“I knew he must be some tailor’s son or other,” remarked Brogten.
“I say, Bruce, we shall have to cut him at Saint Werner’s,” observed an exquisite young exclusive.
Such things—the mere lispings of malicious folly—Julian could not help hearing; and they galled him so much that he determined to have a talk on the subject with his tutor, who was a Saint Werner’s man. It was his tutor’s custom to devote the hour before lock-up on every half-holiday to seeing any of his pupils who cared to come and visit him; but as on the rich summer evenings few were to be tempted from the joyous sounds of the cricket-field, Julian found him sitting alone in his study, reading.
“Ha, Julian!” he exclaimed, rising at once, with a frank and cordial greeting. “Here’s a triumph! A boy actually enticed from bats and balls to pay me a visit!”
Julian smiled. “The fact is, sir,” he said, “I’ve come to ask you about something. But am I disturbing you? If so, I’ll go and ‘pursue vagrant pieces of leather again,’ as Mr Stokes says when he wants to dismiss us to cricket.”
“Not in the least. I rather enjoy being disturbed during this hour. But what do you say to a turn in the open air? One can talk so much better walking than sitting down on opposite sides of a fireplace with no fire in it.”
Julian readily assented, and Mr Carden took his arm as they bent their way down to the cricket-field. There they stopped involuntarily for a time, to gaze at the house match which was going on, and the master entered with the utmost vivacity into the keen yet harmless “chaff” which was being interchanged between the partisans of the rival houses.
“What a charming place this field is,” he said, “on a summer evening, while the sunset lets fall upon it the last innocuous arrows of its golden sheaf. When I am wearied to death with work or vexation—which, alas! is too often—I always run down here, and it gives me a fresh lease of life.”
Julian smiled at his tutor’s metaphorical style of speech, which he knew was in him the natural expressions of a glowing and poetic heart, that saw no reason to be ashamed of its own warm feelings and changeful fancies; and Mr Carden, wrapped in the scene before him, and the sensations it excited, murmured to himself some of his favourite lines—
“Alas that one
Should use the days of summer but to live,
And breathe but as the needful element
The strange superfluous glory of the air
Nor rather stand in awe apart, beside
The untouched time, and murmuring o’er and o’er
In awe and wonder, ‘These are summer days!’”