Chapter Twenty Seven.
Julian and Kennedy.
“But there where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Patience, thou young and rose-lipped cherubim!
Aye there, look grim as hell!”
Othello, Act 4, scene 2.
Saint Werner’s clock, with “its male and female voice,” has just told the university that it is nine o’clock.
A little crowd of Saint Wernerians is standing before the chapel door, and even the grass of the lawn in front of it is hardly sacred to-day from common feet. The throng composed of undergraduates, dons, bedmakers, and gyps, is broken into knots of people, who are chatting together according to their several kinds; but they are so quiet and expectant that the very pigeons hardly notice them, but flutter about and coo and peck up the scattered bread-crumbs, just as if nobody was there. If you look attentively round the court, you will see, too, that many of the windows are open, and you may detect faces half concealed among the window curtains. Clearly everybody is on the look out for something, though it is yet vacation time, and only a small section of the men are up.
The door opens, and out sail the Seniors, more than ever conscious of pride and power; they stream away in silk gowns, carrying on their faces the smile of knowledge even into their isolation, where no one can see it. For some reason or other they always meet in chapel, or, for all I know, it may be in the ante-chapel, to elect the Saint Werner’s scholars.
And now the much talked of, much thought of, anxiously expected list, which is to make so many happy or miserable, is to be announced. On that little bit of paper, which the chapel-clerk holds in his hands as he stands on the chapel steps, are the names which everybody has been longing to conjecture. He comes out and reads. There are nine scholarships vacant, of which five will be given to the Third-year men, and four to Julian’s year.
The five Third-year men are read first, and as each name is announced, off darts some messenger from the crowd to carry the happy intelligence to some expectant senior soph. The heads of listeners lean farther and farther out of the window, for the clerk speaks so loud as to make his voice heard right across the court; and the wires of the telegraph are instantly put into requisition to flash the news to many homes, which it will fill either with rejoicing or with sorrow.
And now for the four Second-year scholars, who have gained the honour of a scholarship their first time of trial, and whose success excites a still keener interest. They are read out in the accidental order of the first entering of their names in the college books.
Silence! the Second-year scholars are—Dudley Charles Owen, (for the names are always read out at full length, Christian names and all); Julian Home; Albert Henry Suton; and it is a very astonishing fact, but the fourth is Hugh James Lillyston.
Who would have believed it? Everybody expected Owen and Home to get scholarships their first time, and Suton was considered fairly safe of one; but that Kennedy should not have got one, and that Lillyston should, were facts perfectly amazing to all who heard them. Saint Werner’s was full of surprise. But after all they might have expected it; Kennedy had been grossly idle, and Lillyston, who had been exceedingly industrious, was not only well-grounded at Harton in classics, but had recently developed a real and promising proficiency in mathematics; and it was this knowledge, joined to great good fortune in the examination, which had won for him the much-envied success.
But not Kennedy?
No. This result was enough most seriously to damp the intense delight which Julian otherwise felt in his own success, and that of his three friends.
Julian, half-expecting that he would be successful, had come up with Owen early in the day, and received the news from the porter as he entered the college. Kennedy and Lillyston were not yet arrived, and Julian went to meet the coach from Roysley, hoping to see one of them at least for he was almost as anxious to break the disappointment gently to Kennedy, as he was to be the first to bear to his oldest school friend the surprising and delightful news of his success.
They were both in the coach, and Julian was quite puzzled how to meet them. His vexation and delight alternated so rapidly as he looked from one to the other, that he felt exceedingly awkward, and would very much have preferred seeing either of them alone. Lillyston was incredulous; he insisted that there must be some mistake, until he actually saw the list with his own eyes. It was quite by accident, and not with any view of being sworn in as a scholar the next morning, that he had returned to Saint Werner’s on that day at all. Kennedy bore the bitter, but not unexpected disappointment with silent stoicism, and showed an unaffected joy at the happy result which had crowned the honest exertions of his best-loved friends.
He bore it in stoical silence, until he reached his own rooms; and then, do not blame him—my poor Kennedy—if he bowed his head upon his hands, and cried like a little child. There are times when the bravest man feels quite like a boy—feels as if he were unchanged since the day when he sorrowed for boyish trespasses, and was chidden for boyish faults. Kennedy was very young, and he was eating the fruits of folly and idleness in painful failure and hope deferred. In public he never showed the faintest signs of vexation, but in the loneliness of his closet do not blame him if he wept—for Violet’s sake as well as for his own.
So once more he was separated from Julian and Lillyston in hall and chapel, for they now sat at the scholars’ table and in the scholars’ seats.
He was beginning to get over his feeling of sorrow when he received a letter, which did not need the coronet on the seal to show him that his correspondent was De Vayne. He opened it with eagerness and curiosity, and read—
“Eaglestower, April 30, 18—, Argyllshire.
“My Dear Kennedy—How long it is since we saw or heard of each other! I am getting well now, slowly but surely, and as I am amusing my leisure by reviving my old correspondence with my friends, let me write to you whom I reckon and shall ever reckon among that honoured number.
