Hardy and Tom accompanied the Captain to the gate. During his passage across the two quadrangles, the old gentleman was full of the praises of the men and of protestations as to the improvement in social manners and customs since his day, when there could have been no such meeting, he declared, without blackguardism and drunkenness, at least among young officers; but then they had less to think of than Oxford men, no proper education. And so the Captain was evidently traveling back into the great trireme question when they reached the gate. As they could go no farther with him, however, he had to carry away his solution of the three-banks-of-oars difficulty in his own bosom to the “Mitre”.
“Don't let us go in,” said Tom, as the gate closed on the Captain, and they turned back into the quadrangle, “let us take a turn or two;” so they walked up and down the inner quad in the starlight.
Just at first they were a good deal embarrassed and confused; but before long, though not without putting considerable force on himself, Tom got back into something like his old familiar way of unbosoming himself to his re-found friend, and Hardy showed more than his old anxiety to meet him half-way. His ready and undisguised sympathy soon dispersed the remaining clouds which were still hanging between them; and Tom found it almost a pleasure, instead of a dreary task, as he had anticipated, to make a full confession, and state the case clearly and strongly against himself to one who claimed neither by word nor look the least superiority over him, and never seemed to remember that he himself had been ill-treated in the matter.
“He had such a chance of lecturing me, and didn't do it,” thought Tom afterwards, when he was considering why he felt so very grateful to Hardy. “It was so cunning of him, too. If he had begun lecturing, I should have begun to defend myself, and never have felt half such a scamp as I did when I was telling it all out to him in my own way.”
The result of Hardy's management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything down to his night at the ragged school; and what an effect his chance-opening of the “Apology” had had on him. Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice. “You needn't have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson.”
“I don't understand,” said Tom.
“Well, there's something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn't there?”
“Yes, a great deal,” Tom answered, after a pause; “but it isn't the same thing.”
“Why not the same thing?”
“Oh, surely you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a daemon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning.”