Chapter Thirteen.
How Tom Drift, still going downhill, met my old master.
When Tom reached his lodgings that night he found a jubilant letter from Charlie awaiting him.
“Just fancy,” he said, “it’s only three weeks more, old man, and then to Jericho with books, and test-tubes, and anatomy! I’ll drag you out of your study by the scruff of your neck, see if I don’t; I’ll clap a knapsack on your back, and haul you by sheer force down into Kent. There you shall snuff the ozone, and hold your hat on your head with both hands on the cliff top. I’ll hound you through old castles, and worry you up hills. If I catch so much as a leaflet on chemistry in your hands, I’ll tear it up and send it flying after the sea-gulls. In short, I shouldn’t like to say what I won’t do, I’m so wild at the prospect of a week with you. Of course, the dear old people growl at me for leaving them in the lurch; but they are glad for us to get the blow; indeed, my pater insists on paying the piper, which is handsome of him. I expect I shall get a day in London on my way, either going or returning; and if you can put me up at your diggings for the night, we’ll have a jolly evening, and you can show me all your haunts.”
Tom gasped as he got so far; and well he might.
“I’ll tell you all the news when I come. I suppose, by your not writing, you are saving yours up for me. Ta, ta, old boy, and au revoir in twenty-one days! Hurrah! Yours ever,—C.N.”
Tom, in his misery, crushed the letter up in his fingers and flung it from him. If a passing pang shot through his breast, it was followed almost instantly by other feelings of vexation and shame. One moment he was ready to sink to the floor in a passion of penitence and remorse—the next, he was ready to resent Charlie’s influence over him even at a distance, and to sneer, as Gus and his friend had done, at the boy’s expense. His brain was too muddled with the excitement and the strange emotions of that evening to reason with himself; his head ached, and his mind was poisoned.
“What right has the fellow always to be following me up in this way?” he asked. “I’m a fool to stand it. Why can’t I do as I choose without his pulling a long face?”
Thus Tom questioned, and thus he proved that it was Charlie’s influence more than his letter that worried him; for what had the latter said, either in the way of exhortation or reproof?
Then he threw himself on the bed, and lay with the wild memory of the evening crowding on his feverish mind. He rose, and, lighting a candle, endeavoured to read; but even his novel was flat and stupid, and in the midst of it he fell asleep, to dream of Gus and his friend all night long. Long ere he awoke my senses had left me, for he had neglected to wind me up. Next morning he went to lectures as usual. To his fellow-students he appeared the same shy, quiet youth he had always seemed; to Mr
Newcome, whom he met in the street, he appeared still as Charlie’s chosen and dear friend, ready for his holiday and rejoicing in the prospect of the coming meeting; to his professors he appeared still the same steady, hard-working student, bent on making his way in his profession. But to himself, alas! how altered, how degraded he appeared!
In the midst of his duties his thoughts ran continually—now back to the strange experience of last evening, now forward to the doubtful events of this.
The recollection of the past had lost a good deal of its repulsiveness after twelve hours’ interval, and although he still felt it to be low and harmful, he yet secretly encouraged his curiosity to revisit the place of his temptation.
“After all, it did me no harm,” said he to himself; “it’s not interfered with my work, or made me feel worse than before. What harm in going again to-night? When Charlie comes, and we get away from town, I shall easily be able to break it off; and besides, Charlie’s sure to help to put me square; he always does. Yes; I think I’ll just go and see what’s on there to-night; it can’t be worse than it was. Besides,” thought he, glad to seize on any straw of excuse, “I’m bound in honour to play Gus a return match; it would be ungentlemanly to back out of that.”
But why sicken you, dear reader, and myself, with recapitulating the sad workings of this poor fellow’s mind? The more he tried to convince himself he was doing only a slight wrong, the more his conscience cried out he was running to his ruin. But he stopped his ears and shut his eyes, and blindly dared his fate. He went that evening to the music-hall. He met Gus and Mortimer, and two other friends. He had taken care to get himself up in a nearer approach to his companions’ style. He bought some cigars of his own on the way, and offered them with a less awkward swagger than he had been able to assume the night before. He found himself able to nod familiarly to the barmaid, and fancied that even Mortimer must have approved of the way in which he ordered about the billiard-marker.
