Brogten went straight from hall to Kennedy's rooms.  He found the door
sported, but knew as well as possible that Kennedy was in.  He hammered
and thumped at the door a long time with sundry imprecations, but
Kennedy, moodily resolute, heard all the noise inside, and would not
stir.  Then Brogten took out a card and wrote on the back, "I think
you'll ask De Vayne," and dropped it into the letter-box.

That evening he found in his own letter-box a slip of paper.  "De Vayne
is coming to wine with me to-morrow.  Come, and the foul fiend take you.
_I have filled my decanters half-full of water_, and won't bring out
more than one bottle.  E K."

Brogten read the note and chuckled,--partly with the thought of Kennedy,
partly of Bruce, partly of De Vayne.  Yet the chuckle ended in a very
heavy sigh.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE.

KENNEDY'S WINE-PARTY, AND WHAT CAME OF IT.

  "Et je n'ai moi
  Par la sang Dieu!
  Ni foi, ni loi,
  Ni jeu, ni lieu,
  Ni roi, ni Dieu."
  Victor Hugo, _Notre Dame de Paris_.

  "Nay, that's certain but yet the pity of it,
  Iago!--O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!"
  Othello, Act 4, Scene 1.

"Are you going to Kennedy's, Julian?" asked De Vayne.

"No."

"I wish he'd asked you."

Julian a little wondered why he had not, but remembered, with a sigh,
that there was _something_, he knew not what, between him and Kennedy.
Yet Kennedy was engaged to Violet!  The thought carried him back to the
beautiful memories of Grindelwald and Murrem,--perhaps of Eva Kennedy: I
will not say.

As De Vayne glanced round at the men assembled at Kennedy's rooms, he
felt a little vexation, and half wished he had not come.  Why on earth
did Kennedy see so much of these Bruces and Brogtens when he was so
thoroughly unlike them?  But De Vayne consoled himself with the
reflection that the evening could not fail to be pleasant, as Kennedy
was there; for he liked Kennedy both for Julian's sake and for his own.
Happily for him he did not know as yet that Kennedy was affianced to
Violet Home.

Kennedy sat at the end of the table with a gloomy cloud on his brow.
"Here, De Vayne," he said; "I'm so really glad to see you at last.  Sit
by me--here's a chair."

De Vayne took the proffered seat, and Bruce immediately seated himself
at his left hand.  At first, as the wine was passed round, there seemed
likely to be but little conversation, but suddenly some one started the
subject of a "_cause celebre_" which was then filling the papers, and
Kennedy began at once to discuss it with some interest with De Vayne,
who sat nearly facing him, almost with his back turned to Bruce, who did
not seem particularly anxious to attract De Vayne's attention.

"What execrable wash," said Brogten, emptying his glass.

De Vayne, surprised and disgusted at the rudeness of the remark, turned
hastily round, and, while Bruce as hastily withdrew his hand, raised the
wine-glass to his lips.

"Stop, stop, De Vayne," said Bruce eagerly; "there's a fly in your
glass."

"I see no fly," said De Vayne, glancing at it, and immediately draining
it, with the intention of saying something to smooth Kennedy's feelings,
which he supposed would have been hurt by Brogten's want of common
politeness.

"I think it very--" Why did his words fail, and what was the reason of
that scared look with which he regarded the blank faces of the other
undergraduates?  And what is the meaning of that gasp, and the rapid
dropping of the head upon the breast, and the deadly pallor that
suddenly put out the fair colour in his cheeks?  There was no fly--but,
good heavens! was there death in the glass?

The whole party leapt up from their places, and gathered round him.

"What is the matter, De Vayne?" said Kennedy tenderly, as he knelt down
and supported the young man in his arms.  But there was no answer.
"Here D'Acres, or somebody, for heaven's sake fetch a doctor; he must
have been seized with a fit."

"_What have you been doing, Bruce_?" thundered Brogten.

"Bruce doing!" said Kennedy wildly, as he sprang to his feet.  "By the
God above us, if I thought this was any of your devilish machinations, I
would strike you to the earth!"

"Doing?  I?" stammered Bruce.  "What do you mean?"  He trembled in every
limb, and his face was as pale as that of his victim; yet, though
perhaps De Vayne's life depended on it, the young wretch would not say
what he had done.  He had meant but to put four or five drops into his
glass, but De Vayne had turned round suddenly and startled him in the
very act, and in the hurried agitation of the moment, his hand had
slipped, and he had poured in all the contents of the bottle, with
barely time to hurry it empty into his pocket, or to prevent the
consequences of what he had done, when De Vayne lifted the glass to his
lips.

The men all stood round De Vayne and Kennedy in a helpless crowd, and
Kennedy said, "Here, fetch a doctor, somebody, and let all go except
D'Acres; so many are only in the way."

The little group dispersed, and two of them ran off to find a doctor;
but Bruce stood there still with open mouth, and a countenance as pale
in its horror as that of the fainting viscount.  He was anxious to tell
the truth about the matter in order to avert worse consequences, and yet
he dared not--the words died away upon his lips.

"Don't stand like that, Bruce," said Brogten indignantly, "the least you
can do is to make yourself useful.  Go and get the key of De Vayne's
rooms from the porter's lodge.  Stop, though! it will probably be in his
pocket.  Yes, here it is.  Run and unlock his door, while we carry him
to bed."

Bruce took the key with trembling hand, and shook so violently with
nervous agitation that he could hardly make his way across the court.
The others carried De Vayne to his bedroom as quickly as they could, and
anxiously awaited the doctor's arrival.  The livid face, with the dry
foam upon the lips, filled them with alarm, but they had not any
conception what to do, and fancied that De Vayne was in a fit.

It took Dr Masham a very short time to see that his patient was
suffering from the influence of some poison, and when he discovered
this, he cleared the room, and at once applied the proper remedies.  But
time had been lost already, and he was the less able to set to work at
first from his complete ignorance of what had happened.  He sat up all
night with his patient, but was more than doubtful whether it was not
too late to save his life.

The news that De Vayne had been seized with a fit at Kennedy's rooms
soon changed into a darker rumour.  Men had not forgotten the affair of
Hazlet, and they suspected that some foul play had been practised on one
whom all who knew him loved, and whom all, though personally
unacquainted with him, heartily respected.  That this was really the
fact soon ceased to be a secret; but who was guilty, and what had been
the manner or motives of the crime remained unknown, and this
uncertainty left room for the wildest surmises.

The dons were not slow to hear of what had happened, and they regarded
the matter in so serious a light, that they summoned a Seniority for its
immediate investigation.  Kennedy was obviously the first person of whom
to make inquiries, and he told them exactly what had occurred, viz, that
De Vayne after drinking a single glass of wine, fell back in his chair
in the condition wherein he still continued.  "Was anything the matter
with the wine, Mr Kennedy?" asked Mr Norton, who, as one of the
tutors, had a seat on the board.

"Nothing, sir; it was the same which we were all drinking."

"And without any bad effects?"

"Yes, sir."

"But, Mr Kennedy, there seems strong reason to believe that some one
drugged Lord De Vayne's wine.  Were you privy to any such plan?"

"No, sir--not exactly," said Kennedy slowly, and with hesitation.

"Really, sir," said the Master of Saint Werner's, "such an answer is
grossly to your discredit.  Favour us by being more explicit; what do
you mean by `not exactly'?"

Kennedy's passionate and fiery pride, which had recently increased with
the troubles and self-reprobation of his life, could ill brook such
questioning as this, and he answered haughtily:

"I was not aware that anything of _this_ kind was intended."

"Anything of _this_ kind; you _did_ then expect something to take
place?"

"I thought I had taken sufficient precautions against it."

"Against _it_; against _what_?" asked Mr Norton.

Kennedy looked up at his questioner, as though he read in his face the
decision as to whether he should speak or not.  He would hardly have
answered the Master or any of the others, but Mr Norton was his friend,
and there was something so manly and noble about his look and character,
that Kennedy was encouraged to proceed, and he said slowly:

"I suspected, sir, that there was some intention of attempting to make
De Vayne drunk."

"You suspected that," said Mr Norton with astonishment and scorn, "and
yet you lent _your_ rooms for such a purpose.  I am ashamed of you,
Kennedy; heartily, and utterly ashamed."

Kennedy's spirit was roused by this bitter and public apostrophe.  "I
lent my rooms for no such purpose; on the contrary, if it existed, I did
my best to defeat it."

"What made you suspect it?" asked Dr Rhodes, the Master.

"Because a similar attempt was practised on another."

"At which it seems that you were present?"

"I was not."  Kennedy was too fiercely angry to answer in more words
than were absolutely required.

"I am sorry to say, Mr Kennedy, you have not cleared yourself from the
great disgrace of giving an invitation, though you supposed that it
would be made the opportunity for perpetrating an infamous piece of
mischief.  Can you throw no more light on the subject?"

"None."

"Will you bring the decanter out of which Lord De Vayne drank?" said one
of the seniors after a pause, and with an intense belief in the
acuteness of the suggestion.

"I don't see what good it will do, but I will order my gyp to carry it
here if you wish."

"Do so, sir.  And let me add," said the Master, "that a little more
respectfulness of manner would be becoming in your present position."

Kennedy's lip curled, and without answer he left the room to fetch the
wine, grimly chuckling at the effect which the mixture would produce on
Mr Norton's fastidious taste.  When he reached his rooms, he stumbled
against the table in his hurry, and upset a little glass dish which held
his pencils, one of which rolled away under the fender.  In lifting the
fender to pick it up, a piece of paper caught his eye, which the
bedmaker in cleaning the room had swept out of sight in the morning.  He
looked at it, and saw in legible characters, "Laudanum, Poison."  It was
the label which had been loosely tied on Bruce's phial, and which had
slipped off as he hurried it into his pocket.

