Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

The critical time—the time of intense anxiety—lasted eight days. In the course of them Gerald wrote once to his father, describing the ebb and flow of anxiety in the school—he would have written oftener but for his correspondence with Lady Venniker—and Mr. Eversley replied most tenderly, assuring him that he was daily ‘wrestling with the Lord in prayer’ for his friend’s recovery.

At last the turn came. The delirium ceased. The breathing grew less difficult. The dark cloud lifted from the house. The doctors pronounced that Harry was better; then, that there was no cause for immediate anxiety about him; then, that he was out of danger; and, finally, that his recovery was only a question of time. When he was able to sit up in the bed, Gerald was allowed to see him, at first only for a few minutes, and afterwards for a longer time. Lord Venniker, who had been profoundly touched by the sympathy—all the more expressive because so silent—of the boys, and by Gerald Eversley’s in particular, felt able to leave St. Anselm’s, though it was understood that he would return to take Harry home as soon as his travelling was permitted.

Those were happy days, it will be believed, for Gerald Eversley. To see his friend brought back by slow steps from the brink of the grave was a holy joy to him. He watched with more than brotherly eagerness the signs of reviving health. Lord Venniker having now returned to Helmsbury, Miss Venniker came to spend a few days with Mr. and Mrs. Brandiston and to assist in nursing her brother. She and Gerald were thus thrown together; sometimes they were the only persons with him in the sick-room. Gerald looked with admiring surprise at her tenderness, her solicitude, her thoughtfulness, which seemed a little beyond her years, and her skill or tact in anticipating wants. His own life had not afforded him much insight into the ministering charities of womanhood. But as Miss Venniker sat at her brother’s bedside, holding his hand in hers, smoothing his pillows from time to time, or whiling away the long, long hours with talks of home, her eyes, her whole being illumined with the light of loving sympathy, Gerald could think of nothing so beautiful, unless it were the vision that came to him sometimes in his morning dreams, and he felt within himself that he had seen, as it were, the face of an angel.

It was five weeks and three days from the great house match when Harry Venniker was able to be moved from St. Anselm’s. On the Sunday before, Dr. Pearson had offered public thanks in the chapel for his recovery. When the day of his departure arrived, the invalid carriage in which he was to travel all the way to Helmsbury was brought to the door of Mr. Brandiston’s house. Quite a knot of boys had gathered outside the house as Harry was lifted into the carriage, and his father and sister took their places in it at his side. Gerald Eversley stood among them. A warm pressure of his hand and a hearty ‘God bless you’ from Lord Venniker, and a sweet smile from Miss Venniker as she gave him her hand and whispered, ‘We can never thank you enough for all you have done. I will write to-morrow and tell you how he has borne the journey,’ were the rewards of his devotion. Harry Venniker waved his hand to the boys. His eyes met Gerald’s with a glance of deep affection as the carriage drove away. The boys all raised their hats in respectful sympathy. Gerald Eversley turned on his heel, without a word, and went to his room. He was bereft of his friend for a time; and he was bereft of him—though he knew it not then—at the time when he would have the sorest need of his presence.

After Harry Venniker’s departure, life at St. Anselm’s for such brief part of the term as was left, resumed its usual tenor. The memory of errors and sorrows is but short-lived, among the young especially—nay, among all men. God be thanked that it is so; for if we remembered all the past, the present would be unendurable. We sigh at times for a greater power of remembering; it were better to give thanks for our power of forgetting. Time, with its softening, sanctifying grace—Time, that makes the green grass spring and the golden corn wave over fields that once were reddened with human slaughter—Time is the divinely appointed healer of all wounds.

Yet Gerald Eversley did not soon emerge from the shadow of the dark weeks through which he had passed. He was as one who moves in an unseen world. Though there came to him good news of Harry’s convalescence, and at last a few lines written by Harry himself, he could not succeed in fixing his thoughts upon his ordinary duties. He became more dreamy than ever; his mind was ever far from the book that he held in his hand, and his place in form was so much below the first that Mr. Brandiston felt it necessary to send for him, to urge upon him the duty of using his time well and conferring credit upon the house, and to threaten him with punishment if his work in the coming examination did not make amends for his indolence in the term. Mr. Brandiston, though he made some allowance for Gerald’s failures during the time when the issue of his friend’s illness was trembling in the balance, was not a man capable of imagining or appreciating any romantic explanation of a long-continued indifference to classical scholarship. He told Gerald that, as he was himself going to take part in the examination of his form, he should be able to see what he was worth.

Mr. Brandiston’s method of dealing with his examination papers was (like all Mr. Brandiston’s habits) simple and precise. The papers were printed in London. They were forwarded to St. Anselm’s by post in a carefully sealed packet. Mr. Brandiston would open the packet of papers when he was alone in his study, take out one paper in order to satisfy himself that there were no mistakes in the printing, count the number of the papers, divide them, if necessary, into several packets (also carefully sealed) for the use of such masters as might need them, then put back the paper which he had taken out into its packet, lock up all the papers in one of the drawers of his writing-table, of which he alone possessed the key, and leave them there until the day of examination. He kept the key of the writing-table in his purse. He had acted so for more than twenty years. He acted so now. Mr. Brandiston was not the master of Gerald Eversley’s form, but he was examining it in two subjects. One of these was Latin translation. The printed papers reached him in the usual way. It was not necessary to divide the papers into several packets; for he was going to sit with the form himself, and it was the only form to which the paper would be set. He took one paper (as usual) out of the packet, found that it was accurately printed, all his corrections of the proof having been made, and locked up the papers in his drawer.

This was done on Tuesday evening. The paper was to be set on Friday morning.

Late on Thursday night, when the boys had all gone to their rooms after supper, Mr. Brandiston opened the drawer containing the packet of papers, to assure himself that, when he wanted the papers next morning, he would find them there. It struck him, rightly or wrongly, that they were not arranged in his ordinary exact manner. He took them out. He counted them again. The number was—one short. There had been fifty when he counted before; there were forty-nine now. He repeated the counting as many as three times, but always with the same result. One paper was missing. He looked into the drawer again, ransacked it thoroughly; but it contained nothing, except some few copies of old examination papers which had been left there casually. He unlocked the other drawers of the writing-table and searched them all. It was no good.

Mr. Brandiston was in a quandary. Had he counted the number aright in the first instance? or had the printers, by mistake, sent only forty-nine? That was a possibility, but it was not improbable. He telegraphed early next morning to the firm of printers; the reply was that the number of papers sent had undoubtedly been fifty.