“I am afraid that you consider me to have been slightly alienated from you by the sad scene which your rooms witnessed when last we met in health, and by the connection into which your name was dragged, by popular rumour, with that unhappy affair. If such a thought has ever troubled you, let me pray that you will banish it. I have long since been sure that you would have been ready to suffer any calamity rather than expose me to the foreseen possibility of such an outrage.
“No, believe me, dear Kennedy, I am as much now as I always have been since I knew you, your sincere and affectionate friend. Nor will I conceal how deep an interest another circumstance has given me in your welfare. You perhaps did not know that I too loved your affianced Violet; how long, how deeply I can never utter to any living soul. I did not know that you had won her affections, and the information that such was the case, came on me like the death-knell of all my cherished hopes. But I have schooled myself now to the calm contemplation of my failure, and I can rejoice without envy in the knowledge, that in you she has won a lover richly endowed with all the qualities on which future happiness can depend.
“I write to you partly to say good-bye. In a fortnight I am going abroad, and shall not return until I feel that I have conquered a hopeless passion, and regained a shattered health. Farewell to dear Old Camford! I little thought that my career there would terminate as it did, but I trust in the full persuasion that God worketh all things for good to them who love Him.
“Once more good-bye. When I return, I hope that I shall see leaning on your arm, a fair, a divine young bride.—Ever affectionately yours, De Vayne.”
Kennedy had written home to announce that his name was not to be found in the list of Saint Werner’s scholars. The information had disgusted his father exceedingly. Mr Kennedy, himself an old Wernerian, loved that royal foundation with an unchanging regard, and ever since that day Edward had been playing in his hall a pretty boy, he determined that he should be a Saint Werner’s scholar at his first trial. He knew his son’s abilities, and felt convinced that there must be some radical fault in his Camford life to produce such a disastrous series of failures and disgraces. Unable to gain any real information on the subject from Edward’s letters, he determined to write up at once, and ask the classical and mathematical tutors the points in which his son was most deficient, and the reason of his continued want of success.
The classical tutor, Mr Dalton, wrote back that Kennedy’s failure was due solely to idleness; that his abilities were acknowledged to be brilliant, but that at Camford as everywhere else, the notion of success without industry, was a chimera invented by boastfulness and conceit. “Le Génie c’est la Patience.”
“You seem, however,” continued Mr Dalton, “to be under the mistaken impression that your son read with me last term, and even ‘read double.’ This is not the case, as he has ceased to read with me since the end of the Christmas term: I was sorry that he did so; for if economy was an object, I would gladly, merely for the sake of the interest I take in him, have afforded gratuitous assistance to so clever and promising a pupil.”
The letter of Mr Baer, the mathematical tutor, was precisely to the same effect. “I can only speak,” he said, “from what I observed of your son previous to last Christmas; since then I have not had the pleasure of numbering him among my pupils.”
When Mr Dalton’s letter came, Mr Kennedy was exceedingly perplexed to understand what it meant, and assumed that there must be some unaccountable mistake. He simply could not believe that his son could have asked him for the money on false pretences. But when Mr Baer’s letter confirmed the fact that Kennedy had not been reading with a tutor either in classics or mathematics during the previous quarter, it seemed impossible for any one any longer to shut his eyes to the truth.
When the real state of the case forced itself on Mr Kennedy’s conviction, his affliction was so deep that no language can adequately describe what he suffered. In a few days his countenance became sensibly older-looking, and his hair more grey. His favourite and only surviving son had proved unworthy and base. Not only had he wasted time in frivolous company, but clearly he must have sunk very low to be guilty of a crime so heinous in itself, and so peculiarly wounding to a father’s heart, as the one which it was plain that he had committed.
At first Mr Kennedy could not trust himself to write, lest the anger and indignation which usurped the place of sorrow should lead him into a violence which might produce irreparable harm. Meanwhile, he bore in silence the blows which had fallen. Not even to his daughter Eva did he reveal the overwhelming secret of her brother’s shame, but brooded in loneliness over the fair promise of the past, blighted utterly in the disgrace of the present. Often when he had looked at his young son, and seen how glorious and how happy his life might be, he had determined to shelter him from all evil, and endow him with means and opportunities for every success. He had looked to him as a pride and stay in declining manhood, and a comfort in old age. Edward Kennedy had been “a child whom every eye that looked on loved,” and now he was—; Mr Kennedy could not apply to him the only name which at once sprang up to his lips. He wrote—
“Dear Edward,—When I tell you that it costs me an effort, a strong effort to call you ‘dear,’ you may judge of the depth of my anger. I cannot trust myself, nor will I condescend to say much to you. Suffice it for you to know that your shameful transactions are detected, and that I am now aware of the means, the treacherous dishonest means you have adopted to procure money, which, since I give you an ample and liberal allowance, can only be wanted to pander to vice, idleness, and I know not what other forms of sin.
“I tell you that I do not know what to say; if you can act as you have acted, you must be quite deaf to expostulation, and dead to shame. You have done all you can to cover me and yourself with dishonour, and to bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.