He read it, and as the horrid truth flashed across his mind, stood for a
moment stupefied and dumb.  His plan was instantly formed.  Instead of
returning to the conclave of Seniors he ran straight off to the
chemist's, which was close by Saint Werner's.

"Do you know anything of this label?" he said, thrusting it into the
chemist's hands.

"Yes," said the man, after looking at it for a moment; "it is the label
of a bottle of laudanum which I sold yesterday morning to Mr Bruce of
Saint Werner's."

Without a word, Kennedy snatched it from him, and rushed back to the
Seniority, who were already beginning to wonder at his long absence.  He
threw down the piece of paper before.  Mr Norton, who handed it to the
Master.

"I found that, sir, on the floor of my room."

"And you know nothing of it?"

"Yes.  It belongs to a bottle purchased yesterday by Bruce."

Amazement and horror seemed to struggle in the minds of the old
clergymen and lecturers as they sat at the table.

"We must send instantly for this young man," said Mr Norton; and in ten
minutes Bruce entered, pale indeed, but in a faultless costume, with a
bow of easy grace, and a smile of polite recognition towards such of the
board as he personally knew.  He was totally unaware of what had been
going on during Kennedy's cross-examination.

"Mr Bruce," said Mr Norton, to whom they all seemed gladly to resign
the task of discovering the truth, "do you know anything of the cause of
Lord De Vayne's sudden attack of illness last night?"

"I, sir?  Certainly not."

"He sat next to you, did he not?"

"He did, I believe.  Yes.  I can't be quite sure--but I think he did."

"You know he did as well as I do," said Kennedy.

"Mr Kennedy, let me request you to be silent.  Mr Bruce, had you any
designs against Lord De Vayne?"

"Designs, sir?  Excuse me, but I am at a loss to understand your
meaning."

"You had no intention then of making him drunk?"

"Really, sir, you astonish me by such coarse imputations.  Is it you,"
he said, turning angrily to Kennedy, "who have been saying such things
of me?"

Kennedy deigned no reply.

"I should think the testimony of a man who doesn't scruple secretly to
read examination-papers before they are set, ought not to stand for
much."  Brogten, as we have already mentioned, had revealed to him the
secret of Kennedy's dishonour.  This remark fell quite dead: Kennedy sat
unmoved, and Mr Norton replied--

"Pray don't introduce your personal altercations here, Mr Bruce, on
irrelevant topics.  Mr Bruce," he continued, suddenly giving him the
label, "have you ever seen that before?"

With a cry of agony, Bruce saw the paper, and struck his forehead with
his hand.  The sudden blow of shameful detection with all its train of
consequences utterly unmanned him, and falling on his knees, he cried
incoherently--

"Oh!  I did it, I did it.  I didn't mean to; my hand slipped: indeed,
indeed it did.  For God's sake forgive me, and let this not be known.  I
will give you thousands to hush it up--"

A general exclamation of indignation and disgust stopped his prayers,
and the Master gave orders that he should be removed and watched.  He
was dragged away, tearing his hair and sobbing like a child.  Kennedy,
too, was ordered to retire.

It took the Seniors but a short time to deliberate, and then Bruce was
summoned.  He would have spoken, but the Master sternly ordered him to
be silent, and said to him:

"Vyvyan Bruce, you are convicted by your own confession, extorted after
deliberate falsehood, of having wished to drug the wine of a
fellow-student for the purpose of entrapping him into a sin, to which
you would otherwise have failed to tempt him.  What fearful results may
follow from your wickedness we cannot yet know, and you may have to
answer for this crime before another tribunal.  Be that as it may, it is
hardly necessary to tell you that your time as a student at Saint
Werner's has ended.  You are expelled, and I now proceed to erase your
name from the books."  (Here the Master ran his pen two or three times
through Bruce's signature in the college register).  "Your rooms must be
finally vacated to-morrow.  You need say nothing in self-defence, and
may go."  As Bruce seemed determined to plead his own cause, they
ordered the attendant to remove him immediately.

Kennedy was then sent for, and they could not help pitying him, for he
was a favourite with them all.

"Mr Kennedy," said the senior Dean, "the Master desires me to admonish
you for your very culpable connivance--for I have no other name for it--
in the great folly and wickedness of which Bruce has been convicted--"

"I did _not_ connive," said Kennedy.

"Silence, sir!"

"But I will _not_ keep silence; you accuse me falsely."

"We shall be obliged to take further measures, Mr Kennedy, if you
behave in this refractory way."

"I don't care what measures you take.  I cannot listen in silence to an
accusation which I loathe--of a crime of which I am wholly innocent."

"Why, sir, you confessed that you suspected some unfair design."

"But not this design.  Proceed, sir; I will not interrupt you again; but
let me say that I am totally indifferent to any blame which you throw on
me for a brutality of which the whole responsibility rests on others."

The thread of the Dean's oration was quite broken by Kennedy's impetuous
interruption, and he merely added--"Well, Mr Kennedy, I am sorry to see
you so little penitent for the position in which you have placed
yourself.  You have disappointed the expectation of all your friends,
and however you may brazen it out, your character has contracted a
stain."

"You can say so, sir, if you choose," said Kennedy; and he left the room
with a formal bow.

A few days after, Mr Grayson asked him to what Bruce had alluded in his
insinuation about an examination-paper.

"He alludes, sir, to an event which happened some time ago."

Further questions were useless; nevertheless Kennedy saw that his
tutor's suspicions were not only aroused, but that they had taken the
true direction.  Mr Grayson despised him, and in Saint Werner's he had
lost caste.

That evening Bruce vanished from Camford, with the regrets of few except
his tailors and his duns.  To this day he has not paid his college debts
or discharged the bill for the gorgeous furniture of his rooms.  But we
shall hear of him again.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

DE VAYNE'S CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.

  "He that for love hath undergone
  The worst that can befall,
  Is happier thousandfold than one
  Who never loved at all.

  "A grace within his soul hath reigned,
  Which nothing else can bring;
  Thank God for all that I have gained
  By that high suffering."
  Moncton Manes.

For many days Lord De Vayne seemed to be hovering between life and
death.  The depression of his spirits weighed upon his frame, and
greatly retarded his recovery.  That he, unconscious as he was of ever
having made an enemy--good and gentle to all--with no desire but to love
his neighbour as himself, and to devote such talents and such
opportunities as had been vouchsafed him to God's glory and man's
benefit;--that _he_ should have been made the subject of a disgraceful
wager, and the butt of an infamous experiment; that in endeavouring to
carry out this nefarious plan, any one should have been so wickedly
reckless, so criminally thoughtless;--this knowledge lay on his
imagination with a depression as of coming death.  De Vayne had been but
little in Saint Werner's society, and had rarely seen any but his few
chosen friends; and that such a calamity should have happened in the
rooms and at the table of one of those friends,--that Kennedy, whom he
so much loved and admired, should be suspected of being privy to it;--
this fact was one which made De Vayne's heart sink within him with
anguish and horror, and a weariness of life.

And in those troubled waters of painful thought floated the broken
gleams of a golden phantasy, the rainbow-coloured memories of a secret
love.  They came like a light upon the darkened waves, yet a light too
feeble to dissipate the under gloom.  Like the phosphorescent flashes in
the sea at midnight, which the lonely voyager, watching with interest as
they glow in the white wake of the keel, guesses that they may be the
heralds of a storm,--so these bright reminiscences of happier days only
gave a weird beauty to the tumult of the sick boy's mind; and the
mother, as she sat by him night and day during the crisis of his
suffering, listened with a deeper anxiety for future trouble to the
delirious revelations of his love.

For Lady De Vayne had come from Other Hall to nurse her sick son.  She
slept on a sofa in his sitting-room, and nursed him with such tenderness
as only a mother can.  There was no immediate possibility of removing
him; deep, unbroken quiet was his only chance of life.  The silence of
his sick-room was undisturbed save by the softest whispers and the
lightest footfalls, and the very undergraduates hushed their voices, and
checked their hasty steps as they passed in the echoing cloisters
underneath, and remembered that the flame of life was flickering low in
the golden vase.

De Vayne was much beloved, and nothing could exceed the delicacy of the
attention shown him.  Choice conservatory flowers were left almost daily
at his door, and men procured rare and rich fruits from home or from
London, not because De Vayne needed any such luxuries, which were easily
at his command, but that they might show him their sympathy and
distress.  Several ladies more or less connected with Saint Werner's
offered their services to Lady De Vayne, but she would not leave her
son, in whose welfare and recovery her whole thoughts were absorbed.

And so, gloomily for the son and mother, the Christmas holidays came on,
and Saint Werner's was deserted.  Scarcely even a stray undergraduate
lingered in the courts, and the chapel was closed; no sound of choir or
organ came sweetly across the lawns at morning or evening; the ceaseless
melancholy plash of the great fountain was almost the only sound that
broke the stillness.  Julian, Lillyston, and Owen had all gone down for
the holidays, full of grief at the thought of leaving their friend in
such a precarious state, but as yet not permitted to see or serve him.
Lady De Vayne promised to write to Julian regular accounts of Arthur's
health, and told him how often her son spoke of him, both in his
wanderings, and in his clearer moments.

