Intensely feeling this, Nelligan would have given much for courage to say, “I am one of that very set you sneer at. All my associations and ties are with them. My home is amongst them, and every link of kindred binds me to them.”
Yet, somehow, he could not bring himself to the effort. It was not that he dreaded the loss of friendship that might ensue,—indeed, he rather believed that such would not occur; but he thought that a time might come when that avowal might be made with pride, and not in humiliation, when he should say: “My father, the little shopkeeper of Oughterard, gave me the advantages by which I became what I am. The class you sneer at had yet ambitions high and daring as your own; and talents to attain them, too! The age of noble and serf has passed away, and we live in a freer and more generous era, when men are tested by their own worth; and if birth and blood would retain their respect amongst us, it is by contesting with us more humbly born the prizes of life.” To have asserted these things now, however, when he was nothing, when his name had no echo beyond the walls of a college, would have seemed to him an intolerable piece of presumption, and he was silent.
Massingbred read his reserve as proceeding from displeasure, and jestingly said,—
“You mustn't be angry with me, Joe. The boldness of men like me is less impudence than you take it for, since—should I fulfil my threat, and pay your father a visit—I 'd neither show surprise nor shame if he refused to receive me. I throw over all the claims of ceremony; but at the same time I don't want to impose the trammels on my friends. They are free to deal with me as frankly, ay, and as curtly as I have treated them; but enough of all this. Let us talk of something else.”
And so they did, too,—of their college life and its changeful fortunes; of their companions and their several characters, and of the future itself, of which Massingbred pretended to read the fate, saying: “You'll be something wonderful one of these days, Joe. I have it as though revealed to me,—you astonishing the world by your abilities, and winning your way to rank and eminence; while I like a sign-post that points to the direction, shall stand stock-still, and never budge an inch, knowing the road, but not travelling it.”
“And why should it be so, Mass, when you have such a perfect consciousness of your powers for success?”
“For the simple reason, my boy, that I know and feel how the cleverness which imposes upon others has never imposed upon myself. The popular error of a man's being able to do fifty things which he has not done from idleness, apathy, carelessness, and so on, never yet deceived me, because I know well that when a fellow has great stuff in him it will come out, whether he likes or not. You might as well say that the grapes in a wine-vat could arrest their own process of fermentation, as that a man of real genius—and mind, I am now speaking of no other—could suppress the working of his intelligence, and throw his faculties into torpor. The men who do nothing are exactly the men who can do no better. Volition, energy, the strong impulse for action, are part and parcel of every really great intellect; and your 'mute, inglorious Milton' only reminds me of the artist who painted his canvas all red to represent the passage of the Egyptians through the Red Sea. Believe me, you must take all untried genius in the same scale of credit as that by which you have fancied the chariots and horsemen submerged in the flood. They are there, if you like; and if you don't—”
“Your theory requires that all men's advantages should be equal, their station alike, and their obstacles the same. Now, they are not so. See, for instance, in our University here. I am debarred from the fellowship-bench—or, at least, from attempting to reach it—because I am a Papist.”
“Then turn Protestant; or if that doesn't suit you, address yourself to kick down the barrier that stands in your way. By the bye, I did n't know you were a Roman; how comes that? Is it a family creed, or was it a caprice of your own?”
“It is the religion my family have always professed,” said Nelligan, gravely.