“Oh Edward, Edward! if I could have foreseen this in the days when you were yet a young and innocent and happy boy, I would have chosen rather that you should die.
“It must be a long time before you see my face again. I will not see you in the coming holidays, and I at once reduce your allowance to half of what it was. I cannot, and will not supply money to be wasted in extravagance and folly, nor shall I again be deceived into granting it to you on false pretences—Your indignant, deeply-sorrowing father, T. Kennedy.”
Kennedy read the letter, and re-read it, and laid it down on the table beside his untouched breakfast. There was but one expression in his face, and that was misery, and in his soul no other feeling than that of hopeless shame.
He did not, and could not write to his father. What was to be said? He must bear his burden—the burden of detection and of punishment—alone.
And the thought of Violet added keener poignancy to all his grief. For Kennedy could not but observe that her letters were not so fondly, passionately loving as they once had been, and he knew that the fault was his, because his own letters reflected, like a broken mirror, the troubled images of his wandering heart.
Chapter Twenty Eight.
Kennedy’s Despair.
“When all the blandishments from life are gone,
The coward slinks to death;—the brave live on!”
Of all the sicknesses that can happen to the human soul, the deadliest and the most incurable is the feeling of despair—and this was the malady which now infected every vein of Kennedy’s moral and intellectual life.
Could he but have conquered his pride so far as to take but one person into his confidence, all might have been well. But Violet—could he ever tell Violet of sins which her noble heart must render so inconceivable as almost to make it impossible for her to sympathise with one who committed them? And Eva; could he ever wound the tender affection of his sweet sister, by revealing to her the disgrace of the brother whom, from her childhood, she had idolised? He sometimes thought that he would confess to Julian or Lillyston; but his courage failed him when the time came, and he fed on his own heart in solitude, avoiding the society of men.
The sore burden of a self-reproaching spirit wore him down. He had fallen so often now, and swerved so often from the path of temperance, rectitude, and honour, that he began to regard himself as a hopeless reprobate—as one who had been weighed and found wanting—tested of God, and deliberately set aside.
And so step by step the devil thrust him into desperation, and strove thereby to clinch the hopelessness of his estate. With wild fierce passion, Kennedy flung himself into sins he had never known before; angrily he laid waste the beauty and glory of the vineyard whose hedge had been broken down; a little entrance to the sanctuary had been opened to evil thoughts, and they, when once admitted, soon flung back wider and wider the golden gates, till the revelling band of worse wickednesses rushed in and defiled the altar, and trampled on the virgin floors, and defaced the cedarn walls with images of idolatry and picturings of sin. Because he had sunk into the slough of despond, he would be heedless of the mud that gathered on his garments. Was he not ruined already? Could anything much worse befall him than had befallen him already? No; he would sin on now and take his fill.
It was a short period of his life; but in no other period did he suffer so much, or shake more fatally the foundations of all future happiness. It was emphatically a sin against his own soul, and as such it affected his very look. Those blue laughing eyes were clouded over, and the bloom died away from his cheeks, and the ingenuous beauty from his countenance, as the light of the Shechinah grew pale and dim in the inmost sanctuary. Kennedy was not mastered by impulse, but driven by despair.
Nor did he take any precaution to shield himself from punishment—the punishment of outward circumstance and natural consequence—as his moral abasement proceeded. His acquaintances shunned him, his friends dropped away from him, and the guiltiness of the present received a tinge of deeper horror from the gloom of the future.
All that could be done, Julian did. He warned, he expostulated, he reminded of purer and happier—of pure and happy days. But he did not know the bitter fountain of despondency whence flowed those naphthaline streams of passion. At last he said—
“Kennedy, I have not often spoken to you of my dear sister; it is time to speak of her now. Your conduct proves to me that you do not and cannot love her.”
Kennedy listened in silence; his face bowed down upon his hands. “You could not go on as you are doing if you loved her, for love allows no meaner, no unhallowed fires to pollute her vestal flame. Your love must be a pretence—a thing of the past. It was only possible, Kennedy, when you were worthier than now you are.”
He groaned deeply, but still said nothing.
“Kennedy,” continued Julian, “I have loved you as a friend, as a brother; I love you still most earnestly, and you must not be too much pained at what I say; but I have come to a determination which I must tell you, and by which I must abide. Your engagement with Violet must cease.”
“Does she say so?” he asked in a hollow voice.
“No, she does not know, Kennedy, what I know of you; but she will trust my deep affection, and know that I act solely for her good. The blow may almost kill her, but better that she should die than that her life should be ever connected—oh, that you should have driven me to say it—with one so stained as yours!”
“Aye!” said Kennedy bitterly, “stab hard, for the knife is in your hand. Fling dust on those who are down already—it is the world’s way. I see through it all, Julian Home; you would gladly get rid of me, that Violet may wear a coronet. No comparison between a penniless and ruined undergraduate, and a handsome, rich young viscount.”
