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?