In the match with Gus for half-crowns he lost, though only narrowly—so narrowly that he was not content, without a further trial of skill, to own himself beaten, and therefore challenged his adversary to a second meeting the next evening. Then he watched the others play, and betted with Mortimer on the result—and alas! for him, he won.
It was Tom himself who said, at nine o’clock,—
“And now, suppose we see what’s going on below.”
It was the same stupid, disgusting spectacle, but to Tom it seemed less repulsive than he had found it the night before. True, he at times felt a return of the old feeling of shame; the blush would occasionally suffuse his face; but such fits were rare, and he was able to carry them off more easily with joke and laughter.
“Jack,” said Gus in a whisper to Mortimer, as Tom, after accepting a very broad hint to treat the party to spirits, was turning to go, “that fellow will be a credit to you and me. Did you see how he smacked his lips over the play, and yet all the while wanted to make us think he saw that sort of thing every day of his life, eh? He’s a promising chap, eh, Jack?”
“Wathah,” replied Jack, laughing.
Meanwhile Tom, glad enough to get out into the pure air, though in not so desperate a case as the night before, shouldered his way among the loitering company towards the door. He was just emerging into the street, when the sound of voices arrested him.
“That’s one of our men, isn’t it?” said one.
“Why, so it is; I fancied he was anything but a festive blade. Yes; and upon my word he’s half seas over!”
Tom had no difficulty in discovering that these hurried words had reference to him, and turning instinctively towards the voices, he found himself face to face with two, reputedly, of the wildest of his fellow-students.
Gladly would he have avoided them; gladly would he have shrunk back and lost himself in the crowd, but it was too late now; he stood discovered.
“How are you?” cried one of the two, as he passed; “isn’t your name Drift?”
Tom stared as if he would have denied his name; but the next moment he put on his lately acquired swagger, and said, “Yes.”
“Ah! I thought so; one of the Saint Elizabeth men. Hullo! he’s in a hurry, though,” added he, as Tom made a dive forward and strode rapidly down the street.
It was but a step deeper. Well he knew that by to-morrow every one of his fellow-students would know of him as a frequenter of that wretched place. Well he knew that, as far as they were concerned, the mask of shyness and reticence under which he had sheltered in their midst was for ever pulled away. “One of us,” indeed! So truly the very worst of them might now speak and think of him. Oh, if he had but considered in time; if he had but stemmed this flood at its source! But it was too late now.
And he strode home reckless and hardened.
The next day, as he expected, every one seemed to know of his visits to the music-hall. The two who had seen him accosted him with every show of friendship and intelligence. He was appealed to in the presence of nearly a dozen of his fellow-students as to the name of one of the low songs there given; he was asked if he was going to be there to-night, and he was invited to join this party and that in similar expeditions to similar places. And to all these questions and greetings he was constrained to reply in keeping with his assumed character of a gay spark. How sick, how vile he felt; yet in that one day how hardened and desperate he became!
It was not in Tom Drift to cry “I have sinned! I will return!” No, once loose from his moorings, he let himself float down the stream, watching the receding banks in mute despair, raising no shout for succour, venturing no plunge for safety.
You, who by this time have given him up, disgusted at his weakness, his vanity, his low instincts, his cowardliness—who say let him wallow in the mire he has prepared for himself, who know so glibly what you would have done, what you would have said, what you would have felt, remember once more that Tom Drift was not such as you; and unfortunately did not know you. He was not gifted with your heroic resolution or your all-penetrating wisdom. He was an ordinary sinful being of flesh and blood, relying only on his own poor strength; and therefore, reader, try to realise all he went through before you fling your stone.
The toils were closing round him fast. His will had been the first to suffer, his conscience next. Then with a rush had gone honour, temperance, and purity; and now finally the flimsy rag, his good name, had been torn from him, and he stood revealed a prodigal—and a hypocrite.
Even yet, however, help might have been forthcoming.
“I say, you fellow,” said one of his fellow-students this same day, “I’ve never spoken to you before, and perhaps shall never do so again; but don’t be a fool!”
“What do you mean?” said Tom sharply.
“Only this, and I can’t help it if you are angry, keep clear of these new friends of yours, and still more, keep clear of the places they visit. If you’ve been led in once, rather cut off your right hand than be led in again, that’s all!”
What spirit of infatuation possessed Tom Drift, that he did not spring for very life at the proffered help, that he did not besiege this friend, however blunt and outspoken, and compel his timely aid? Alas, for his blindness and folly!