“Unjust! ungenerous!” answered Julian, with indignation; “you have poisoned your own true heart, Kennedy, or you would not utter the lie which you must disbelieve. Edward Kennedy, I will not attempt to rebut your unworthy suspicions; you know neither my character nor Violet’s, or you would not have dared to utter them. No—it is clearer to me than ever that you are no fit suitor for my sister. Passion and weakness have dragged you very low. I trust and pray that you may recover yourself again.”
A sudden rush of tears came to his eyes as he turned away to leave his earliest and best-loved college friend. But Kennedy stopped him, and said wildly—
“Stop, Julian Home, you shall hear me speak. I can hardly believe that you do this of your own responsibility—without Violet’s—nay, nay, I must not call her so—without your sister’s consent. And if this be so, hear me. Tell her that I scorn the heart which would thus fling away its plighted love: tell her that she has committed a great sin in thus rejecting me: tell her that she is now responsible for all my future,—that whatever errors I may fall into, whatever sins I may commit, whatever disgrace or ruin I may incur, she is the author of them. Tell her that if I ever live to do ungenerous acts, or ever yield to bursts of foolish passion, the acts are hers, not mine; she will have caused them; my life lies at her feet. Tell her this before it is too late. What? you still wish to hurry away? Go, then.” He almost pushed Julian out, and banged the door after him.
Amazed at this paroxysm of wrath and madness, Julian went down-stairs with a slow step and a heavy, heavy heart; above all, he dreaded the necessity of breaking to Violet the heart-rending intelligence of his decision, and the circumstances which caused it. He trembled to do it, for he knew not how crushing the weight might prove. At last he determined to write to his mother, and to beg her to bear for him the pain of telling that which her womanly tact and maternal sympathy might make less overwhelming to be borne.
But Kennedy, after Julian’s words, rushed out of his rooms, and it was night. He left the college, and wandered into the fields—he knew not whither, nor with what intent.
His brain was on fire. The last gleam that lent brightness to his life had been extinguished; the friend whom he loved best had cast him off; his name was sullied; his love rejected. It was not thought which kept him in a tumult, but only a physical consciousness of dreadful, irremediable calamity; and but for the wind which blew so coldly and savagely in his face, and the rain that soaked his clothes and cooled the fever of his forehead, he feared that he might go mad.
He did not return to the college till long past midnight; and the old porter, as he got out of bed to open the gate, could not help saying to him in a tone of reproach—
“Oh, Mr Kennedy, sir—excuse me, sir—but these are bad ways.”
The words were lost upon him: he went up to his room, and threw himself, without taking off his clothes, upon his bed. No sleep came to him, and in the morning—damp, weary, and feverish as he had been—his look was inexpressibly pitiable and haggard.
The imperious demands of health forced him to take some notice of his condition; and he was about to put on clean clothes, and take some warm tea about ten in the morning, when the Master’s servant came to tell him that the Seniority desired his presence.
He at once knew that it must be for his irregularity of the previous night, which, in the agitation of other thoughts, had not occurred to him before. He remembered, too, that the Senior Dean had only recently threatened him that, in consequence of his late misdoings, the next offence would be visited with summary and final punishment.
Kennedy received rather hard treatment at the hand of the Senior Dean, who was a very worthy and excellent man, but so firm and punctilious that he could neither conceive nor tolerate the existence of beings less precise in their nature than himself. Kind and well-intentioned, he was utterly unfit for the guidance of young men, because he was totally deficient in those invaluable qualities—sympathy and tact. He had early taken a dislike to Kennedy, in consequence of some very harmless frivolities of his freshman’s year. Kennedy, in his frolicsome and happy moods, had, in ways, childish, perhaps, but completely harmless, offended the sensitive dignity of the college official, and these trivial eccentricities the Dean regarded as heinous faults—the symptoms of a reckless and irreverent character. There was one particular transaction which gave him more than usual offence, in which Kennedy, hearing a very absurd story at a don’s party, while the Dean was present, parodied it with such exquisite humour and such complete command of countenance, that all the other men, in spite of the official presence, had indecorously broken into fits of laughter. It is a great pity when rulers and teachers take such terrible fright at little outbreaks of mere animal and boyish spirits.
The Dean was inclined therefore from the first to take the most serious view of Kennedy’s proceedings, even when they were not as questionable as recently they had been. Instead of trying to enter into a young man’s feelings and temptations with consideration and forbearance, the Dean regarded them from a moral watchtower of unapproachable altitude, and hence to him the errors which he was sometimes obliged to punish were not regarded as human failings, but as monstrous and inexplicable phenomena. He could not in the least understand Kennedy; he only looked at him as a wild, and objectionable, and irregular young man; while Kennedy reciprocated his pity by a hardly-concealed contempt.
So, as Kennedy took cap and gown, and walked across the court to the combination-room, he became pretty well aware that a very heavy sentence was hanging over his head. He cared little for it; nothing that Saint Werner’s or its authorities could do, would wound him half so deeply as what he was already suffering, or cause the iron to rankle more painfully in his soul. He felt as a man who is in a dream.