It was touching to see the stately and beautiful lady walking alone at
evening about the deserted college, to gain a breath of the keen winter
air, while her son had sunk for a few moments to fitful rest.  She was
pale with long watchings and deep anxiety, and in her whole countenance,
and in her deep and often uplifted eyes, was that look of prayerfulness
and holy communion with an unseen world which they acquire whose abode
has long been in the house of mourning, and removed from the follies and
frivolities of life.

Well-loved grounds of Saint Werner's by the quiet waves of the sedgy
Iscam, with smooth green grass sloping down to the edge, and trim quaint
gardens, and long avenues of chestnut and ancient limes!  Though winter
had long whirled away the last red and golden leaf, there was pleasure
in the air of quiet and repose, which is always to be found in those
memory-hallowed walks; and while Lady De Vayne could pace among them in
solitude, she needed no other change, nor any rest from thinking over
her sick son.

She was surprised one evening, very soon after the men had gone down, to
see an undergraduate slowly approaching her down the long and silent
avenue.  He was tall and well made, and his face would have been a
pleasant one, but for the deep look of sadness which clouded it.  He
hesitated and took off his cap as she came near, and returning his
salute, she would have passed him, but he stopped her and said:

"Lady De Vayne."

Full of surprise she looked at him, and with his eyes fixed on the
ground he continued, "You do not know my name; if I tell you, I fear you
will hate me, because I fear you will have heard calumnies about me.
But may I speak to you?"

"You are not Mr Bruce?" she said with a slight shudder.

"No; my name is Edward Kennedy.  Ah, madam! do not look at me so
reproachfully, I cannot endure it.  Believe me, I would have died--I
would indeed--rather than that this should have happened to Lord De
Vayne."

"Nay, Mr Kennedy, I cannot believe that you were more than thoughtless.
I have very often heard Julian Home speak of you, and I cannot believe
that his chosen friend could be so vile as some reports would make you."

"They are false as calumny itself," he said passionately.  "Oh, Lady De
Vayne, none could have honoured and loved your son more than I did; I
cannot explain to you the long story of my exculpation, but I implore
you to believe my innocence."

"I forgive you, Mr Kennedy," she said, touched with pity, "if there be
anything to forgive; and so will Arthur.  A more forgiving spirit than
his never filled any one I think.  Excuse me, it is time for me to
return to him."

"But will you not let me see him, and help you in nursing him?  It was
for this purpose alone that I stayed here when all the others went.  Let
me at least be near him, that I may feel myself to be making such poor
reparation as my heedlessness requires."

She could hardly resist his earnest entreaty, and besides, she was won
by compassion for his evident distress.

"You may come, Mr Kennedy, as often as you like; whenever Arthur is
capable of seeing you, you shall visit his sick-room."

"Thank you," he said, and she perceived the tremble of deep emotion in
his voice.

He came the next morning, and she allowed him to see De Vayne.  He
entered noiselessly, and gazed for a moment as he stood at the door on
the pale wasted face, looking still paler in contrast with the long dark
hair that flowed over the pillow.  He was awake, but there was no
consciousness in his dark dreamy eyes.

As De Vayne murmured to himself in low sentences, Kennedy heard
repeatedly the name of Violet, and once of Violet Home.  He sat still as
death, and soon gathered from the young lord's broken words, his love,
his deep love for Julian's sister.

And when Kennedy first recognised this fact, which had hitherto been
quite unknown to him, for a moment a flood of jealousy and bitter envy
filled his heart.  What if Violet should give up her troth in favour of
a wealthier, perhaps worthier lover?  What if her family should think
his own poor claims no barrier to the hope that Violet should one day
wear a coronet?  The image of Julian and Violet rose in his fancy, and
with one more pang of self-reproach, he grew ashamed of his unworthy
suspicions.

Yet the thought that De Vayne, too, had fixed his affections on Violet
filled him with uneasiness and foreboding, and he determined, on some
future occasion, to save pain to all parties, by getting Julian to break
to De Vayne the secret of his sister's betrothal.

For several days he came to the sick-room, and a woman could hardly have
been more thoughtful and tender than he was to his friend.  It was on
about the fourth evening that De Vayne awoke to complete consciousness.
He became aware that some one besides his mother was seated in the room,
and without asking he seemed slowly to recognise that it was Kennedy.

"Is that Kennedy?" he asked, in a weak voice.

"It is I," said Kennedy, but the patient did not answer, and seemed
restless and uneasy and complained of cold.

When Kennedy went, De Vayne whispered to his mother, "Mother, I am very
weak and foolish, but it troubles me somehow to see Kennedy sitting
there; it shocks my nerves, and fills me with images of something
dreadful happening.  I had rather not see him, mother, till I am well."

"Very well, Arthur.  Don't talk so much, love; I alone will nurse you.
Soon I hope you will be able to return to Other."

"And leave this dreadful place," he said, "for ever."

"Hush, my boy; try to sleep again."

He soon slept, and then Lady De Vayne wrote to Kennedy a short note, in
which she explained as kindly and considerately as she could, that
Arthur was not yet strong enough to allow of any more visits to his
sick-room.

"He shuns me," thought Kennedy, with a sigh, and packing up some books
and clothes, he prepared to go home.

Of course he was to spend part of the vacation at Ildown.  Violet
wondered that he did not come at once; she was not exactly jealous of
him, but she thought that he might have been more eager for her company
than he seemed to be, and she would have liked it better had he come
earlier.  Poor Kennedy! his very self-denials turned against him for the
sole reason why he kept away from Ildown was, that he feared to disturb
the freedom of Frank and Cyril by the presence of a stranger all the
time of their holidays, and he hesitated to intrude on the united
happiness which always characterised the Ildown circle.

Eva, too, was invited, and the brother and sister arrived at Ildown by a
late train, and drove to the house.  What a glowing welcome they
received!  Julian introduced them to Mrs Home, and Kennedy kissed
affectionately the hand of his future mother.  Frank and Cyril had gone
to bed, but Frank was so determined to see Violet's lover that night,
that he made Julian bring him into their bedroom, and he was more than
satisfied with the first glimpse.

"And where is Violet?" asked Kennedy, in a matter-of-fact tone, for he
well knew that she would not choose to meet him in the presence of
others.

"In her own little room," said Julian, smiling; "I will show you the
way."  He led Kennedy up-stairs, and left him at the door; he well knew
that her heart would be fluttering as much as his.

A light knock at the door, and a moment after they saw each other again.

She sat on the sofa, and the firelight flickered on the amethyst--his
gift--which she wore on her white neck; and her bright eyes danced with
tears and laughter, and her bosom heaved and fell as he clasped her to
his breast and printed a long, long kiss upon her cheek.

In silence, more exquisite than speech, they gazed on each other; and as
though her beauty were reflected on his own face, all trace of sorrow
and shame fled like a cloud from his forehead; and who would not have
said, looking upon the pair, that he was worthy of her, as she of him?

"My own Violet," he said, "you are beautiful as a vision to-night."

"Hush, flatterer!" and she placed her little hand upon his mouth:--no
wonder that he seized and kissed it.

"And what a thrice-charming dress."

"Ah, I _meant_ you to admire it," she said, laughing.

  "`And thinking, _this_ will please him best,
  She takes a ribbon or a rose,'"

he whispered to her.

"Come," she replied, "no ill-omened words, Edward.  You know the sad
context of those lines."

"No! no sadness to-night, my own Violet, my beautiful, beautiful Violet;
you quite dazzle me, my child.  I really can't sit by your side; come,
let me sit on your foot-stool here, and look up in your face."

"Silly boy," she said, "come along, we shall keep them all waiting for
supper."

While poor De Vayne languished on the bed of sickness, his sufferings
were almost the only shadow which chequered the brightness of those
weeks at Ildown.  In the morning, Julian and Kennedy worked steadily;
the afternoon and evening they devoted to amusement and social life.
The Kennedys soon became great favourites among the Ildown people, and
went out to many cheery Christmas parties; but they enjoyed more the
quiet evenings at home when they all sat and talked after dinner round
the dining-room fire, and while the two boys played at chess, and Violet
and Eva worked or sketched, Julian and Kennedy would read aloud to them
in turns.  How often those evenings recurred to all their memories in
future days.

Soon after the Kennedys had come, Julian received from Camford the
Christmas college-list.  He had again won a first class, but Kennedy's
name, much to his vexation, appeared only in the third.

"How is it that Edward is only in the third class?" asked Violet of
Julian--for, of course, she had seen the list.  "He is very clever--is
he not?"

"Very; one of the cleverest fellows in Saint Werner's."

"Then is he idle?"

"I'm afraid so, Vi.  You must get him to work more."

So when he was seated by her on the sofa in her little boudoir, she
said, "You must work more, Edward, at Camford, to please me."

"Ah, do not talk to me of Camford," he said, with a heavy sigh.  "Let me
enjoy unbroken happiness for a time, and leave the bitter future to
itself."

"Bitter, Edward? but why bitter?  Julian always seems to me so happy at
Camford."

"Yes, _Julian_ is, and so are all who deserve to be."

"Then you must be happy too, Edward."

His only answer was a sigh.  "Ah, Violet, pray talk to me of anything
but Camford."

The visit came to an end, as all things, whether happy or unhappy, must;
and Julian rejoiced that confidence seemed restored between him and
Kennedy once more.  Of course, he told Violet none of the follies which
had cost poor Kennedy the loss both of popularity and self-respect.
Soon afterwards Lord De Vayne was brought back to Other Hall, and Violet
and Julian were invited, with their mother, to stay there till the
Camford term commenced.  The boys had returned to school, so that they
all acceded to Lady De Vayne's earnest request that they would come.

