Tom Brown at Oxford

In dock;
Dock shall ha'
A new smock;
Nettle shan't
Ha' narrun'."

What with the rubbing, and the constable's kind manner, and listening to the doggerel rhyme, and feeling that nettle would get her deserts, the little thing soon ceased crying. But several groups had been drawn towards the place, and amongst the rest came Miss Winter and her cousin, who had been within hearing of the disaster. The constable began to feel very nervous and uncomfortable, when he looked up from his charitable occupation, and suddenly found the rector's daughter close to him. But his nervousness was uncalled for. The sight of what he was about, and of the tender way in which he was handling the child, drove all remembrance of his heresies and contumaciousness in the matter of psalmody out of her head. She greeted him with frankness and cordiality, and presently – when he had given up his charge to the mother, who was inclined at first to be hard with the poor little sobbing truant – came up, and said she wished to speak a few words to him.

David was highly delighted at Miss Winter's manner; but he walked along at her side not quite comfortable in his mind, for fear lest she should start the old subject of dispute, and then his duty as a public man would have to be done at all risk of offending her. He was much comforted when she began by asking him whether he had seen much of Widow Winburn's son lately.

David admitted that he generally saw him every day.

Did he know that he had left his place, and had quarrelled with Mr. Tester?

Yes, David knew that Harry had had words with Farmer Tester; but Farmer Tester was a sort that was very hard not to have words with.

"Still, it is very bad, you know, for so young a man to be quarrelling with the farmers," said Miss Winter.

"'Twas the varmer as quarreled wi' he, you see, miss," David answered, "which makes all the odds. He cum to Harry all in a fluster, and said as how he must drow up the land as he'd a'got, or he's place – one or t'other on 'em. And so you see, Miss, as Harry wur kind o' druv to it. 'Twarn't likely as he wur to drow up the land now as he were just reppin' the benefit ov it, and all for Varmer Tester's place, wich be no sich gurt things, miss, arter all."

"Very likely not; but I fear it may hinder his getting employment. The other farmers will not take him on now if they can help it."

"No; thaay falls out wi' one another bad enough, and calls all manner o' names. But thaay can't abide a poor man to speak his mind, nor take his own part, not one on 'em," said David, looking at Miss Winter, as if doubtful how she might take his strictures; but she went on without any show of dissent, —

"I shall try to get him work for my father, but I am sorry to find that Simon does not seem to like the idea of taking him on. It is not easy always to make out Simon's meaning. When I spoke to him, he said something about a bleating sheep losing a bite; but I should think this young man is not much of a talker in general?" – she paused.

"That's true, miss," said David, energetically; "there ain't a quieter spoken or steadier man at his work in the parish."

"I'm very glad to hear you say so," said Miss Winter, "and I hope we may soon do something for him. But what I want you to do just now is to speak a word to him about the company he seems to be getting into."

The constable looked somewhat aghast at this speech of Miss Winter's, but did not answer, not knowing to what she was alluding. She saw that he did not understand, and went on —

"He is mowing to-day with a gang from the heath and the next parish; I am sure they are very bad men for him to be with. I was so vexed when I found Simon had given them the job; but he said they would get it all down in a day, and be done with it, and that was all he cared for."

"And 'tis a fine day's work, miss, for five men," said David, looking over the field; "and 'tis good work too, you mind the swarth else," and he picked up a handful of the fallen grass to show her how near the ground it was cut.

"Oh, yes, I have no doubt they are very good mowers, but they are not good men, I'm sure. There, do you see now who it is that is bringing them beer? I hope you will see Widow Winburn's son, and speak to him, and try to keep him out of bad company. We should be all so sorry if he were to get into trouble."

David promised to do his best, and Miss Winter wished him good evening, and rejoined her cousin.

"Well, Katie, will he do your behest?"

"Yes, indeed; and I think he is the best person to do it. Widow Winburn thinks her son minds him more than any one."

"Do you know, I don't think it will ever go right. I'm sure she doesn't care the least for him."

"Oh, you have only just seen her once for two or three minutes."

"And then that wretched old Simon is so perverse about it," said the cousin. "You will never manage him."

"He is very provoking, certainly; but I get my own way generally, in spite of him. And it is such a perfect plan, isn't it!"

"Oh, charming! if you can only bring it about."

"Now we must be really going home; papa will be getting restless." So the young ladies left the hay-field deep in castle-building for Harry Winburn and the gardener's daughter, Miss Winter being no more able to resist a tale of true love than her cousin, or the rest of her sex. They would have been more or less than woman if they had not taken an interest in so absorbing a passion as poor Harry's. By the time they reached the Rectory gate they had installed him in the gardener's cottage with his bride and mother (for there would be plenty of room for the widow, and it would be so convenient to have the laundry close at hand) and had pentioned old Simon, and sent him and his old wife to wrangle away the rest of their time in the widow's cottage. Castle-building is a delightful and harmless exercise.