He stood before them with a look of utter vacancy and listlessness, the result partly of physical weariness, partly of complete indifference. He was aware that the Dean, undisturbed this time, was haranguing him to his heart’s content, but he had very little notion of what he was saying. At last his ear caught the question—
“Have you any explanation to offer of your conduct, Mr Kennedy?”
He betrayed how little he had been attending by the reply—
“What conduct, sir?”
The Dean ruffled his plumage, and said with asperity—
“Your conduct last night, sir.”
“I was wandering in the fields, sir.”
“Wandering in the fields!” In the Dean’s formal and regular mind such a proceeding was wholly unintelligible; fancy a sensible member of a college wandering in the fields on a wet stormy night past twelve o’clock! “Really, Mr Kennedy, you must excuse us, but we can hardy accept so fantastic an explanation; we can hardly believe that you had no ulterior designs.”
Kennedy was bothered and fretful; he was not thinking of Deans or Seniors just then; his thoughts were reverting to his father’s implacable anger, and to Julian’s forbidding him to hope for the love of Violet Home. Weary of the talking, and careless of explaining anything to them, and with a short return of his old contempt, he wished to cut short the discussion, and merely said—
“I can’t help what you accept or what you believe.”
The Seniors had a little discussion among themselves, in which the opinion of Mr Norton appeared to be over-borne by the majority of votes, and then the Senior Dean said shortly—
“Mr Kennedy, we have come to the decision that it is undesirable for you to remain at Saint Werner’s at present, until you have mended your ways, and taken a different view of the duties and responsibilities of college life. You are rusticated for a year. You must leave to-morrow.”
Kennedy bowed and left the room. He, too, had been coming to a decision, and one that rendered all minor ones a matter of no consequence to him. During all the wet, and feverish, and sleepless night he had been determining what to do, and the event of this morning confirmed him still further. He was rusticated for a year; where could he go? Not to his father and his home, where every eye would look on him as a disgraced and characterless man; not to any of his relations or friends, who would regard him perhaps as a shame and burden;—no, there was but one home for him, and that was the long home, undisturbed beneath the covering of the grave.
The burden and mystery of life lay heavily on him—its lasting calamities and vanishing joys, its trials and disappointments. He would try whether, in a new state of life, the same distorted individuality was a necessary possession. Would it be necessary there also to live two lives in one, to have a soul, within whose precincts curse wrestled with blessing, good with evil, and life with death? As life went with him then, he would rather escape from it even into annihilation; he groaned under it, and in spite of all he had heard or read, he had no fear whatever of the after-death. If he had any feeling about that, it was a feeling of curiosity alone. He could not wholly condemn himself: he felt that however much evil might have mastered him good was the truest and most distinctive element of his being. He loved it even when he abandoned it, and yielded himself to sin. He could not believe that for these frailties, he would be driven into an existence of unmitigated pain.
He had no fear, no shadow of fear of the state of death, for he forgot that he would carry himself, his unchanged being—Conscience, Habit and Memory—into the other world. What he dreaded was the spasm of dying—the convulsion that was to snap the thousand silver strings in the harp of life. This he shuddered at, but he consoled himself that it would be over in a moment.
He took no food that day, but wrote to his father, to Eva, to Julian, Violet, and De Vayne. He told them his purpose, and prayed their forgiveness for all the wrongs he had done them. And then there seemed no more to do. With weak unsteady steps he paced his room, and looked at the old Swiss chamois-gun above the door. He took it down and handled it. It was a coarse clumsy weapon, and he could not trust it to effect his purpose. Shunning observation, he walked by back streets and passages until he came to a gunsmith’s shop, where he bought a large pistol, under pretence of wanting it for the purposes of travel.
He carried it home himself, but instead of returning straight to his rooms, he was tempted to stroll for a last time about the grounds. The delightful softness of the darkening air on that spring evening, and the cheerful gleam of lamps leaping up here and there between the trees, and flickering on the quiet river, enticed him up the glorious old entwined avenue into the shadow of the great oaks beyond, until he found himself leaning between the weeping willows over the bridge of Merham Hall, looking on the still grey poetic towers, and the three motionless reposing swans, and the gloaming of the west. And so, still thinking, thinking, thinking, he slowly wandered home.
As he had determined to commit suicide that night, it mattered little to him at what hour it was done, and opening the first book on the table, he tried to kill time until it grew later and darker. The book happened to be a Bible, and conscious how much it jarred with his present frame of mind, and his guilty purpose, he threw it down again; but not until his eye had caught the words:—
“AND HE SAW THE ANGEL OF THE LORD STANDING IN THE WAY.”
The verse haunted him against his will, till he half shuddered at the dim light which the moon made, as it struggled through the curtains only partially drawn, into the quaint old room. He would delay no longer, and loaded the pistol with a dreadful charge, which should not fail of carrying death.
Some fancy seized him to put out the lights, and then with a violent throbbing at the heart, and a wild prayer for God’s mercy at that terrible hour, he took the pistol in his hand.
At that very instant,—when there was hardly the motion of a hair’s breadth between him and fate,—what was it that startled his attention, and caused his hand to drop, and fixed him there with open mouth and wild gaze, and caused him to shiver like the leaves of the acacia in a summer wind?
