CHAPTER VIII.
As soon as the warm weather came we went to the mountains, and when we returned in the autumn I had put aside one crutch, and felt at times that I was soon to banish the other. The boys had gone to college, and Belfield was desolate to me. Georgy was visiting cousins in New York. I had not seen her since that evening in June when she came to see me, nor was I to see her again for years. In November my mother and I went to Jamaica, for I had so outgrown my strength that fresh and alarming symptoms seemed to threaten me with more fatal ills than being merely crippled for life. But their only effect was to banish us for two years from all the familiar old scenes. We were never to go back to Belfield again and find our home there. Youth and passionate emotion and the thought of marriage had vanished now from my mother: she had, it sometimes seemed to me, no other wish than that I should be restored to health. I fancy she almost hated the memory of that brief time when the words of Mr. Floyd made her color deepen, her lip tremble and the glad impulsive tears start to her eyes.
I accepted her willing service and her exclusive love. I needed both, God knows, in those days of weakness and pain. After a time I began to mend: then I grew robust and strong. My lameness diminished, and was comparatively cured, since I could dispense with crutch or stick. Whether youth or the fine air of those beautiful tropical uplands wrought the miracle, who shall say? Now, although I have the old limp, which I shall carry with me to the grave, my misfortune has ceased to be such to me: it is hard to feel that I was ever justified in regarding it as a calamity to becloud my life. And my little daughter said to me the other day, "I am so glad, papa, that you are lame, for I am sure to catch you up, even if the boys run away from me."
All the more striking characteristics of my nature were changed by my accident. I had suffered much in body and in mind, and had been refined by the torture to a point which made me effeminate, since an almost painful capacity for sympathy, an overwhelming dread of inflicting suffering, and a somewhat morbid self-depreciation are qualities scarcely masculine. My early ambition had been for a hard place in the world, where the world's work would force me to give hard knocks before I reached success. But now I shrank from the jostle and bustle and harsh competitions of real life; and as both my mother and Mr. Floyd wished nothing so much as that I should be guarded from all effort and fatigue at this epoch, everything conspired to unfit me for an active career, and to make me a mere looker-on—not a worker, but a musing, disappointed spectator.
But when I was about eighteen I returned and entered the junior year at college with Jack Holt and Harry Dart. I had felt some pride in keeping up with them, and had enjoyed the advantage in Jamaica of the society of an Oxford graduate who was coaching the two sons of a wealthy planter to fit them to enter an English university. I read with him, and was well able to pass my examination.
What it was for me to resume my old familiar intercourse with Holt and Dart I could never write down here. My two years in the tropics had not been joyless—indeed, considering all things, they had been singularly happy years—still, I had felt like a child shut out from the sunshiny place where his mates are playing. I had become patient, contemplative and resigned, and in study and in studious observation of Nature in her rarest beauty and most mighty and invincible development I had almost forgotten the deliciousness of a selfish and individual hope, the pleasures of happy and careless youth.
But as soon as I entered college I became sufficiently absorbed in the actual. Neither Holt nor Dart had changed in the slightest degree, except that Jack wore trim English whiskers and looked quite middle-aged, and Harry was engaged in nursing the incipient down of a moustache, and was the tallest, handsomest, cleverest fellow in his class. Jack had always been the closest of students, and his old diligence had not abated here: he kept up with the rest by dint of solid hard work. Harry flung scholarship to the winds of course, but made a special career for himself which won him more admiration from everybody except the faculty than any amount of legitimate industry. He was a fluent and ready debater; he wrote for the college journal; his high animal spirits brought everybody about him, and his mind seemed ever eager and poised for flight: he was ready in wit; decried trifling subjects, yet would dispute for two hours over an absurdity; was dexterous and unanswerable in his syllogisms; would advance the crudest and most untenable theory, defend it, reducing the arguments of his opponents to meaningless folly, conquer apparently by both wit and reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it into senseless atoms, and dismiss it as unworthy of a thought. In short, among us lads, busy with books and full of admiration of our own cleverness, he was delightful; and among other ostentatious pedantries such as prevail at college his passed unrebuked. When he tried his wits with Mr. Floyd, that gentleman implored him for God's sake to hold his tongue and to consult Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, book 2, chapter 4, and discover the opinion of sensible men concerning youthful intellects like his own.
