Eden’s Troubles.
Et tibi quae Samios diduxit littera ramos,
Surgentem dextro monstravit limite callem.
Pers. three 56.
There has the Samian Y’s instructive make,
Pointed the road thy doubtful foot should take;
There warned thy raw and yet unpractised youth,
To tread the rising right-hand path of truth.
Brewster.
They went home in different directions, and morally too their paths henceforth were widely diverse. The Pythagoreans chose the letter Y as their symbol for a good and evil life. The broad, sloping, almost perpendicular left-hand stroke is an apt emblem for the facile downward descent into Avernus; the precipitous and narrow right-hand stroke aptly presents the slippery, uphillward struggle of a virtuous course I remember to have seen, as a child, another and a similar emblem which impressed me much. On the one side of the picture a snail was slowly creeping up a steep path; on the other a stag rushed and bounded unrestrained down the sheer proclivities of a wide and darkening hill. Improvement is ever slow and difficult; degeneracy is too often startling rapid. From henceforth, as we shall have occasion to see hereafter, Walter was progressing from strength to strength, adding to faith virtue, and to virtue temperance, and to temperance knowledge, and to knowledge brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity—
“Springing from crystal step to crystal step
Of the bright air—;”
while our poor Kenrick was gradually descending deeper and deeper into darkness and despair.
Yet he loved Walter, and sighed for the old intimacy, while he was daily abusing his character and affecting to scorn his conduct. In short, a change came over Kenrick. There had always been a little worm at the root of his admiration of and affection for Walter. It was jealousy. He did not like to hear him praised so loudly by his friends and schoolfellows; and besides this he was vexed that Walter, Henderson, and Power, were more closely allied to each other than to him. He had struggled successfully against these unworthy feelings so long as Walter was his friend, but now that he had allowed himself to seek a quarrel with him they grew up with tremendous luxuriance. And he was so thoroughly in the wrong, and so obstinate in persisting to misunderstand and misrepresent his former friend, that gradually, by his pertinacity and injustice, he alienated the regard of all those who had once been his chosen companions. Even Whalley grew cool towards him. He had to look elsewhere for associates, and unhappily he looked in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile Walter, although he constantly grieved at the loss of a friend, was otherwise very happy. The boys at Saint Winifred’s were not overworked; there was enough work to stimulate but not to oppress them, and Walter’s work grew more promising every day. He was fond of praise, and Mr Percival, while he always took care so to praise him as to obviate the danger of conceit, was not so scant of his approbation as most men are. His warm and generous appreciation encouraged and rewarded Walter’s exertions, so that he was quite the “star” of his form. Many other boys did well under Mr Percival. There was a bright and cheerful emulation among them all, and they took especial pains with their exercises, which Mr Percival varied in every possible way, so as to call out the imagination and the fancy, to exercise both the reason and the understanding, and to test the powers of attention and research. His method was so successful that it was often a real pleasure to look over the exercises of his form, and he had adopted one plan for keeping up the boys’ interest in them, which was eminently useful. All the best exercises, if they attained to any positive excellence, were sent to Dr Lane; and at the end of the half-year, a number, printed opposite to the boy’s name, showed how often he had thus been “sent up for good.” If in one fortnight four separate exercises were so sent up, the form obtained, by this proof of industry, the remission of an hour’s work, and as this honour could never be cheaply won it was highly prized. Now two or three times Walter’s unusually brilliant exercises had been the chief contribution towards winning these remitted hours, and this success caused him double happiness, because it necessarily made him a general favourite with the form. Henderson (who had only got a single remove at the beginning of the term, but had worked so hard in his new form that he had succeeded in his purpose of winning a remove during the term, and so being again in the same division with Walter) did his best to earn the same distinction, but he only succeeded when the exercise happened to be an English one, and on a subject which gave some opportunity for his sense of the ludicrous. He generally contrived to introduce some purely fictitious “Eastern Apologue” as he called it; and as he rarely managed to keep the correct Oriental colouring, his combinations of Sultans, Tchokadars, Odaliques, and white bears, were sometimes so inexpressibly absurd that Mr Percival, to avoid fits of laughter, was obliged to look over his exercises alone. Nor were his eccentricities always confined to his English themes; his Latin verses were occasionally no less extraordinary, and in one set, on the suicide of Ajax, the last few lines consisted of fragmentary words interspersed here and there with numerous stars—a phenomenon which he explained to Mr Percival in the gravest manner possible, by saying that here the voice of Ajax was interrupted by sobs!
Happy in his work, Walter was no less happy in his play. The glorious mid-day bathes on the hard sparkling yellow sands when the sea was smooth as the blue of heaven, and clear as transparent glass—the long afternoons on the green and sunny cricket field—the strolls over the mountains, and lazy readings under a tree in the fragrant fir-groves—all invigorated him, and gave to his face the health, and to his heart the mirth, which told of an innocent life and a vigorous frame.
But it must not be supposed that he escaped troubles of his own, and his first trouble rose out of the kind boyish protectorate which he had established over little Eden’s interests.
His rescue of Eden from the clutches of a bad lot was one of Walter’s proudest and gladdest reminiscences. Instead of moping about miserable and lonely, and rapidly developing into a rank harvest the evil seeds which his tormentors had tried to plant in his young heart, Eden was now the gayest of the gay. Secure from most annoyances by possessing the refuge of Power’s study, and the certainty of Walter’s help, he soon began to assert his own position among all the boys of his own age and standing. No longer crushed and intimidated by bullying and bad companions, he was lively, happy, and universally liked, but never happier than when Walter and Power admitted him, as they constantly did, into their own society.