Ravenshoe

by Henry Kingsley

It is a curious sensation, that of meeting, as a young man of two or three-and-twenty, a man one has last seen as a little lad of ten, or thereabouts. One is almost in a way disappointed. You may be asked out to dinner to meet a man called, say, Jones (or, if you like the name better, Delamere D'Eresby), whom you believe to be your old friend Jones, and whom you have not seen for a month or so; and on getting to the house find it is not your Jones at all, but another Jones whom you don't know. He may be cleverer, handsomer, more agreeable than your old friend—a man whom you are glad to know; and yet you are disappointed. You don't meet the man you expected, and you are rather disposed to be prejudiced against his representative.

So it is when you meet a friend in manhood whom you have not seen since you were at school. You have been picturing to yourself the sort of man your friend must have developed into, and you find him different from what you thought. So, instead of foregathering with an old friend, you discover that you have to make a new acquaintance.

You will now have to resume the acquaintance of Charles Ravenshoe at two and twenty. I hope you will not be much disappointed in him. He was a very nice boy, if you remember, and you will see immediately that he has developed into a very nice young man indeed. It is possible that I may not be about to introduce him to you under the most favourable circumstances; but he created those circumstances for himself, and must abide by them. As it is not my intention to follow him through any part of his University life, but only to resume his history when he quits it, so it becomes imperatively necessary for me to state, without any sort of disguise, the reason why he did leave it. And, as two or three other important characters in the story had something to do with it, I shall do so more at length than would at first seem necessary.

It was nine o'clock on the 6th of November. The sun, which had been doing duty for her Majesty all night at Calcutta, Sydney, &c., had by this time reached Oxford, and was shining aslant into two pretty little Gothic windows in the inner or library quadrangle of St. Paul's College, and illuminating the features of a young man who was standing in the middle of the room, and scratching his head.

He was a stout-built fellow, not particularly handsome, but with a very pleasing face. His hair was very dark brown, short, and curling; his forehead was broad and open, and below it were two uncommonly pleasant-looking dark grey eyes. His face was rather marked, his nose very slightly aquiline, and plenty of it, his mouth large and good-humoured, which, when opened to laugh, as it very frequently was, showed a splendid set of white teeth, which were well contrasted with a fine healthy brown and red complexion. Altogether a very pleasant young fellow to look on, and looking none the worse just now for an expression of droll perplexity, not unmixed with a certain amount of terror, which he had on his face.

It was Charles Ravenshoe.

He stood in his shirt and trousers only, in the midst of a scene of desolation so awful, that I, who have had to describe some of the most terrible scenes and circumstances conceivable, pause before attempting to give any idea of it in black and white. Every moveable article in the room—furniture, crockery, fender, fire-irons—lay in one vast heap of broken confusion in the corner of the room. Not a pane of glass remained in the windows; the bedroom-door was broken down; and the door which opened into the corridor was minus the two upper panels. Well might Charles Ravenshoe stand there and scratch his head!

"By George," he said at last, soliloquising, "how deuced lucky it is that I never get drunk! If I had been screwed last night, those fellows would have burnt the college down. What a devil that Welter is when he gets drink into him! and Marlowe is not much better. The fellows were mad with fighting, too. I wish they hadn't come here and made hay afterwards. There'll be an awful row about this. It's all up, I am afraid. It's impossible to say though."

At this moment, a man appeared in the passage, and, looking in through the broken door, as if from a witness-box, announced, "The dean wishes to see you at once, sir." And exit.

Charles replied by using an expression then just coming into use among our youth, "All serene!" dressed himself by putting on a pilot coat, a pair of boots, and a cap and gown, and with a sigh descended into the quadrangle.