that “my boy and his particular chum, young Tempest, son of the late Colonel Tempest, you know, of the Guards, did this and that together, and might perhaps spend their next holidays together at Tempest Hall, in Lincolnshire, if he could spare the boy from home,” and so on.
It was an awful fascination for some of us to speculate what the “Dux” would have to say if he could hear this sort of talk. We trembled for Tipton’s father, and his shop, and the whole neighbourhood in which he flourished.
Tempest’s presence at the “College” did, however, add quite a little prestige to the place. No one seemed to suppose that it had anything to do with the fact that the terms were exceptionally moderate, and that his gallant father had left very slender means behind him. Even Dr Plummer had a habit, so people said, of dragging his aristocratic head pupil’s name into his conversation with possible clients, while we boys mingled a little awe with the esteem in which we held our broad-backed and well-dressed comrade.
Within the last few weeks especially the school had had reason to be proud of him. He had taken an exhibition at Low Heath, one of the crack public schools, and was going up there at Midsummer. This was an event in the annals of Plummer’s which had never happened before and in all probability would never happen again.
To do the Dux justice, he set no special store by himself. He believed in the Tempests as a race, but did not care a snap whether anybody else believed in them or not. Any boy who liked him he usually liked back, and showed his affection, as he did in my case, by frequent lickings. Boys he did not like he left severely alone, and there were a good many such at Dangerfield.
As to the exhibition, that had been entirely his own idea. He had not said a word about it to Plummer or any of us, and it was not till after he had got it, and Plummer in the fulness of his heart gave us a holiday in celebration of the event, that we had any of us known that the Dux had been in for it.
The second bell had already sounded before I had completed my toilet, the finishing touches of which, consequently, I was left to add in solitude.
When I descended to the refectory I was struck at once by an unusual air of gloom and mystery about the place. Something unpleasant must have occurred, but what it was nobody appeared exactly to know, unless it was the principal himself. Dr Plummer was just about to make a communication when I made my belated entry.