Basil had not done well at school or at ’Varsity. But ’Varsities are fairly used to that, and are built of long-suffering stuff, and young Gregory’s shortcomings had not over-mattered at Queen’s. But at school—a nice school, strictly run—he had been in serious trouble more than once, and once had been saved from expulsion by Jack Bradley, and at some sacrifices on Bradley’s part.
Both the school and the ’Varsity had been rather inappropriately selected. Basil came of commercial stock and was dedicated to a commercial life, and commercial life of a sort for which a few years’ business training in Chicago would have been more useful preparation than any amount of term-keeping at Oxford. But Gregory the father, who had had a very limited education, was, as is usual with such men of means, obsessed that his son should have the public-school and ’Varsity hallmark that he himself lacked. And Mrs. Gregory had wished it no less ardently. She had Oxford associations in her blood and of her girlhood, and her own father had worn an Oxford hood and held a modest incumbency near the town.
Basil Gregory learned some of the prescribed lessons at public school: he had to. And he might have learned something of books and other erudite lore at Oxford, for they do teach at the ’Varsities any one who insists upon being taught. But Basil had not insisted, and left Oxford knowing a little less than when he went.
Bradley had been at Queen’s, but had worked while Basil played, and such intimacy as had been between them died away, naturally enough, in the wider life and the greater individual freedom and scope of ’Varsity. But they had met sometimes; and once Bradley had been of great service to Gregory.
When Basil had reached Hong Kong a year ago, John Bradley had been serving there for some time as a curate in the Cathedral Church of St. John.
The young priest had held out an eager, friendly hand at once, but Basil had almost ignored it. It was shabby of him, and he knew it at the time. He knew that the other’s overtures were not in the least to the rich ship-owner’s son, but altogether to an old schoolmate newly come to a foreign country.
The priest—he lived quite alone—was just sitting down to his solitary dinner when Basil’s rickshaw came through the gate, ran up the path between the tall lychee trees, and stopped at the door.
The older man gave the younger the cordial greeting of their old days, and added, “Come and eat. Oh! but you must. I’m famished.”
And Basil sat down, both glad and sorry to postpone even by half an hour the unpleasant tale he had come to tell.
The priest was no anchorite, and his simple food was good, his wine sound. Both had their flattering tonic effect upon the easily influenced peccant, and as he ate and drank his misdemeanor dwindled away in his own eyes, until almost it seemed to him that he had been more sinned against than sinner.