A sudden rush of tears came to his eyes as he turned away to leave his earliest and best-loved college friend. But Kennedy stopped him, and said wildly—
“Stop, Julian Home, you shall hear me speak. I can hardly believe that you do this of your own responsibility—without Violet’s—nay, nay, I must not call her so—without your sister’s consent. And if this be so, hear me. Tell her that I scorn the heart which would thus fling away its plighted love: tell her that she has committed a great sin in thus rejecting me: tell her that she is now responsible for all my future,—that whatever errors I may fall into, whatever sins I may commit, whatever disgrace or ruin I may incur, she is the author of them. Tell her that if I ever live to do ungenerous acts, or ever yield to bursts of foolish passion, the acts are hers, not mine; she will have caused them; my life lies at her feet. Tell her this before it is too late. What? you still wish to hurry away? Go, then.” He almost pushed Julian out, and banged the door after him.
Amazed at this paroxysm of wrath and madness, Julian went down-stairs with a slow step and a heavy, heavy heart; above all, he dreaded the necessity of breaking to Violet the heart-rending intelligence of his decision, and the circumstances which caused it. He trembled to do it, for he knew not how crushing the weight might prove. At last he determined to write to his mother, and to beg her to bear for him the pain of telling that which her womanly tact and maternal sympathy might make less overwhelming to be borne.
But Kennedy, after Julian’s words, rushed out of his rooms, and it was night. He left the college, and wandered into the fields—he knew not whither, nor with what intent.
His brain was on fire. The last gleam that lent brightness to his life had been extinguished; the friend whom he loved best had cast him off; his name was sullied; his love rejected. It was not thought which kept him in a tumult, but only a physical consciousness of dreadful, irremediable calamity; and but for the wind which blew so coldly and savagely in his face, and the rain that soaked his clothes and cooled the fever of his forehead, he feared that he might go mad.
He did not return to the college till long past midnight; and the old porter, as he got out of bed to open the gate, could not help saying to him in a tone of reproach—
“Oh, Mr Kennedy, sir—excuse me, sir—but these are bad ways.”
The words were lost upon him: he went up to his room, and threw himself, without taking off his clothes, upon his bed. No sleep came to him, and in the morning—damp, weary, and feverish as he had been—his look was inexpressibly pitiable and haggard.
The imperious demands of health forced him to take some notice of his condition; and he was about to put on clean clothes, and take some warm tea about ten in the morning, when the Master’s servant came to tell him that the Seniority desired his presence.
He at once knew that it must be for his irregularity of the previous night, which, in the agitation of other thoughts, had not occurred to him before. He remembered, too, that the Senior Dean had only recently threatened him that, in consequence of his late misdoings, the next offence would be visited with summary and final punishment.