Right before him,—half hidden by the window curtains, and half drawing them back,—clear and distinct he saw the spirit of his dead mother with uplifted finger and sad reproachful eyes fixed upon her son. The countenance so sorrowfully beautiful, the long bright gleaming of the white robe, the tresses floating down over the shoulders like a golden veil, for one instant he saw them, not dim and shadowy like the fading outlines of a dream, but with all the marked full character of living vision.
“Oh mother, mother!” he whispered, as he stretched out his hands, and sank trembling upon his knees, and bowed his head; but as he raised his head again, there was nothing there; only the glimmer of lamps about the court, and the pale moonlight streaming through the curtains, partly drawn, into the quaint old room.
Unable to trust himself with the murderous weapon in his hand even for a moment, yet swept from his evil purpose by the violent reflux of new and better thoughts, he fired the pistol into the air. The barrel, enormously overloaded, burst in the discharge, and uttering a cry, he fell fainting, with his right hand shattered, to the ground.
His cry and the loud report of the explosion raised the alarm, and as the men rushed up and forced open the door of his room, they found him weltering in his blood upon the floor.
Chapter Twenty Nine.
Eva enters the Chapel.
“I took it for a faëry vision
Of some bright creatures of the element,
That in the colours of the rainbow live
And play i’ the plighted clouds; I was awe-struck,
And, as I passed, I worshipped.”
Comus.
The long, long illness that followed, and the weary time which it took to heal the mutilated hand, proved the greatest blessings that could have befallen the weak and erring heart of Edward Kennedy. They spared him the necessity of that heart-rending meeting with those whom he best loved, the dread of which had been the most powerful incitement to urge upon him the thought of suicide. They gave him time to look before and after—they relieved the painful tension of his overwrought mind—they calmed him with the necessity for quiet thought and deep rest after the anguish and turmoil of the bygone months.
When he awoke to consciousness, Eva was sitting by his bedside in the sick-room. Slowly the well-remembered objects and the beloved face broke upon his recollection, but at first he could remember nothing more, nor connect the strange present with the excited past. Still more slowly—as when one breaks the azure sleep of some unruffled mountain mere by the skimming of a stone, and for a long time the clear images of blue sky, and wreathing cloud, and green mountain-top, are shaken and confused on the tremulous and twinkling wave, but unite together into the old picture when the water has recovered its glassy smoothness—so still more slowly did Kennedy’s troubled memory reflect the incidents, (alas! unbeautiful and threatening incidents), of the preceding days. They came back to him as he lay there quite still; and then he groaned.
“Hush! dearest Edward,” said Eva, who had watched his face, and guessed from its expressive workings the progress of his thoughts; “hush, we are with you, and all is going on well. Your hand is healing.”
He found that his right hand was tightly and firmly bandaged, and kept still by a splint.
“Was it much hurt? Shall I recover the use of it?”
“Yes, almost certainly, Dr Leesby says. I will tell papa that you are awake.”
“Is he very, very angry?” asked poor Kennedy.
“He has forgiven all, dear,” she said, kissing his forehead. “It was all very dreadful,”—and a cold shiver ran over her—“but none of us will ever allude to it again. Banish it from your thoughts, Eddy; we will leave Camford as soon as you can be moved.”
She went to fetch her father, and as he came in and leant fondly over his son’s sick-bed, and grasped warmly his unwounded hand, tears of afflicting memory coursed each other fast down the old man’s cheeks. He had been hard, too hard upon Edward; perhaps his severity had driven him of late into such bad courses, and to the brink of such an awful and disgraceful end; perhaps if he had been kinder, gentler, more sympathising for this first offence, he might have been saved the anguish of driving his poor boy to lower and wilder depths of sin and sorrow. It was all over now; and amid the apparent wreck of all his hopes, even after the death-blows which recent events had dealt to his old pride in his noble child, he yet regarded him as he lay there—wounded and in such a way—with all the pity of a Christian’s forgiveness, with all the fondness of a father’s love.
“Oh, father, I have suffered unspeakably. If God ever raises me to health and strength again, I vow with all my heart to serve Him as I have never done before.”
“Yes, Edward, I trust and believe it; think no more of the past; let the dead bury their dead. The golden present is before you, and you will have two friends who never desert the brave man—your Maker and yourself.”
A silence followed, and then Eva said, “I have just seen Dr Leesby, Eddy, and he says that if you are now quite yourself, and the light-headedness has ceased, you may be moved on Monday.”
“And to-day is?—I have lost all count of time.”
“To-day is Saturday. Won’t it be charming, dear, to find ourselves once more at home; quietly at home, with no one but ourselves, and our own love to make us happy.”
“And what am I to do, Eva?”
“Hush, Eddy; sufficient for the day—”
“Does she know, Eva? Do you ever hear from her now?”
“Yes, often—but do not think too much of those things just yet.”
“And Julian?”
“He has often come to ask after you,” she said blushing, “but he is afraid to see you, lest it should do you harm just now.”