It was astonishing how rapidly the young viscount recovered when once
Violet had come to Other Hall.  Her presence seemed to fill him with
fresh life, and he soon began to get down-stairs, and even to venture on
a short walk in the park.  His constitution had suffered a serious and
permanent injury, but he was pronounced convalescent before the Homes
finished their visit.

The last evening before their departure, he was seated with Violet on a
rustic seat on the terrace, looking at the sun as it set behind the
distant elms of the park, and at the deer as they grazed in lovely
groups on the rich undulating slopes that swept down from the slight
eminence on which his house was built.  He felt that the time had come
to speak his love.

"Violet," he said, as he looked earnestly at her, and took her hand,
"you have, doubtless, seen that I love you.  Can you ever return my
love?  I am ready to live and die for you, and to give you my whole
affection."  His voice was still low and weak through illness, and he
could hardly speak the sentences which were to win for him a decision of
his fate.

Violet was taken by surprise; she had known Lord De Vayne so long and so
intimately, and their stations were so different, that the thought of
his loving her had never entered her head.  She regarded him familiarly
as her brother's friend.

"Dear De Vayne," she said, "I shall always love you as a friend, as a
brother.  But did you not know that I have been for some months
engaged?"

"Engaged?" he said, turning very pale.

"I am betrothed," she answered, "to Edward Kennedy.  Nay, Arthur, dear
Arthur," she continued, as he nearly fainted at her feet, "you must not
suffer this disappointment to overcome you.  Love me still as a sister;
regard me as though I were married already, and let us enjoy a happy
friendship for many years."

He was too weak to bear up, too weak to talk; only the tears coursed
each other fast down his cheeks as he murmured, "Oh, forgive me, forgive
me, Violet."

"Forgive you," she said kindly; "nay, you honour me too much.  Marry one
of your own high rank, and not the orphan of a poor clergyman.  I am
sure you will not yield to this sorrow, and suffer it to make you ill.
Bear up, Arthur, for your mother's sake--for _my_ sake; and let us be as
if these words had never passed between us."

She lent him her arm as he walked faintly to his room, and as he turned
round and stooped to kiss her hand, she felt it wet with many tears.

They went home next day, and soon after received a note from Lady De
Vayne, informing them that Arthur was worse, and that they intended
removing for some time to a seat of his in Scotland; after which they
meant to travel on the Continent for another year, if his health
permitted it.  "But," she said, "I fear he has had a relapse, and his
state is very precarious.  Dear friends, think of us sometimes, and let
us hope to meet again in happier days."

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.

MEMORY THE BOOK OF GOD.

  "At Trompyngtoun, nat fer fra Cantebrigg,
  Ther goth a brook, and over that a brigge,
  Upon the whiche brook then stant a melle;
  _And this is verray sothe that I you telle_."
  Chaucer, _The Reeve's Tale_.

There is little which admits of external record in Julian's life at this
period of his university career.  It was the usual uneventful, quiet
life of a studious Camford undergraduate.  Happy it was beyond any other
time, except perhaps a few vernal days of boyhood, but it was unmarked
by any incidents.  He read, and rowed, and went to lectures, and worked
at classics, mathematics, and philosophy, and dropped in sometimes to a
debate or a private-business squabble at the Union, and played racquets,
fives, and football, and talked eagerly in hall and men's rooms over the
exciting topics of the day, and occasionally went to wine or to
breakfast with a don, and, (absorbed in some grand old poet or
historian), lingered by his lamp over the lettered page from chapel-time
till the grey dawn, when he would retire to pure and refreshful sleep,
humming a tune out of very cheerfulness.

Happy days, happy friendships, happy study, happy recreation, happy
exemption from the cares of life!  The bright visions of a scholar, the
bright hilarity of a youth, the bright acquaintanceship with many united
by a brotherly bond within those grey walls, were so many mingled
influences that ran together "like warp and woof" in the web of a
singularly enviable life.  And every day he felt that he was knowing
more, and acquiring a strength and power which should fit him hereafter
for the more toilsome business and sterner struggles of common life.
Well may old Cowley exclaim--

  "O pulerae sine luxes aedes, vitaeque decore
  Splendida paupertas ingenuusque pudor!"

All the reading men of his year were now anxiously occupied in working
for the Saint Werner's scholarships.  They were the blue ribbon of the
place.  In value they were not much more than 50 pounds a year, but as
the scholars had an honourable distinctive seat both in hall and chapel,
and as from _their_ ranks alone the Fellows were selected, all the most
intelligent and earnest men used their best efforts to obtain them on
the earliest possible occasion.  At the scholars' table were generally
to be found the most distinguished among the alumni of Saint Werner's.

Julian still moved chiefly among his old friends, although he had a
large acquaintance, and by no means confined himself to the society of
particular classes.  But De Vayne's illness made a sad gap in the circle
of his most intimate associates, and he was not yet sufficiently
recovered to attempt a correspondence.  Among the dons, Julian began to
like Mr Admer more and more, and found that his cynicism of manner was
but the result of disappointed ambition and unsteady aims, while his
heart was sound and right.

Kennedy, as well as Julian, had always hoped to gain a scholarship at
his first trial, but now, with only one term left him to read in, his
chance seemed to fade away to nothing.  Poor fellow, he had returned
with the strongest possible intention of working, and of abandoning at
once and for ever all objectionable acquaintances and all dangerous
ways.  Hourly the sweet face of Violet looked in upon his silent
thoughts, and filled him with shame as he thought of lost opportunities
and wasted hours.

"Kennedy," said Mr Admer, "how can you be so intolerably idle?  I saw
some of your Christmas papers, and they were wholly unworthy of your
abilities."

"I know it well.  But what could you expect?  The Pindar I had read once
over with a crib; the morality I had not looked at; the mathematics I
did not touch."

"But what excuse have you?  I really feel quite angry with you.  You are
wholly throwing away everything.  What have you to show for your time
and money?  Only think, my dear fellow, that an opportunity like this
comes only once in life, and soon your college days will be over with
nothing to remember."

"True, too true."

"Well, I am glad that you see and own it.  I began to fear that you were
one of that contemptible would-be fine gentleman class that affects
forsooth to despise work as a thing unworthy of their eminence."

"No, Mr Admer," said Kennedy, "my idleness springs from very different
causes."

"And then these Brogtens and people, whom you are so often seen with;
which of them do you think understands you, or can teach you anything
worth knowing? and which of them do you think you will ever care to look
back to as acquaintances in after days?"

"Not one of them.  I hate the whole set."

"And then, my dear Kennedy--for I speak to you out of real good-will--I
would say it with the utmost delicacy, but you must know that your name
has suffered from the company you frequent."

"Can I not see it to be so?" he answered moodily; "no need to tell me
that, when I read it in the faces of nearly every man I see.  The men
have not yet forgiven me De Vayne's absence, though really and truly
that sin does not lie at my door.  Except Julian and Lillyston there is
hardly a man I respect, who does not look at me with averted eyes.  Of
course Grayson and the dons detest me to a man; but I don't care for
them."

"Then, you mysterious fellow, seeing all this so clearly, why do you
suffer it to be so?"

Kennedy only shook his head; already there had begun to creep over him a
feeling of despair; already it seemed to him as though the gate of
heaven were a lion-haunted portal guarded by a fiery sword.

For he had soon found that his intense resolutions to do right met with
formidable checks.  There are two stern facts--facts which it does us
all good to remember--which generally lie in the path of repentance, and
look like crouching lions to the remorseful soul.  First, the fact that
we become so entangled by habit and circumstance, so enslaved by
association and custom, that the very atmosphere around us seems to have
become impregnated with a poison which we cannot cease to breathe;
secondly, the fact that "_in the physical world there is no forgiveness
of sins_;" to abandon our evil courses is not to escape the punishment
of them, and although we may have relinquished them wholly in the
present, we cannot escape the consequences of the past.  Remission of
sin is _not_ the remission of their results.  The very monsters we
dread, and the dread of which terrifies us into the consideration of our
ways, glare upon us out of the future darkness, as large, as terrible,
as irresistible, whether we approach them on the road to ruin, or
whether we seem to fly from them through the hardly attained and narrow
wicket of genuine repentance.

Both these difficulties acted with their full force on the mind of
Kennedy.  His error was its own punishment, and its heaviest punishment.
The hours he had lost were lost so utterly, that he could never hope to
recover them; the undesirable acquaintances he had formed were so far
ripe as to render it no light task to abandon them; and above all, the
fleck on his character, the connection of his name with the outrage on
De Vayne, had injured his reputation in a manner which he never hoped,
by future endeavours, to obviate or remove.

For instance, there was at once an objection to his dropping the society
of the set to which Bruce and Brogten had introduced him.  He owed them
money, which at present he could not pay; his undischarged "debts of
honour" hung like a millstone round his neck.  To pay these seemed a
necessary preliminary even to the possibility of commencing a new
career.

But how to get the money? ah me! new temptations seemed springing up
around like the crop of armed men from the furrows sown with the
dragon's teeth.

There was but one way which suggested itself to his mind, by which he
would be able at once to deliver himself in part by meeting the most
exigent demands.  Let me hurry over the struggle which it cost him, but
finally he adopted it.  It was this.