Scowling round at the speaker, he muttered an oath, and said, “What on earth concern is it of yours who my friends are and where I go? Mind your own business.”
And so, thrusting rudely away the hand that might, by God’s grace, have saved him, he swept farther and farther out towards the dark waters.
One final and great hope was still reserved for him, and that was Charlie’s visit. But to Tom that prospect was becoming day by day mere distasteful. As the days wore on, and Tom sunk deeper and deeper into the snare prepared for him, the thought of a week in the society of one so upright and pure as Charlie became positively odious. The effort to conceal his new condition would be almost impossible, and yet to admit it to him would be, he felt, to shatter for ever the only friendship he really prized. He racked his brain for expedients and excuses to avert the visit, but without avail. If he pleaded illness Charlie would be the first to rush to his bedside; if he pleaded hard work Charlie would insist on sharing it, or improving its few intervals of rest; if he pleaded disinclination Charlie would devise a hundred other plans to please him. In short, Charlie’s visit was inevitable, and as he looked forward to it he writhed in misgiving and anxiety.
His visits to the music-hall were meanwhile continuing, and his circle of acquaintance at that evil haunt enlarging. He was duly installed as one of the “fast set” at Saint Elizabeth’s, and under its auspices had already made his début at other scenes and places than that of his first transgression. He was known by sight to a score of billiard-markers, potmen, blacklegs, and lower characters still, and was on nodding terms with fully half of them. He had lost considerably more than he had gained at billiards, and was still further emptying his purse at cards. Quick work for a few weeks! So quickly and fatally, alas! Will the infection, once admitted, spread, especially in a patient whose moral constitution has undergone so long a course of slow preparation as Tom’s had.
The day came at last. Tom had carefully hidden away his worst books and his spirits; he had bathed his face half a dozen times, to remove the traces of last night’s intemperance he had gathered together from the corners where they had for so long lain neglected the books and relics of his Randlebury days, and restored them to their old places; he had brightened me up, and he had taken pains to purify his room from the smell of rank tobacco; and then he sauntered down to the station.
How my heart beat as the train came into the platform! His head was out of the window, and his hand was waving to us a hundred yards off; and the next minute he had burst from the carriage, and seized Tom by the hands.
“How are you, old Tom? I thought we’d never get here; how glad I am to set eyes on you! Isn’t this a spree?” And not waiting for Tom’s answer he hauled his traps out of the carriage in a transport of delight.
Still the same jovial, honest, fine-hearted boy.
“Hi! here! some of you,” he shouted to a porter, “look after these things, will you, and get us a cab. I tell you what, Tom, you’ve got to come up home with me first, and we can have dinner there; then I’ll come on to your den, and we can pack our knapsacks and sleep, and then start by the five train to-morrow morning.”
Thus he bustled, and thus he brought back the old times on poor Tom Drift. Without the heart to speak, he helped his friend to collect his luggage, and when they were fairly started in the cab he even smiled feebly in reply to the boy’s sallies.
“Tom, you rascal, didn’t I tell you you weren’t to knock yourself up, eh? Why can’t you do what you’re told? Why, I declare you’re as thin as a hurdle, and as black under the eyes as if you had been fighting with a collier. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Look at me; do all I can I can’t get up an interesting pallor like you, and I’ve fretted enough over those conic sections (comic sections Jim always calls them). Never mind! Wait till I get you down to the sea.”
And so he rattled on, while Tom leaned back in his seat and winced at every word.
When they reached Mr Newcome’s of course there was a scene of eager welcome on one side and boisterous glee on the other. Tom, as he looked on, sighed, as well he might, and wished he could have been spared the torture of this day.
Charlie tore himself away from his mother, to drag his friend into the house.
“Look at this object!” he cried; “did you ever see such a caution to students? If we do nothing else in Kent we shall scare the crows, eh, Tom?”
“Charlie!” exclaimed his mother; “you have come home quite rude! I hope you’ll excuse him, Mr Drift.”
Mr Drift said nothing, and looked and felt extremely miserable.
“He looks really ill, poor fellow!” said Mrs Newcome to her husband. “I wonder they allow the students to overwork themselves in that way.”
And then they sat down to dinner—a meal as distasteful to Tom as it was joyful to Charlie and his parents.