“Perhaps he is right. We are not all enemies, then?”
“Enemies with Julian and Violet? Oh no.”
Though the engagement of Kennedy with Violet had been broken off by the common desire of Julian and Mr Kennedy, the two families still continued their affectionate intercourse, and bewailed the sad necessity which drove them to a step so painful, yet so unavoidably required by the welfare of all concerned. And from the first they hoped that all might yet be well, while some among them began to fancy that if Kennedy and Violet should ever be united, it would not be the only close bond between hearts already full of mutual affection.
So Julian still came daily during Kennedy’s illness to see Eva and Mr Kennedy, and to inquire after the sufferer’s health. And sometimes he took them for a walk in the grounds or the immediate neighbourhood of Camford, a place which they had never visited before, and which to them was full of interest.
Eva had often heard of the glories of Saint Werner’s chapel, and on the Sunday she asked Julian if it would be possible for her to go with her father to the evening service there.
“Oh yes,” said Julian; “certainly. I will get one of the Fellows to take you in. It is a remarkable sight, and I think you ought to go.”
The Sunday evening came, and Julian escorted them to the ante-chapel, and showed them the various sculptures and memorials of mighty names. They then waited by the door till some Fellow whom Julian knew should pass into the chapel to escort them to a vacant place in the Fellows’ seats.
Saint Werner’s Chapel consists of a single aisle, along the floor of which are placed rows of benches for the undergraduates; raised above these to a height of three steps are the long seats appropriated to the scholars and the Bachelors of Arts; and again, two steps above these are the seats of the Fellows and Masters of Arts, together with room for such casual strangers as may chance to be admitted. In the centre of these long rows, on either side, are the places for the choristers, men and boys, and the lofty thrones whence the Deans “look down with sleepless eyes upon the world.” By the door on either side are the red-curtained and velvet-cushioned seats of the Master and Vice-master, beyond whom sit the noblemen and fellow-commoners. By the lectern and reading-desk is a step of black and white marble, which extends to the altar, on which are two candlesticks of massive silver; and over them some beautiful carved oaken work covers a great painting, flanked on either side by old gilded pictures of the Saviour and the Madonna. Imagine this space all lighted from wall to wall by wax candles, and at the end by large lamps which shed a brighter and softer light, and imagine it filled, if you can, by five hundred men in snowy surplices, and you have a faint fancy of the scene which broke on the eyes of Mr Kennedy and Eva, as they passed between the statues of the ante-chapel, and under the pealing organ into the inner sanctuary of Saint Werner’s chapel.
“Could they behold—
Who, less insensible than sodden clay
In a sea river’s bed at ebb of tide—
Could have beheld with undelighted heart
So many happy youths, so wide and fair
A congregation in its budding-time
Of health, and hope, and beauty, all at once
So many divers samples from the growth
Of life’s sweet season—could have seen unmoved
That miscellaneous garland of wild flowers,
Decking the matron temples of a place,
So famous through the world?”
It was Mr Norton whom Julian caught hold of as an escort for his friends into the chapel. I well remember, (who that saw it does not?) that entrance. It was rather late; the organ was playing a grand overture, the men were all in their seats, and the service just going to begin, when Eva entered leaning on Mr Norton’s arm, and followed by her father and Julian. Many of the Saint Werner’s men had seen her walking in the grounds the last day or two, and as Kennedy’s sister a peculiar interest attached to her just then. But she needed no such accidental source of interest to attract the liveliest attention of such keen and warm enthusiasts for beauty as the Camford undergraduates. Ladies are comparatively rare apparitions in that semi-monastic body of scholars; and ladies both young and lovely are rare indeed. So as Eva entered, so young and so fair, the bright and graceful and beautiful Eva—with that exquisite rose-tinge which the air of Orton-on-the-Sea had given her, and the folded softness of the tresses which flowed down beside her perfect face, and the light of beaming eyes seen like jewels under her long eyelashes as she bent her glance upon the ground—as Eva entered, I say, leaning on Mr Norton’s arm, and touched, with the floating of her pale silk dress, the surplices of the Saint Werner’s men as they sat on either side down the narrow passage, it was no wonder that every single eye from that of the Senior Dean (Pace Decani dixerim!) to that of the little chorister boy was turned upon her for an instant, as she passed up to the only vacant seats, and Mr Norton caused room to be made for her beside the tutor’s cushion by the chaplain’s desk. She was happily unconscious of the admiration, and the perfect simplicity of her sweet girlish unconsciousness added a fresh charm to the whole grace of her manner and appearance. Only by the slightest possible blush did she show her sense of her unusual position as the cynosure for the admiring gaze of five hundred English youths; and that too though the dark and handsome countenance of Mr Norton glowed visibly with a brighter colour, (as though he were conscious of the thought respecting him, which darted across many an undergraduate’s mind), and even the face of Julian, as he walked to the scholars’ seats among the familiar ranks of his compeers, was flushed with the crimson of a sensitiveness which he would fain have hidden.