Mr Kennedy was most liberal in allowing his son everything which could
possibly further his university studies, and the most important item in
his quarterly expenses was the charge for private tuition.  This sum was
always paid by Kennedy himself, and it amounted at least to seven pounds
a term.  Now, what if he should not only ask his father to allow him
this term a classical and a mathematical tutor, but also request
permission to read double with them both _i e_, to go for an hour _every
day_ instead of every other day?  This would at once procure him from
his father the sum of twenty-eight pounds, and by means of this he
could, with great economy, clear off all the most pressing of those
pecuniary obligations which bound him to company, which he longed to
shun, and exposed him to dangers which he had learnt to fear.  Of course
he would be obliged to forego all assistance from private tutors, and
simply to appropriate the money, without his father's knowledge, to
other ends.  In a high point of view, it was simple embezzlement; it was
little better than a form of swindling.  But in this gross and repulsive
shape, it never suggested itself to poor Kennedy's imagination.  Somehow
one's own sins never look so bad in our eyes as the same sins when
committed by another.  He argued that he would really be applying the
money as his father intended, viz, to such purposes as should most
advance the objects of his university career.  He was committing a sin
to save himself from temptation.

The near approach of the scholarship examination, and Kennedy's failure
at Christmas, made his father all the more ready to give him every
possible advantage that money could procure.  Ignorant of the fact that
to "read double" with a tutor was almost a thing unprecedented at
Camford, and that to do so, _both_ in classics and mathematics, was a
thing wholly unknown, and indeed practically impossible, Mr Kennedy was
only delighted at Edward's letter, as conveying a proof of his extreme
and laudable eagerness to recover lost ground, and do his best.  He very
readily wrote the cheque for the sum required, and praised his son
liberally for these indications of effort.  How those praises cut
Kennedy to the heart.

But he at once spent the money in the way which he had devised, and
added thereby a new load of mental bitterness to the heavy weight which
already oppressed him.  The sum thus appropriated greatly lightened,
although it did not remove, the pecuniary obligations which he had
contracted at cards or in other ways to his set of "fast" companions;
but it was at the cost of his peace of mind.

Externally he profited by the transaction.  He was enabled in great
measure, without the charge of meanness, to drop the most undesirable of
his acquaintances, and awaking eagerly to the hope of at once redeeming
his reputation and lessening his difficulties by gaining a scholarship,
he began, for the first time since he had entered Saint Werner's, to
work steadily with all his might.

He seemed to be living two lives in one, and often asked himself whether
there was in his character some deeply-rooted hypocrisy.  With Julian
and Owen, and the men who resembled them, he could talk nobly of all
that was honourable, and he powerfully upheld a chivalrous ideal of duty
and virtue.  And as his face lighted up, and the thoughts flowed in the
full stream of eloquent language in reprobation of some mean act, or in
glowing eulogium of some recorded heroism for the performance of what
was right, who would have fancied, who would have believed, that
Kennedy's own life had failed so egregiously in the commonest
requirements of steadfastness and honesty?

None rejoiced more in the outward change of life than Julian Home; for
Violet's sake now, as well as for Kennedy's, he felt a keen and
brotherly interest in the progress and estimation of his friend.  Once
more they were to be found together as often as they had been in their
freshman's year, and it was Julian's countenance and affection that
tended more than anything else to repair Kennedy's damaged popularity,
and remove the tarnish attaching to his name.

One evening they were taking the usual two-hours' constitutional--which
is often the poor substitute for exercise in the case of reading men--
and discussing together the chances of the coming scholarship
examination, when they found themselves near a place called Gower's
Mill, and heard a sudden cry for help.  Pressing forwards they saw a
boat floating upside down, and whirling about tumultuously in the racing
and rain-swollen eddies of the mill-dam.  A floating straw hat was
already being sucked in by the gurgling rush of water that roared under
the mighty circumference of the wheel, and for a moment they saw nothing
more.  But as they ran up, a black spot emerged from the stream, only a
few yards from the mill, and they saw a man, evidently in the last stage
of exhaustion, struggling feebly in the white and boiling waves.

The position was agonising.  The man's utmost efforts only served to
keep him stationary, and it was clear, from the frantic violence of his
exertion, that he could not last an instant longer.  Indeed, as they
reached the bank, he began to sink and disappear--disappear as it seemed
to the certainty of a most horrid death.

In one instant--without considering the danger and apparent hopelessness
of the attempt, without looking at the wild force of the water, and the
grinding roll of the big wheel, without even waiting to fling off their
coats--Julian and Kennedy, actuated by the strong instinct to save a
fellow-creature's life, had both plunged into the mill-dam, and at the
same moment struck out for the sinking figure.  It was not till then
that they felt their terrific danger; in the swirl of those spumy and
hissing waves it was all but impossible for them to make head against
the current, and they felt it carry them nearer and nearer to the black,
dripping mass, one blow of which would stun them, and one revolution of
it mangle them with horrible mutilation.  They reached the drowning
wretch, and each seizing him by the arm, shouted for assistance, and
buffeted gallantly with the headstrong stream.  The senseless burden
which they supported clogged their efforts, and as they felt themselves
gradually swept nearer, nearer, nearer to destruction, the passionate
desire of self-preservation woke in both of them in all its wild
agony;--yet they would not attempt to preserve themselves by letting go
the man to save whose life they had so terribly endangered their own.

Meanwhile their repeated shouts and those of the swimmer, which had
first attracted their own attention, had aroused the miller, who
instantly, on hearing them, ran down with a rope to the water's side.
He threw it skilfully; with a wild clutch Kennedy caught it, and in
another moment, as from the very jaws of death, when they were almost
touching the fatal wheel, they were drawn to shore, still carrying, or
rather dragging, with them their insensible companion.

After a word of hurried thanks to the miller for saving their lives,
they began to turn their whole attention to the half-drowned man, and to
apply the well-known remedies for restoring extinct animation.

"Good heavens," said Julian, "it is Brogten!"

"Brogten?" said Kennedy; he looked on the face, and whispered
half-aloud, "Thank God!"

They carried him into the mill, put him between the blankets in a warm
bed, chafed his numb limbs, and sent off for the nearest doctor.  Very
soon he began to revive, and recovered his consciousness; immediately
this was the case, Julian and Kennedy ran home as quickly as they could
to change their wet clothes.

The next day the doctor ordered Brogten to lie in bed till after
mid-day, and then allowed him, now thoroughly well and rested, to walk
home to Saint Werner's.  He had not yet learnt the names of his
deliverers.

He reached the college in the evening, and after changing his boating
dress, his first care was to try and learn to whom he was indebted for
his life.  Almost the first man he met told him that the men who had
risked their safety for his were Home and Kennedy.

Home and Kennedy!  Home, to whom he had caused the bitterest
disappointment and done the most malicious injury which had ever
happened to him in his life; Kennedy, whom he had tried but too
successfully to corrupt and ruin, tempt from duty, and push from his
good name!

Deeply, very deeply, was Brogten humiliated; he felt that his enemies
had indeed heaped coals of fire upon his head.

He determined, as his first duty, to go and thank them both--Kennedy
first, as the one against whom he had most wilfully sinned.

He found Kennedy sitting down to tea, and Julian, Owen, and Suton were
with him.

"Kennedy," he said, "I have come to thank you and Home for a very
gallant deed; I need not say how much I feel indebted to you for the
risk you ran in saving my life."

Genuine tears rushed into his dark eyes as he spoke, and cordially
grasped the hands which, without a word, they proffered.  Community of
danger, consciousness of obligation, blotted out all evil memories; and
to have stood side by side together on the very brink of the precipice
of death was a bond of union which could not be ignored or set aside.
That night, in spite of bygones, the feeling of those three young men
for each other was of the kindliest cast.

"Won't you stay to tea, Brogten?" said Kennedy.

He looked round, as though uncertain whether the others would like his
company, but as they all seconded Kennedy's request, he gladly stayed.
It was the first evening that he had regularly spent in the society of
reading men, and he was both delighted and surprised at the rare
pleasure he received from the vigour and liveliness of their
conversation.  These were the men whom he had despised as slow, yet what
a contrast between their way of talking and the inanities of Fitzurse or
the shallow flippancy of Bruce.  As he sat there and listened, his very
face became softer in its lines from the expression of a real and
intelligent interest, and they all thought that he was a better fellow,
on closer acquaintance, than they had been accustomed to suppose.  Ah
me! how often one remains unaware of the good side of those whom we
dislike.

Oh, those Camford conversations--how impetuous, how interesting, how
thoroughly hearty and unconventional they were!  How utterly presumption
and ignorance were scouted in them, and how completely they were free
from the least shadow of insincerity or ennui.  If I could but transfer
to my page a true and vivid picture of one such evening, spent in the
society of Saint Werner's friends--if I could write down but one such
conversation, and at all express its vivacity, its quick flashes of
thought and logic, its real desire for truth and knowledge, its friendly
fearlessness, its felicitous illustrations, its unpremeditated wit, such
a record, taken fresh from the life, would be worth all that I shall
ever write.  But youth flies, and as she flies all the bright colours
fade from the wings of thought, and the bloom vanishes from the earnest
eloquence of speech.