Meantime David the constable had gone towards the mowers, who were taking a short rest before finishing off the last half-acre which remained standing. The person whose appearance had so horrified Miss Winter was drawing beer for them from a small barrel. This was an elderly raw-boned woman with a skin burnt as brown as that of any of the mowers. She wore a man's hat and spencer and had a strong harsh voice, and altogether was not a prepossessing person. She went by the name of Daddy Cowell in the parish, and had been for years a proscribed person. She lived up on the heath, often worked in the fields, took in lodgers, and smoked a short clay pipe. These eccentricities, when added to her half-made clothing, were quite enough to account for the sort of outlawry in which she lived. Miss Winter, and other good people of Englebourn, believed her capable of any crime, and the children were taught to stop talking and playing, and run away when she came near them; but the constable, who had had one or two search-warrants to execute in her house, and had otherwise had frequent occasions of getting acquainted with her in the course of his duties, had by no means so evil an opinion of her. He had never seen much harm in her, he had often been heard to say, and she never made pretence to much good. Nevertheless, David was by no means pleased to see her acting as purveyor to the gang which Harry had joined. He knew how such contact would damage him in the eyes of all the parochial respectabilities, and was anxious to do his best to get him clear of it.

With these views he went up to the men, who were resting under a large elm tree, and complimented them on their day's work. They were themselves well satisfied with it, and with one another. When men have had sixteen hours or so hard mowing in company, and none of them can say that the others have not done their fair share, they are apt to respect one another more at the end of it. It was Harry's first day with this gang, who were famous for going about the neighbourhood, and doing great feats in hay and wheat harvest. They were satisfied with him and he with them, none the less so probably in his present frame of mind, because they also were loose on the world, servants of no regular master. It was a bad time to make his approaches, the constable saw; so, after sitting by Harry until the gang rose to finish off their work in the cool of the evening, and asking him to come round by his cottage on his way home, which Harry promised to do, he walked back to the village.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SCHOOLS

There is no more characteristic spot in Oxford than the quadrangle of the schools. Doubtless in the times when the University held and exercised the privileges of infang-thief and outfang-thief, and other such old-world rights, there must have been a place somewhere within the liberties devoted to examinations even more exciting than the great-go. But sincealma mater has ceased to take cognizance of "treasons, insurrections, felonies, and mayhem," it is here, in that fateful and inexorable quadrangle, and the buildings which surround it, that she exercises her most potent spells over the spirits of her children. I suppose that a man being tried for his life must be more uncomfortable than an undergraduate being examined for his degree, and that to be hung – perhaps even to be pilloried – must be worse than to be plucked. But after all, the feeling in both cases must be essentially the same, only more intense in the former; and an institution which can examine a man (in literis humanitoribus, in humanities, so called) once a year for two or three days at a time, has nothing to complain of, though it has no longer the power of hanging him at once out of hand.

The schools' quadrangle is for the most part a lonely place. Men pass through the melancholy iron-gates by which that quadrangle is entered on three sides – from Broad street, from the Ratcliff, and from New College-Lane – when necessity leads them that way, with alert step and silently. No nursemaids or children play about it. Nobody lives in it. Only when the examinations are going on you may see a few hooded figures who walk as though conscious of the powers of academic life and death which they wield, and a good deal of shuddering undergraduate life flitting about the place – luckless youths, in white ties and bands, who are undergoing the peine forte et dure with different degrees of composure; and their friends who are there to look after them. You may go in and watch the torture yourself if you are so minded, for the viva voce schools are open to the public. But one such experiment will be enough for you, unless you are very hard-hearted. The sight of the long table, behind which sit Minos, Rhadamanthus & Co., full-robed, stern of face, soft of speech, seizing their victim in turn, now letting him run a little way as a cat does a mouse, then drawing him back, with claw of wily question, probing him on this side and that, turning him inside out, – the row of victims opposite, pale or flushed, of anxious or careless mien, according to temperament, but one and all on the rack as they bend over the allotted paper, or read from the well-thumbed book – the scarcely-less-to-be-pitied row behind of future victims, "sitting for the schools" as it is called, ruthlessly brought hither by statutes, to watch the sufferings they must hereafter undergo – should fill the friend of suffering humanity with thoughts too deep for tears. Through the long day till four o'clock, or later, the torture lasts. Then the last victim is dismissed; the men who are "sitting for the schools" fly all ways to their colleges, silently, in search of relief to their over-wrought feelings – probably also of beer, the undergraduate's universal specific. The beadles close those ruthless doors for a mysterious half-hour on the examiners. Outside in the quadrangle collect by twos and threes the friends of the victims, waiting for the reopening of the door, and the distribution of the "testamurs." The testamurs, lady readers will be pleased to understand, are certificates under the hands of the examiners that your sons, brothers, husbands, perhaps, have successfully undergone the torture. But, if husbands, oh, go not yourselves, and send not your sons to wait for the testamur of the head of your house; for Oxford has seldom seen a sight over which she would more willingly draw the veil, with averted face, than that of the youth rushing wildly, dissolved in tears from the schools' quadrangle, and shouting, "Mamma! papa's plucked! papa's plucked!"