And I cannot help it, if even during the noble service—even amid the sound “Of solemn psalms and silver litanies,” the eyes of many men wandered towards a sweet face, and gazed upon it as they might have gazed upon a flower, and if the thoughts of many men were absorbed unwontedly in other emotions than those of prayer; nor can I help it if Julian was one of those whose eyes and thoughts were so employed.
What an evening star she was! And how her very presence filled all hearts with a livelier sense of happiness and hope, and sweet pure yearnings for wedded calm and bridal love! But she—innocent young Eva—little knew of the sensation she had caused by the rare beauty of her blossoming womanhood. Her whole heart was in the act of worship, except when it wandered for a moment to her poor sick Eddy, whom they had left alone, or for another moment to one whom she could not but see before her in the scholars’ seats. She did not know that men were looking at her, as she raised her clear warbling voice amid the silvery trebles of the choir, and uttered with all the expressiveness of genuine emotion those strains of poetry and passion which thrilled from the heart to the harp of the warrior-prophet and poet-king. And never did truer prayers come from a woman’s lips than those which her heart offered as her head was bowed that night.
The service was over, and the congregation streamed out. That evening the ante-chapel was fuller than usual of men, who stayed nominally to hear the organ; but besides those musical souls, who always linger to hear the voluntary, or to talk in little groups, there were others who, on that pretence, waited to catch another glimpse—a last glimpse of eyes whose deep and lovely colour had flowed into their souls. They were disappointed though, for Eva dropped her veil. With a graceful bow to Mr Norton, which he returned with courteous dignity, she took Julian’s proffered arm, and walked out into the court, her father following. A proud man was Julian that evening, and the subject of kindly envy to not a few.
But that little incident—the many eyes that had seen his treasure—determined Julian to take the step which he had long decided upon in his secret heart. He was half-jealous of the open, unconcealed admiration which Eva had excited, and it made him fear lest another should approach the object of his love, and occupy a place in the heart which he had not even demanded as his own. He was positively in a hurry. What if some undergraduate should get an introduction to Eva—some gay and handsome Adonis—and should suddenly carry away her heart?
So when Mr Kennedy went into the sick-room to read to Edward the lessons for the day, and Julian stayed with Eva in the sitting-room, he drew his chair beside hers, and they began to talk about Saint Werner’s.
“Do you think you shall ever be a Fellow, Julian? I should so like you to be?”
“And if I am, I shall hope very soon to exchange it for a happier fellowship, Eva.”
She wouldn’t see what he meant, so he said, “Eva, shall I read to you?”
“Yes,” she said, “I should like it so much; I used to enjoy so much the poetry we read at Grindelwald.”
He took down Coleridge’s poems from the shelf, and read—
“All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
Are all but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame.”
He went on, watching her colour change with the musical variations of his voice, until he came to the verse—
“I told her how he pined,—and ah
The deep, the low, the pleading tone
In which I sang another’s love
Interpreted my own.”
He saw her breast heaving with agitation, and throwing away the book, he bent down beside her, and looked up into her deep eyes, and said, “Oh, Eva, what need of concealment? You have read it long ago, have you not? I love you, Eva, love you so passionately—you cannot tell the depth of my love. Do you return it, Eva?” he said as he gained possession of her hand.
She had won him then—the dream of her latter life. This was the noble Julian kneeling at her side. She trembled for very joy, and whispered—“Oh, Julian, Julian, do you not see that I loved you from the first day we met?” She regretted the speech the next moment, as though it had been wanting in maidenly reserve, but it was the first warm natural utterance of her heart; and Julian sprang up in an ecstasy of joy, and as she rose he claimed as his due a lover’s kiss.
She blushed crimson, but suffered him to sit down beside her; and they sat, hardly knowing anything but the great fact that they loved each other, till Mr Kennedy’s voice had ceased in the adjoining room, and he came in.
“Oh, there you are,” he said. “Edward is sinking to sleep. How good of you to be so quiet!”
They rose up, and Julian led her to him with her hand in his, and his arm supporting her. “Mr Kennedy,” he said, “I am going to ask you for the most priceless jewel you possess.”
“What? Is it indeed so? Ah, you wicked Julian, do not rob me of Eva yet. She is too young; and now that Edward seems likely to be ill so long—ah, me! I am bereaved of my children. Well, well, I suppose it must be so. Come here, darling, to the old father you are going to desert; I daresay Julian won’t grudge me one kiss.”
He kissed her tenderly, and she clung about his neck as she whispered, “But it will not be yet for a long long time, papa.”
“What youth calls long, my Eva; but not long for those who are walking into the shadow down the hill.”
O happy, happy lovers! how gloriously that night did the stars shine out for you in the deep, unfathomable galaxies of heaven, and the dew fall, and the moon dawn into a sky yet flushed with the long-unfading purple of the fading day! Yet there was sadness mixed with their happiness as they heard, until they parted, the plaintive murmurs of Kennedy’s fitful sleep, and thought of all the sufferings of their brother, and how nearly, how very nearly, he had been hurried from the midst of them by self-inflicted death.