Yet, as I write, let me call to mind, if but for a moment, the
remembrance of those happy evenings, when we would meet to read
Shakespeare or the Poets in each other's rooms, and pleasant sympathies
and pleasant differences of opinion freely discussed, called into genial
life, friendships which we once hoped and believed would never have
grown cold.  Let the image of that bright social circle, picturesquely
scattered in armchairs round the winter fire, rise up before my fancy
once more, and let me recall what can never be again.  Of the honoured
and well-loved few who one night recorded their names and thoughts in
one precious little book, two are dead though it is but five years back;
C E B---is dead; and R H P---is dead; C E B---the chivalrous and
gallant-hearted, the champion of the past, the "Tory whom Liberals
loved;" and R H P---, the honest and noble, the eloquent speaker, and
the brave actor, and the fearless thinker--he, too, is dead, nobly
volunteering in works of danger and difficulty during the Indian Mutiny;
but L---, and B---, and M---, and others are living yet, and to them I
consecrate this page _they_ will forgive the digression, and for their
sakes I will venture to let it pass.  We are scattered now, and our
friendship is a silent one, but yet I know that to them, at least,
changed or unchanged, my words will recall the fading memory of glorious
days.

The conversation, (but do not suppose that I shall attempt, after what I
have said, to reproduce it), happened to turn that evening on the
phenomena of memory.  It started thus:--They had been discussing some
subject of the day, when Owen observed to Julian--

"Why, how grave you look, Julian."

"Do I?  I was thinking of something odd.  While you were talking--
without the faintest apparent reason that I can discover, (and I was
trying to hit upon one when you spoke)--a fact started up in my mind,
which had no connection whatever with the subject, and yet which forced
itself quite strongly and obtrusively on my notice."

"Just as one catches sight suddenly of some stray bit of seaweed
floating in a great world of waters, which seems to have no business
there," said Kennedy.

"Yes.  But there _must_ have been _some_ reason for my thinking of it
just then."

"The law of association, depend upon it," said Owen, "even if the
connecting links were so subtle and swiftly moved that you failed to
detect their presence."

"Are you of the Materialist school, Owen, about memory?" said Julian,
"_i e_, do you go with Hobbes and Condillac, and make it a decaying
sense or a transformed sensation?"

"Not a bit; I believe it to be a spiritual faculty, entirely independent
of mere physical organisation."

"Wo-ho!" said Kennedy; "the physiologists will join issue with you
there.  How for instance do you account for such stories as that of the
groom, who, getting a kick on a particular part of the head from a
vicious horse, suffered no harm except in forgetting everything which
had happened _up to that time_?"

"It isn't a bit conclusive.  I don't say that the conscious exercise of
memory mayn't be temporarily dependent on organisation, but I do believe
that every fact ever imprinted on the memory, however long it may be
latent, is of its very nature imperishable."

"Yes," said Suton.  "Memory is the book of God.  Did you see that story
of the shipwreck the other day?  One of the survivors, while floating
alone on the dark midnight sea, suddenly heard a voice saying to him
distinctly, `Johnny, did you eat sister's grapes?'  It was the revived
memory of a long-forgotten childish theft.  What have the
Pineal-Gland-olaters to say to that?"

"What a profound touch that was of Themistocles," said Kennedy, "who
rejected the offer of a Memoria Technicha, with the aspiration that some
one could _teach him to forget_.  Lethe is the grandest of rivers after
all."

"I can illustrate what you are saying," said Brogten, "and I believe it
to be true that _nothing can be utterly forgotten_.  Yesterday when you
saw me I had sunk twice, and when you rescued me I was insensible.
Strange things happened to my memory then!"

"Tell us," said all of them eagerly.

"Well, I believe it's an old story, but I'll tell you.  When the first
agony of fear, and the sort of gulp of asphyxia was over, I felt as if I
was sinking into a pleasant sleep, surrounded by the light of green
fields--"

"Because the veins of the eye were bloodshot, and green is the
complementary colour," interpolated Kennedy, whereat Owen gave a little
incredulous guffaw; and Brogten continued--

"Well, _then_, it was that all my past life flashed before me, from the
least forgotten venial fault of infancy to the worst passion of youth,--
only they came to me clear and vivid, in _retrograde_ order.  The lies I
told when I was a little boy, the wicked words I spoke, the cruel things
I did, the first taint that polluted my mind, the faces of
school-fellows whom I had irreparably injured, the stolen waters of
manhood--all were dashed into my remorseful recollection; they started
up like buried, menacing ghosts, without, or even against my will.  I
felt convinced that they were _indestructible_."

"That strain I heard was of a higher mood!" thought the auditors, for it
was quite a new thing to hear Brogten talk like this, and in such a
solemn, manly, sober voice.

"Fancy," said Kennedy, sighing, "_an everlasting memory_!"

The others went away, but Brogten still lingered in Kennedy's rooms,
and, rising, took him by the hand.  They both remembered another scene
in these rooms, when they two were together,--the torturer and the
tortured; but it was different now.

"The worst thing that haunted me, Kennedy, when you were saving my life,
was the thought of my wickedness to you.  I fear it can never be
repaired; yet believe me, that from this day forth I have vowed before
God to turn over a new leaf, and my whole effort will be to do all for
you that ever may be in my power!  Do you forgive me?"

"As I hope to be forgiven," he replied.

Yet it was part of Brogten's punishment in after days to remember that
_his_ hand had set the stone moving on the steep hill-side, which
afterwards he had no power to stay.  It would not come back to him for a
wish, but leapt, and rushed, and bounded forward, splintering and
splintered by the obstacles in its course, till at last--Could it be
saved from being dashed to shivers among the smooth rocks of the valley
and the brook?

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

HAZLET'S VISION.

  "And ride on his breast, and trouble his rest
  In the shape of his deadliest sin."
  Anon.

Before the scholarship, came the Little-go, so called in the language of
men, but known to the gods as the Previous Examination.  As it is an
examination which all must pass, the standard required is of course very
low, and the subjects are merely Paley's Evidences, a little Greek
Testament, some easy classic, Scripture History, and a sprinkling of
arithmetic and algebra.

The reading men simply regard it as a nuisance, interrupting their
reading and wasting their time, _i e_, until the wisdom of maturer years
shows them its necessity and use.  But to the idle and the stupid, the
name Little-go is fraught with terror.  It begins to loom upon them from
the commencement of their second year, and all their efforts must be
concentrated to avoid the disgrace and hindrance of a pluck.  There are
regular tutors to cram Poll men for this necessary ordeal, and the
processes applied to introduce the smallest possible modicum of
information into the heads of the victims, the surgical operations
necessary to inculcate into them the simplest facts, would, if narrated,
form a curious chapter in morbid psychology.  I suggest this merely as a
pregnant hint for the future historian of Camford; personally I am only
acquainted by report with the system resorted to.

Hazlet began to be in a fright about the Little-go from the very
commencement of his second October.  His mother well knew that the
examination was approaching, and thought it quite impossible that her
ingenuous and right-minded son could fall a victim to the malice of
examiners.  Hazlet was not so sure of this himself, and as the days had
passed by when he could speak of the classics with a holy indignation
against their vices and idolatry, he was wrought up by dread of the
coming papers into a high state of nervous excitement.

I will not betray the mistakes he made, or dish up in this place the
"crambe repetita" of those Little-go anecdotes, which at this period of
the year awaken the laughter of combination-rooms, and dissipate the
dulness of Camford life.  Suffice it to say that Hazlet displayed an
ignorance at once egregious and astounding; the ingenious perversity of
his mistakes, the fatuous absurdity of his confusions, would be
inconceivable to any who do not know by experience the extraordinary
combinations of ignorance and conceit.  The examiners were very lenient
and forbearing, but Hazlet was plucked; plucked too in Scripture
History, which astonished everybody, until it became known that he had
attributed John the Baptist's death to his having "danced with
Herodias's daughter"--traced a connection between the Old and New
Testaments in the fact of Saint Peter's having cut off the ear of
Malachi the last of the prophets--and stated that the substance of Saint
Paul's sermon at Athens, was "crying vehemently about the space of two
hours, Great is Diana of the Ephesians!"

It is a sad pity that such ludicrous associations should centre round
the word "pluck."  It is anything but a laughing matter to those who
undergo the process; they have tried hard and worked diligently perhaps
to pass the examination, and if they fail they see before them another
long period of weary and dissatisfied effort, with the same probability
of failure again and again repeated: for until the barrier of the
Little-go is passed they can advance no further, and must simply stay at
Camford until in some way or other they can succeed in getting up the
requisite minimum of information.  I have seen a strong man in the
senate-house turn as white as a sheet, when a paper which he was unable
to answer was placed before him.  I fancy I see him now, and distinctly
remember my strong feeling of compassion for his distress, and my
earnest hope that he would not be "floored."

There was a general laugh in Saint Werner's when it was announced that
Hazlet was plucked; and in Scripture History too!  His follies and
inconsistencies had unhappily made him a butt, but men little knew how
heavily the misfortune would weigh upon him.

He happened at this time to be living on the same stair-case with
Lillyston, and Lillyston, who was in the rooms below him, was quite
amazed at the sounds which he heard proceeding from his rooms.  For a
long time there was a series of boo-hoos, long, loud, and wailing as of
some animal in distress, and then there was an uproar as of some one
running violently about, and throwing the furniture out of his way.
Lillyston was just on the point of going to see what was the matter when
the breathless bedmaker appeared at the door, and said--"Oh, Mr
Lillyston, sir, do go and look at Mr Hazlet, sir; he's took very bad,
he is."

"Took very bad--how do you mean?"

"Why, sir, it's the Little-go, sir, as done it.  He's plucked, sir, and
it's upset him like.  So, when I asked him if he'd a-tea'd, and if I
should take away the things, he begins a banging his chairs about, you
see, sir, quite uncomfortable."

Lillyston immediately ran up-stairs.  The violent fit seemed to have
subsided, for Hazlet, peering out of a corner, with wandering,
spectacled eyes, quite cowered when he saw him.  Lillyston was shocked
at the spectacle he presented.  Hazlet was but half dressed, his hands
kept up an uneasy and vague motion, his face was blank, and his whole
appearance resembled that of an idiot.

