XX.
When Foley went the next day to Sutton's lodgings, he was told that Sutton had already left Oxford; had gone away early that morning. Where he had gone, however, no one seemed to know. Certainly Foley never found out; he never saw Sutton again, nor, in spite of all his inquiries, did he ever hear anything but the most vague and uncertain news about him. Abel said he had never gone back to Parnassus City. And then, years after, it was reported that an Oxford man, when visiting some old shrine in Italy, had recognized, or thought he recognized, Sutton in the monk who showed him about the church.
Foley never got rid of a certain feeling of remorse, a sense that at the beginning he had too lightly interfered in the life of the young Dissenter.
But then he would tell himself, that it was probably after all nothing less than Oxford itself, with its old ways and memories, that had gradually changed and influenced the American. Influenced him not for good, surely! he thought. And indeed, remembering Sutton's slow estrangement from his early ideas and friends, his poor attempts to remain faithful, the trouble and mystery in which he had disappeared at last, Foley would ask himself, (and he took a strange sort of pleasure in the question,) whether there were not something really dangerous in the venerable and Gothic beauty of Oxford, a chill in the old shadows, an iron sound in the bells.
The Will to Live
Part One
"Moral Philosophy," notwithstanding all its modern ideas and developments, is still taught at Oxford from the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle. Something indeed of the old Academic discipline might be said still to exist there, the tradition of it coming down through the Schools of the Middle Ages. Certainly the discussions between tutor and pupils, by means of which so much of the philosophic training is carried on, are not without a certain resemblance to the Socratic dialogues. And the young men who are so eager and amusing in Plato's writings—one might find the like of these, perhaps, among the English undergraduates, as well as the types with which modern novels have made us more familiar. The questions they talk and think about would at least be much the same as those so eagerly debated in the Athenian garden—the old questions about Truth and Justice and Beauty; and then the meaning or purpose of Life—that question which is the oldest of all, and which each generation of youth tries to solve in some new way.
"Good night, sir"—"Good night"—"Good night"—and their discussion ended, the young men took their caps and books, and clattered noisily down the stone staircase from the tutor's room. They still lingered a moment, outside in the quadrangle, four or five together, vaguely talking in the darkness.