Free Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss Page B

minute. It was obvious that the wretched boy thought that I would never expel my grandson and therefore would, morally, not be able to expel him. He was wrong, of course. I would have expelled a grandson who had done what he had done. But that need not detain us further. I want you to go to my house, Charles, and remain there until the two boys have left the campus.”
    â€œMay I ask why, sir?”
    â€œBecause I am afraid you might be tempted to beat up Bogart. I can understand how a clean young man would react to so base an accusation.”
    Chip rose with his grandfather and walked with him to the shingle house behind the chapel that was the headmaster’s home. And that was all.
    There were no repercussions. It became known that Chessy had tried to implicate Chip, but his motive was obvious, and no one saw any reason to disbelieve the denial. Chip seemed to have been cleared by the very gods themselves.
    There were times when he wondered whether a drama so inner had any reality. Each week that passed made his nocturnal experience with Chessy seem less true. And as for his lie, what good would the truth have done his partner in evil?
He had saved the peace of mind of his parents and possibly the very life of Mr. B. For he had felt at last the full weight of the old man’s love.
    There was a distinct change thereafter in the way Mr. B treated him. He never called him “Benedict” now, even in class, but always “Charles.” It was as if Chip had passed through his period of probation, triumphantly, and could be recognized before the world as the staff on which the aging headmaster would confidently lean. Teachers and boys both seemed to sense this, and as Chip, gaining confidence, and even a kind of happiness, took in the new friendliness of the campus, he became popular. When at the end of the spring term he was elected head monitor for his second and final year, the gratified headmaster wrote his daughter that he could now sing his Nunc Dimittis.
    But, for all his pride in his only grandson, Mr. B’s health failed rapidly during Chip’s final year at school. It was felt by the senior masters that the tall, blond youth who presided so serenely at assembly, who read the lesson in chapel with such admirable clarity and seriousness, who administered justice to the younger boys with such humanity and understanding, was a kind of gray eminence to the declining chief. It was to Chip that they came before presenting some delicate problem to Mr. B—the need to relax an outdated rule, the question of a new privilege sought by the boys and already granted by other schools—and Chip would explain the matter tactfully to his grandfather, who seemed quite willing now to relax his clung-to prejudices in favor of this new enlightenment.
    The announcement of Mr. B’s retirement was scheduled to be made at Chip’s graduation, which would almost have made it an occasion of too much sentiment. At any rate it was not to be, for the old man had a stroke a month before Prize Day and lingered only a week, immobile and hardly able to articulate a word. As the end approached, Matilda Benedict relinquished the post by her father’s bedside that she had occupied for three days and most of three nights and indicated to Chip that he should hold his grandfather in his arms for the last minutes.
    Mr. B tried to touch Chip’s head, perhaps to bless him, and then expired, whispering a name that was presumably his.
    Afterwards, Chip’s mother followed him into the next room, where she found him sobbing brokenly.
    â€œBut, my darling boy, you must try to remember that you made him happy!” she cried, almost in surprise at such violent emotion. “Happy as nobody else ever made him. Even my own mother!”
    â€œAnd yet I did something for which he would have expelled me, had he known.”
    Neither Matilda nor her husband was ever able to extract from their son another syllable