The examination is nearly over which is to decide the academical fate of some of our characters; the paper-work of the candidates for honors has been going on for the last week. Every morning our three St. Ambrose acquaintances have mustered with the rest for the anxious day's work, after such breakfasts as they have been able to eat under the circumstances. They take their work in very different ways. Grey rushes nervously back to his rooms whenever he is out of the schools for ten minutes, to look up dates and dodges. He worries himself sadly over every blunder which he discovers himself to have made, and sits up nearly all night cramming, always hoping for a better to-morrow. Blake keeps up his affected carelessness to the last, quizzing the examiners, laughing over the shots he has been making in the last paper. His shots, it must be said, turn out well for the most part; in the taste paper particularly, as they compare notes, he seems to have almost struck the bull's-eye in his answers to one or two questions which Hardy and Grey have passed over altogether. When he is wide of the mark, he passes it off with some jesting remark; "that a fool can ask in five minutes more questions than a wise man can answer in a week," or wish "that the examiners would play fair, and change sides of the table for an hour with the candidates for a finish." But he, too, though he does it on the sly, is cramming with his coach at every available spare moment. Hardy had finished his reading a full thirty-six hours before the first day of paper-work, and had braced himself for the actual struggle by two good nights' rest and a long day on the river with Tom. He had worked hard from the first, and so had really mastered his books. And now, feeling that he had fairly and honestly done his best, and that if he fails it will be either from bad luck or natural incapacity, and not from his own fault, he manages to keep a cooler head than any of his companions in trouble.

The week's paper-work passed off uneventfully; then comes theviva voce work for the candidates for honors. They go in, in alphabetical order, four a day, for one more day's work, the hardest of all, and then there is nothing more to do but wait patiently for the class list. On these days there is a good attendance in the enclosed space to which the public are admitted. The front seats are often occupied by the private tutors of the candidates, who are there, like Newmarket trainers, to see the performance of their stables, marking how each colt bears pressing, and comports himself when the pinch comes. They watch the examiners, too, carefully to see what line they take, whether science or history, or scholarship is likely to tell most, that they may handle the rest of their starts accordingly. Behind them, for the most part on the hindermost benches of the flight of raised steps, anxious younger brothers and friends sit, for a few minutes at a time, flitting in and out in much unrest, and making the objects of their solicitude more nervous than ever by their sympathy.

It is now the afternoon of the second day of the viva voceexaminations in honors. Blake is one of the men in. His tutor, Hardy, Grey, Tom, and other St. Ambrose men, have all been in the schools more or less during his examination, and now Hardy and Tom are waiting outside the doors for the issuing of the testamurs.

The group is small enough. It is so much of course that a class-man should get his testamur that there is no excitement about it; generally the man himself stops to receive it.

The only anxious faces in the group are Tom's and Hardy's. They have not exchanged a word for the last few minutes in their short walk before the door. Now the examiners come out and walk away towards their colleges, and the next minute the door again opens and the clerk of the schools appears with a slip of paper in his hand.

"Now you'll see if I am not right," said Hardy, as they gathered to the door with the rest. "I tell you there isn't the least chance for him."

The clerk read out the names inscribed on the testamurs which he held, and handed them to the owners.

"Haven't you one for Mr. Blake of St. Ambrose?" said Tom desperately as the clerk was closing the door.

"No, sir; none but those I have just given out," answered the clerk, shaking his head. The door closed, and they turned away in silence for the first minute.

"I told you how it would be," said Hardy, as they passed out of the south gate into the Ratcliff Quadrangle.

"But he seemed to be doing so well when I was in."

"You were not there at the time. I thought at first they would have sent him out of the schools at once."

"In his divinity, wasn't it?"

"Yes; he was asked to repeat one of the Articles, and didn't know three words of it. From that moment I saw it was all over. The examiner and he both lost their tempers, and it went from bad to worse, till the examiner remarked that he could have answered one of the questions he was asking when he was ten years old, and Blake replied, so could he. They gave him a paper in divinity afterwards, but you could see there was no chance for him."

"Poor fellow! what will he do, do you think? How will he take it?"

"I can' tell. But I'm afraid it will be a very serious matter for him. He was the ablest man in our year too. What a pity."