"Why, Hazlet, my man, what's the matter with you?" said Lillyston,
cheerily.

Hazlet trembled, and muttered something about a dog.  It happened that
just before coming back from the senate-house, a large Newfoundland had
run against him, and his excited imagination had mingled this most
recent impression with the vagaries of a temporary madness.

"The dog, my dear fellow; why, there's no dog here."

Hazlet only cowered farther into the corner.

"Here, won't you have some tea?" said Lillyston; "I'll make it for you.
Come and help me."

He began to busy himself about setting the tea-things, and cutting the
bread, while he occupied Hazlet in pouring out the water and attending
to the kettle.  Hazlet started violently every now and then, and looked
with a terrified side-glance at Lillyston, as though apprehensive of
some wrong.

At last Lillyston got him to sit down quietly, and gave him a cup of tea
and some bread.  He ate it in silence, except that every now and then he
uttered a sort of wail, and looked up at Lillyston.  The look didn't
seem to satisfy him, for, after a few minutes, he seized his knife, and
said, "I shall cut off your whiskers."

What put the grotesque fancy into his head, Lillyston did not know;
probably some faint reminiscence of having been forced to shave after
the trick which Bruce had played on him by painting his face with
lamp-black and ochre.

Lillyston decidedly declined the proposition, and they both started up
from their seats--Hazlet brandishing his knife with determined purpose,
and looking at his companion with a strange savage glare under his
spectacles.

After darting round the room once or twice to escape his attack,
Lillyston managed with wonderful skill to clutch the wrist of Hazlet's
right hand, and, being very strong, he held him with the grasp of a
vice, while with his left hand he forced the knife out of his clutch,
and dropped it on the floor.  He held him tight for a minute or two,
although Hazlet struggled so fiercely that it was no easy task, and then
quietly forced him into a chair, and spoke to him in a firm
authoritative voice--

"No mischief, Hazlet; we shan't allow it.  Now listen to me: you must go
to bed."

The tone of voice and the strength of will which characterised
Lillyston's proceedings, awed Hazlet into submission.  He cried a
little, and then suffered Lillyston to see him into his rooms, and to
put him into a fair way towards going to bed.  Taking the precaution to
remove his razor, Lillyston locked the door upon him, and determined at
once to get medical advice.  The doctor, however, could give very little
help; it was, he said, a short fit of temporary madness, for which quiet
and change of air were the only effectual remedies.  He did not
anticipate that there would be any other outbreak of violence, or
anything more than a partial imbecility.

"Do come and help me to manage Hazlet," said Lillyston to Julian next
morning; "his head has been turned by being plucked for the Little-go,
and he's as mad as Hercules Furens."

Julian went, and they stayed in Hazlet's room till he had quietly
breakfasted.  He then appeared to be so calm that Lillyston agreed to
leave Julian there for the morning, and to take the charge of Hazlet for
the afternoon and evening.  It seemed absolutely necessary that someone
should take charge of him, and they thought it best to divide the
labour.

Julian sorely felt the loss of time.  He had a great deal to get through
before the all-important scholarship examination, and the loss of every
available hour fretted him, for since he had failed in the Clerkland, he
was doubly anxious to gain a Saint Werner's scholarship at his first
time of trial.  Still he never wavered for a moment in the determination
to fulfil the duty of taking care of his Ildown acquaintance, and he
spent the whole tedious morning in trying to amuse him.

Hazlet's ceaseless allusions to "the dog," and the feeble terror which
it seemed to cause him, made it necessary to talk to him incessantly,
and to turn his attention, as far as possible, to other things.  He had
to be managed like a very wilful and stupid child, and when one of the
five hours which Julian had to spend with him was finished, he was worn
out with anxiety and fatigue.  It is a dreadful thing to be alone in
charge of a human being--a being in human shape, who is, either by
accident or constitution, incapable alike of responsibility and thought.
Hazlet had been able to play draughts pretty well, so Julian got out a
board and challenged him to a game, but instead of playing, Hazlet only
scrabbled on the board, and pushed the pieces about in a meaningless
confusion, while every now and then the sullen glare came into his eye
which showed Julian the necessity of being on his guard if self-defence
should be needed.  Then Julian tried to get him to draw, and showing him
a picture, sketched a few strokes of outline, and said--

"Now, Hazlet, finish copying this picture for me."

Hazlet took the pencil between his unsteady fingers, and let it make
futile scratches on the paper, and, when Julian repeated his words,
wrote down in a slow painful hand--

"Finish copying pict-ure pict-."

What was to be done in such a case as this?  Julian suggested a turn in
the grounds, but Hazlet betrayed such dread at the thought of leaving
his rooms, and encountering "the dog," that Julian was afraid, if he
persisted, of driving him into a fit.

Just as the dilemma was becoming seriously unpleasant, Brogten came up
to the rooms, and begged Julian to intrust Hazlet to his charge.

"_Your_ time is valuable, Home--particularly just now.  Mine is all but
worthless.  At any rate I have no _special_ work as you have, and I can
take care of poor Hazlet very well."

"Oh, no," said Julian; "I mustn't shrink from the duty I have
undertaken, and besides you'll find it very dull and unpleasant work."

"Never mind that.  I once had an idiot brother--dead now--and I
understand well how to manage any one in a case like this.  Besides,
Hazlet is one of the many I have injured.  Let me stay."

"I really am afraid you won't like it."

"Nonsense, Home; I won't give in, depend upon it.  I am quite in
earnest, and am besides most anxious that you should get a scholarship
this time.  Don't refuse me the privilege of helping you."

Julian could refuse no longer, and went back to his rooms with perfect
confidence that Brogten would do his work willingly and well.  He looked
in about mid-day to see how things were going on, and found that, after
thoroughly succeeding in amusing his patient, Brogten had persuaded him
to go to sleep, in the conviction that by the time he awoke he would be
nearly well.  Nor was he mistaken.  The next day Hazlet was sufficiently
recovered to go home for the Easter vacation.

It was a very bitter and humiliating trial to him; but misfortune,
however frequently it causes reformation, is not invariably successful
in changing a man's heart and life.  Hazlet came back after the Easter
vacation with recovered health, but damaged constitution, and in no
respect either better or wiser for the misfortune he had undergone.

One peculiarity of his recent attack was a strong nervous excitability,
which was induced by very slight causes, and Hazlet had not long
returned to Saint Werner's when the dissipation of his life began once
more to tell perniciously upon his state of health.  It must not be
imagined that because he was the easiest possible victim of temptation,
he suffered no upbraidings of a terrified and remorseful conscience.
Many a time they overwhelmed him with agony and a dread of the future,
mingling with his slavish terrors of a material Gehenna, and stirring up
his turbid thoughts until they drove him to the verge of madness.  But
the inward chimera of riotous passions was too fierce for the weak human
reason, and while he hated himself he continued still to sin.

Late one night he was returning to his rooms from the foul haunts of
squalid dissipation and living death, when the thought of his own
intolerable condition pressed on him with a heavier than usual weight.
It was a very cloudy night, and he had long exceeded the usual college
hours.  The wind tossed about his clothes, and dashed in his face a keen
impalpable sleet, while nothing dispelled the darkness except the
occasional gleam of a lamp struggling fitfully with the driving mist.
Hazlet reached Saint Werner's wet and miserable; in returning he had
lost his way, and wandered into the most disreputable and
poverty-stricken streets, the very homes of thievery and dirt, where he
seriously feared for his personal safety.  By the time he got to the
college gates he was drenched through and through, and while his body
shivered with the cold air, the condition of his mind was agitated and
terrified, and the sudden blaze of light that fell on him from the large
college lamp, as the gates opened, dazzled his unaccustomed eyes.

Hastily running across the court to his own rooms, he groped his way--
giddy and crapulous--giddy and crapulous--up the dark and narrow
stair-case, and after some fumbling with his key opened the door.

Lillyston, who was just going to bed after a long evening of hard work,
heard his footstep on the stairs, and thought with sorrow that he had
not mended his old bad ways.  He heard him open the door, and then a
long wild shriek, followed by the sound of some one falling, rang
through the buildings.

In an instant, Lillyston had darted up-stairs, and the other men who
"kept" on the stair-case, jumped out of bed hastily, thrust on their
slippers, and also ran out to see what was the matter.  As Lillyston
reached the threshold of Hazlet's rooms, he stumbled against something,
and stooping down found that it was the senseless body of Hazlet himself
stretched at full length upon the floor.

He looked up, but saw nothing to explain the mystery; the rooms were in
darkness, except that a dull, blue flame, flickering over the black and
red relics of the fire, threw fantastic gleams across the furniture and
ceiling, and gave an odd, wild appearance to the cap and gown that hung
beside the door.

Lillyston was filled with surprise, and lit the candle on the table.
Lifting Hazlet on the sofa, he carefully looked at him to see if he was
correct in his first surmise, that the unhappy man had swallowed poison,
or committed suicide in some other way.  But there was no trace of
anything of the kind, and Hazlet merely appeared to have fainted and
fallen suddenly.

Aided by Noel, one of those who had been alarmed by that piercing
shriek, Lillyston took the proper means to revive Hazlet from his
fainting fit, and put him to bed.  He rapidly recovered his
consciousness, but earnestly begged them not to press him on the subject
of his alarm, respecting which he was unable or unwilling to give them
any information.