I appeared to poor enough advantage at first, and was almost afraid to speak in the curious and motley society which thronged our rooms. The quick wit, the ready epigram and squib, the oppressive and multitudinous puns in every language,—all served to stun and confuse me, fixed as I was in grave and quiet habits of mind and thought. It was amazing to me at first with what ease many of the boys had acquired clear ideas upon every question of the day, and with what brilliancy they could advance them, while I was tongue-tied from modesty or reserve. Presently, however, I discovered that these promising young gentlemen were not so wondrous wise after all. I dismissed my fears, felt less fastidious about the emphatic utterance of a thoughtless opinion, and soon was as loud-tongued as any in my demand that the world should be made over at once to suit men of our calibre. At first they were all very tender and patient with me, but when I grew a trifle bolder my little gravities became the target for everybody's wit, and I dare say I was much improved by having my mannerisms and elegancies knocked rudely off from me.
Every boy is fortunate who carries the oldest and best associations of his life into his university career; and Harry and I were supremely lucky in always having Jack Holt with us in the old way, and being able in a world of transient delusions and attractions of absorbing charm to fall back upon something real—an influence which could not be overturned by our eagerness for fashion and novelty, and which, if forgotten for a moment, reasserted itself with vital force to atone for such a base neglect. Not that Jack claimed anything from us: perhaps his power over us was commensurate with the modesty and dignity of his character. His regard was a necessary note in the harmony of our well-being: his disapprobation was a voice which cried "Shame!" to us, although he never uttered a reproach. I felt all this as well as Harry, but he, of course, undisciplined and untrained, possessed more ardor and a more decided temperament than I: his aberrations were wider; and, as the pendulum must always swing back to the right as far as it bounded to the left, he came in his repentance as much closer to his cousin than did I as his deviations had exceeded mine. No wonder Jack loved him—not with impetuosity, for Jack was never impetuous: all his feelings were deep, calm, patient, tender, unconquerable by time or chance. The two felt that mutual attraction which opposites and counterparts possess. Harry was the most popular man in his class. Nature had done everything for him, and lavished those gifts of which she is usually most sparing. He had a good mind and genial wit; a relish for every form of enjoyment; a perfect form, the glorious beauty of a Greek god, with crisp golden curls, brilliant deep-set eyes of blue, noble and chiselled features; frank manners which none could resist; spirits which nothing could depress; an impetuous temper, but passing like a flash the moment it was spent. Jack, on the other hand, had no beauty, and was regarded by those whom he did not care for as a dull fellow. He was a little slow, and had slight appreciation of wit except to admire every evidence of it in Harry. He had certain settled objects in life, and spent none of his forces on the pleasant distractions which the rest of us sought on the way. He had been born with a sort of reposeful energy, which had always impressed me with the conviction that no ordinary situation was enough for him; and at college there was something disproportionate in his position among light-hearted boys, so that I never wondered that he found our aims trivial. He possessed to the full that force of character by which a man masters himself, always keeps himself in check, and in times of risk and extremity of peril can suffice unto his own needs and courageously resist sorrow, misfortune and disappointment.
But while Harry, full of lawless and uncontrollable impulses, had a stormy and untried future before him, in which he was to be obliged to work hard for all his successes, Jack's seemed a dazzling vista of prosperity and ease. He was already engaged to the girl he loved; he was the only son of a man whose wealth was enormous; and while the rest of us were to be hungrily gazing into the world's windows with our cold hands in our empty pockets, he was calmly to take the prettiest girl we knew by the hand and lead her away into a fairyland whose glories we might only guess at. But he took all his prospects very quietly: not even for the sake of love did he neglect his work. He rarely spoke of Georgy, and I knew that it would never be his fault to illuminate with too bright a glare the sweet mysteries of the love that must lie between them. I saw him sometimes writing to her with her picture before him.
"What do you suppose he writes about?" Harry used to ask me on such occasions. "She cares little enough about fine sentiments, even if he were given to that sort of thing; and I can't believe that he is very ostentatious in declaring his passion. I don't think she will ever pass that criticism upon his epistles that some old party did upon a pudding: 'Too many plums and not enough suet.' I confess I cannot guess how he contrives to fill his six regulation pages."
"I don't see that it concerns us, at all events."
"Very true. But she would show me his letters if I asked her to. I wonder how Jack likes a certain ease she has in other men's society? What claws are to a cat, what the sting is to the bee, what its poison is to the upas tree, coquetry is to Georgy Lenox. I wish him joy of her, but wash my hands of the engagement."
He spoke with some heat, which was his wont in every allusion to Jack's love-affair. But I knew that Harry had a dozen flirtations on hand, and the fatalest effect of the false is its power of destroying our delicate and just perception of the true.