"Well, my boy," he said when he had concluded. "I cannot but think that as far as you can see now you have acted rightly. It is terribly hard on you, but I will help you all I can. And perhaps, after all, the future may prove brighter than it looks now for all of us."
CHAPTER VI.
It was the end of Term, nearly two years after that interview in Richmond Park which, as both Vane and Enid had then believed, was for them the parting of the ways. Vane was sitting in a deep-seated, Russian wicker-chair in his cosy study, and opposite him, in a similar chair, was another man with whom he had been talking somewhat earnestly for about an hour.
To-morrow would be Commemoration Day—"Commem," to use the undergraduate's abbreviation. There would be meetings from far and wide of people gathered together, not only from all over the kingdom, but from the ends of the earth as well; men and women glorying, for their own sakes and their sons', in the long traditions of the grand old University, the dearly-loved Alma Mater, nursing-mother of their fathers and fathers' fathers. Here a man who had been a tutor and then a Fellow, and was now one of His Majesty's judges; there another, who walked with sober mien in the leggings and tunic of a Bishop, and who, in his time, had dodged the Proctor and his bull-dogs as nimbly as the most irresponsible undergraduate of the moment—and so on through the whole hierarchy of the University.
The Lists were just out. Vane had fulfilled the promise of his earlier career and had taken a brilliant double-first. He had read for Classics and History, but he had also taken up incidentally Mental Science and Moral Philosophy, and he had scored a first in all. If it had then been possible for him to have had a Treble-First, it would have been his. As it was he had won the most brilliant degree of his year—and there he was, sitting back in his chair, blowing cloud after cloud of smoke out of his mouth, and every now and then taking a sip out of a big cup of tea and looking with something more than admiration at the man opposite; a man who had only achieved a first, and who, if he had been some other kind of man, would have been very well contented with it.
It would not, however, have needed a particularly keen student of human nature to discover that this was not the kind of man who could rest contented with anything like a formal success; and, after all, even a double-first, to say nothing of a single, although a great achievement as the final triumph of an educational course, is still only the end of the beginning. That done, the student, armed cap-à-pie in his intellectual armour, goes forth to face something infinitely sterner and more pitiless than tutors or proctors, ay, even than Masters and Chancellors themselves—the presiding genius of that infinitely greater University called the World, where taking your degree means anything that human fortune can give you, and where being plucked may mean anything from a clerkship in an office to selling matches in the gutter.
"I am sorry you missed your double, old man!" said Vane, continuing the conversation after a pause that had lasted for two or three minutes. "Still, at any rate, you've got your first, and, after all, a first in Classics and a second in History is not to be sneezed at, and I don't suppose it would have mattered a hang to you whether you had come out anywhere or not."