The next morning he was very ill; excitement and anxiety brought on a
brain fever, which kept him for many weary weeks in his sick-room, and
from which he had not fully recovered until after a long stay at Ildown.
As he lost, in consequence of this attack, the whole of the ensuing
term, he was obliged to degrade, as it is called, _i e_ to place his
name on the list of the year below; and he did not return to Camford
till the following October, where his somewhat insignificant
individuality had been almost forgotten.

Let us anticipate a little to throw light on what we have narrated.

When Hazlet _did_ come back to undergraduate life, he at once sought the
alienated friends from whom he had been separated ever since the
disastrous period of his acquaintanceship with Bruce.  He came back to
them penitent and humble, with those convictions now existing in his
mind in their reality and genuineness, which before he had only
simulated so successfully as to deceive himself.  I will not say that he
did not continue ignorant and bigoted, but he was no longer conceited
and malicious.  I will not say that he never showed himself dogmatic and
ill-informed, but he was no longer obtrusive and uncharitable.  His life
was better than his dogmas, and the sincerity of his good intentions
counteracted and nullified the ill effects of a narrow and unwholesome
creed.  There were no farther inconsistencies in his conduct, and he
showed firmly, yet modestly, the line he meant to follow, and the side
he meant to take.  As his conscience had become scrupulous, and his life
irreproachable, it mattered comparatively little that his intellectual
character was tainted with fanaticism and gloom.

I would not be mistaken to mean that he found his penitence easy, or
that he was, like Saint Paul, transformed as it were by a lightning
flash--"a fusile Christian."  I say, there were--after his two
sicknesses and long suffering, and experiences bitter as wormwood--there
were, I say, no more _outward_ inconsistencies in his life; but I do not
say that _within_ there were no fierce, fearful struggles, so wearisome
at times that it almost seemed better to yield than to feel the
continued anguish of such mighty temptations.  All this the man must
always go through who has warmed in his bosom the viper whose poisoned
fang has sent infection into his blood.  But through God's grace Hazlet
was victorious: and as, when the civilisation of some infant colony is
advancing on the confines of a desert, the wild beasts retire before it,
until they become rare, and their howling is only heard in the lonely
night, and then even that sign of their fury is but a strange
occurrence, until it is heard no more; so in Hazlet, the many-headed
monsters, which breed in the slime of a fallen human heart, were one by
one slain or driven backwards by watchfulness, and shame, and prayer.

Julian and Lillyston had never shunned his society, either when he
breathed the odour of sanctity, or when he sank into the slough of
wretchlessness.  Both of them were sufficiently conscious of the heart's
weakness to prevent them from the cold and melancholy presumption which
leads weak and sinful men to desert and denounce those whom the good
spirits have not yet deserted, and whom the good God has not finally
condemned.  As long as he sought their society, they were always open to
his company, however distasteful; and the advice they gave him was
tendered in simple good-will--not as though from the haughty
vantage-ground of a superior excellence.  Even when Hazlet was at the
worst--when to be seen with him, after the publicity of his vices,
involved something like a slur on a man's fair name--even in these his
worst days neither Julian nor Lillyston would have refused, had he so
desired it, to walk with him under the lime-tree avenue, or up and down
the cloisters of Warwick's Court.

But they naturally met him more often when his manner of life was
changed for the better, and were both glad to see that he had found the
jewel which adversity possessed.  It happened that he was with them one
evening when the conversation turned on supernatural appearances, the
possibility of which was maintained by Julian and Owen, while Lillyston
in his genial way was pooh-poohing them altogether.  Hazlet alone sat
silent, but at last he said--

"I have never yet mentioned to any living soul what once happened to me,
but I will do so now.  Lillyston, you remember the night when I aroused
you with a scream?"

"Well!" said Lillyston.

"That night I was returning in all the bitterness of remorse from places
where, but for God's blessing, I might have perished utterly"--and
Hazlet shuddered--"when from out of the storm and darkness I reached my
room door.  You know that a beam ran right across my ceiling.  When I
threw open the door to enter, I saw on that beam as clearly as I now see
you--no, _more clearly, far_ more clearly than I now see you, for your
presence makes no special impression on me, and this was burnt into my
very brain--I saw there written in letters of fire--

"`AND THIS IS HELL.'

"Struck dumb with horror, I stared at it; there could be no doubt about
it, the letters burned and glared and reddened before my very eyes, and
seemed to wave like the northern lights, and bicker into angrier flame
as I looked at them.  They fascinated me as I stood there dumb and
stupefied, when suddenly I saw the dark and massive form of a hand, over
which hung the skirt of a black robe, moving slowly away from the last
letter.  What more I _might_ have seen I cannot tell;--it was then that
I fell and fainted, and my shriek startled all the men on the
stair-case."

Hazlet told his story with such deep solemnity, and such hollow pauses
of emotion, that the listeners sat silent for a while.

"But yet," said Lillyston, "if you come to analyse this, it resolves
itself into nothing.  You were confessedly agitated, and almost
hysterical that night; your body was unstrung; you were wet through, and
it was doubtless the sudden passage from the darkness outside to the dim
and uncertain glimmer of your own room, which acted so powerfully on
your excited imagination, as to project your inward thoughts into a
shape which you mistook for an external appearance.  I remember noticing
the aspect of your rooms myself that evening; the mysterious shadows,
and the mingled effects of dull red firelight with black objects,
together with the rustle of the red curtain in front of your window
which you had left open, and the weird waving of your black gown in the
draught, made such an impression even on me merely in consequence of the
alarm your shriek had excited, that I could have fancied _anything_
myself, if I wasn't pretty strong-headed, and rather prosaic.  As it
was, I did half fancy an unknown Presence in the room."

"Yes, but you say _inward_ thoughts," replied Hazlet eagerly.  "Now
these _weren't_ my inward thoughts; on the contrary they flashed on me
like a revelation, and the strange word, `And,' (for I read distinctly,
`_And_ this is--') was to me like an awful copula connecting time and
eternity for ever.  I had always thought of quite another, quite a
different hell; but this showed me for the first time that the state of
sinfulness is _the_ hell of sin.  It was only the other day that I came
across those lines of Milton--oh, how true they are--

  "Which way I fly is hell, _myself am hell_,
  And in the lowest deep a lower deep
  Still gaping to devour me opens wide,
  To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven."

"It was the truth conveyed in those lines which I then first discovered,
and discovered, it seems to me, from without.  I know very very little--
I am shamefully ignorant, but I do think that the vision of that night
taught me more than a thousand volumes of scholastic theology.  And let
me say too," he continued humbly, "that by it I was plucked like a brand
from the burning; by it my conversion was brought about."

None of the others were in a mood to criticise the phraseology of
Hazlet's religious convictions, and he clearly desired that the subject
of his own immediate experiences, as being one full of awfulness for
him, might be dropped.

"Apropos of your argument, I care very little, Hugh," said Julian,
"whether you make supernatural appearances objective or subjective.  I
mean I don't care whether you regard the appearance as a mere deception
of the eye, wrought by the disordered workings of the brain, or as the
actual presence of a supernatural phenomenon.  The result, the effect,
the _reality_ of the appearance is just the same in either case.
Whether the end is produced by an illusion of the senses, or an appeal
to them, the end _is_ produced, and the senses _are_ impressed by
something which is not in the ordinary course of human events, just as
powerfully as if the ghost had flesh and blood, or the voice were a
veritable pulsation of articulated air.  The only thing that annoys me
is a contemptuous and supercilious denial of the _facts_."

"I hold with you, Julian," said Owen.  "Take for instance the
innumerable recorded instances where intimation has been given of a
friend's or relative's death by the simultaneous appearance of his image
to some one far absent, and unconscious even of his illness.  There are
four ways of treating such stories--the first is to deny their truth,
which is, to say the least, not only grossly uncharitable, but an absurd
and impertinent caprice adopted in order to reject unpleasant evidence;
the second is to account for them by an optical delusion, accidentally
synchronising with the event, which seems to me a most monstrous
ignoring of the law of chances; a third is to account for them by the
existence of some exquisite faculty, (existing in different degrees of
intensity, and in some people not existing at all), whereby physical
impressions are invisibly conveyed by some mysterious sympathy of
organisation a faculty of which it seems to me there are the most
abundant traces, however much it may be sneered and jeered at by those
shallow philosophers who believe nothing but what they can grasp with
both hands: and a fourth is to suppose that spirits can, of their own
will, or by superior permission, make themselves sometimes visible to
human eyes."

"Or," said Julian, "so affect the senses _as to produce the impression_
that they are present to human eyes."

"And to show you, Lillyston," said Owen, "how little I fear any natural
explanations, and how much I think them beside the point, I'll tell you
what happened to me only the other night, and which yet does not make me
at all inclined to rationalise Hazlet's story.  I had just put out the
candle in my bedroom, when over my head I saw a handwriting on the wall
in characters of light.  I started out of bed, and for a moment fancied
that I could read the words, and that somebody had been playing me a
trick with phosphorus.  But the next minute, I saw how it was; the
moonlight was shining in through the little muslin folds of the lower
blind, and as the folds were very symmetrical, the chequered reflection
on the wall looked exactly like a series of words."

"Well, now, that would have made a capital ghost story," said Lillyston,
"if you had been a little more imaginative and nervous.  And still more
if the illusion had only been partially optical, and partly the result
of excited feelings."

"It matters nothing to me," said Hazlet, rising, "whether the characters
I saw were written by the finger of a man's hand, or limned by spirits
on the sensorium of the brain.  All I know is that--thank God--_they
were there_."

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 Genie 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 faery 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