Dick went back to Oxford that year with another feeling creeping into his heart side by side with the great love for his father which had hitherto possessed it. He was not over head and ears in love with Ada Clifford, nor, since it must be confessed, she with him; but his father and himself rode over often that vacation, and Dick found the family one of the most agreeable in every way that he had ever met, while Ralph atoned for his former rudeness in a thousand ways that come with such an indescribable charm from a strong nature. Dick took back this memory with him to the university, and perhaps it saved him from getting among the “fast men”—a society only too fascinating for young fellows blessed with health, strength, good nature, good looks, and money.
Without actually giving up his practices of muscular Christianity, association with more intellectual minds brought him soon to perceive that there was a higher ambition in this life for a young man than being the captain of a cricket eleven, the “stroke” of a university eight, the best pigeon shot, or the proprietor of the most startling “turn-out” on the road. Association with intellectual men brought with it intellectual thoughts, inquiries, pursuits; while under all happily ran the boy’s innate love of honor, of what was fair and truthful, supporting him somewhat, and keeping him, on the whole, straight in the midst of the dangerous speculations and vexed problems which were being agitated around him, and discussed with all the boldness natural to undisciplined minds.
His Oxford course was drawing to a close, and he began to think of adopting some career, though the wealth and property to which he was heir necessitated no pursuit at all other than that of a quiet country gentleman living on his estates. During his last year particularly he had read and studied much, and the result of his studies and inquiries always came home to him in the form of the old question of Pilate, What is truth? He was, like his father, a loyal Englishman, a supporter of the state, rather because he found it there established, and could see no better, than for any divine right which, in his father’s mind, and in the minds of so many Englishmen, the glorious British Constitution possesses. But the church was another affair. That question puzzled him sorely. That it might be a very fine institution, that it had given birth to many splendid minds, that it still possessed many very amiable and worthy followers, he did not deny; but that an institution which was at best a very mixed affair, which was not believed in by the majority of his countrymen, which had been patched, and stretched, and mended, and cobbled to meet the exigencies of every changing hour, which was not believed in even by so many of its professed members and teachers, was in any sense a divine institution, he could not concede. To his truthful mind, it dated from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not from Jesus Christ; it was simply in its present form an amiable machine of state, not a divine organization which should command the approving consent of all were it what men who believed in salvation ought to follow. As for the rest of the wrangling sects, he looked upon them as so many ecclesiastical tinkerings, better calculated to bore holes in the edifice of faith than to build up a system strong, enduring, and right.
Filled with thoughts of this description, he came home restless, dissatisfied, questioning; too true and too earnest to throw quite overboard all belief as a sham, and take the world as he found it—a mixture of good and bad, inexplicable save as a result of chance and conventionality. He visited the Cliffords, and they found laughing Dick Cranstone an altered man, somewhat graver, and evidently unsettled. One day, when his father was not present, he unbosomed himself to Mr. Clifford, who was a very intellectual man. The latter listened kindly to the boy, though he knew the story well; he had gone through it all himself. He did not try to explain matters there and then; he merely told him that what he was then experiencing was the exact counterpart of what he himself had experienced. “If you like to come over in a few days, I expect to have F. Leslie here, a Jesuit, and a convert like myself. He will explain matters to you much better than I can, if you are not afraid of meeting a Jesuit, Richard.”
Dick winced a little at this proposal; he had never in his life met with a Jesuit, and his opinion of the society was formed on what he had read of them as the most deceitful, crafty, and cunning set of men ever organized to blind men’s eyes and lead them astray from freedom and light; though, when he came to think the matter over, he could not bring to mind a single case of any of his friends who had come across them and been converted to Catholicity, as some of them had, turning out fiends or blind enthusiasts. So he resolved to meet F. Leslie.
It was the old story. After due inquiry and preparation, he was converted, and immediately after went straight to his father, and told him all.
To describe Ralph Cranstone’s wrath at the news would be impossible. He only saw one terrible fact—his family disgraced for ever in the person of their last descendant his son, from whom he had hoped so much. The line of the Cranstones was poisoned, defiled in the person of one who could thus turn traitor to his queen and country. A Cranstone a Papist! And that Cranstone his son Dick! He did not ask him to retract—he rose up and cursed the boy, and turned him out of the house.
Protestant friends, this part of the story, though inwoven with fiction, is a very hard fact. It is not of unfrequent occurrence; the writer to-day has friends who in their own persons can corroborate it.
Ralph Cranstone could have borne anything rather than this—that his son should turn Papist. He might become an infidel, and believe in no God at all; he might join any one he chose of the sects, however low; he might even turn Mussulman or Jew—but a Cranstone a Papist! Good God! it were better that he had never been born.
And so Ralph sat there looking out into the storm, where the form of his brave, handsome boy had vanished. He was conscious only of the storm raging in his own breast, of the terrible curse he had uttered out of his heart on the head of the one he had loved more, infinitely more, than himself. That curse was ringing around the room still, and seemed to mock him like a fiend. He rose at last, and staggered to his room, not noticing the tearful old housekeeper, who knew that something dreadful had happened, and who came timidly asking him to take something to eat, for the day had gone. His day had gone out with his boy, and the light of his life went out with Dick into the winter storm, to be swallowed up and buried away in it for ever.