BY THE LATE CHARLES KINGSLEY,
REVISED AND COMPLETED BY HIS DAUGHTER, LUCAS MALET.
Copyright by Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. in the United States of America.
CHAPTER XXIII.
It was the beginning of the Lent term. I had stayed up during the vacation, my College being also my home. And during that vacation a weight of loneliness descended upon me. This was wrong, since had I not very much to be thankful for? My position was a secure, and, from the university standpoint, an even brilliant one. I liked my work. It interested me. Yet, in some aspects, this university life seemed to me narrow. It pained me to see old faces depart, and new ones enter who knew naught of me. Other men halted here, but for a while, on their life’s journey, moving forward to meet the larger issues, to seek ‘fresh woods and pastures new.’ And I remained—as one, held up by accident, remains at some half-way house, seeing the stream of traffic and of wayfarers sweep for ever forward along the great crowded highroad, and pass him by.
If I had not had that break in my university course, if I had not spent those two years at Hover in a society and amid interests and occupations—pleasures, let me put it roundly—foreign to my own social sphere, Cambridge, and all Cambridge stood for, would not probably have palled upon me. But I had beheld wider horizons; beheld them, moreover, through the windows of an enchanted castle. Thus memory cast its shadow over the present, making me—it was faithless, ungrateful, I had nearly said, sinful—dissatisfied and sad.
However, being in good health, I was not too sad to eat a good dinner; and so, one fine day at the beginning of term, when the bell rang for hall, I crossed the quadrangle and went in—or went rather to the door, and there stopped short. For, face to face, I met none other than Mr. Halidane, in all the glory of a freshman’s brand-new gown.
‘Ah! Mr. Brownlow,’ he exclaimed, with his blandest and most beaming smile, ‘it is indeed a gracious dispensation to meet you, sir, an old and valued friend, on my first day within these hallowed and venerable walls. I feared you might not have come up yet. Allow me to congratulate you upon your distinctions, your degree, your fellowship. With what gladness have I heard of them, have I welcomed the news of your successful progress. I trust you are duly thankful to an over-ruling providence!’
‘I trust I am,’ quoth I.
I believed the man to be a hypocrite. He had done me all the harm he could. Yet, what with my loneliness, what with my memories of that enchanted castle, I could not but be moved at this unexpected meeting with him. I choked down my disgust, my resentment for the dirty tricks he had played me, and shaking him by the hand asked what had brought him here.
‘The generosity of my pious patron,’ he answered, casting up his eyes devoutly. ‘Ah! what do I not owe—under providence—to that true ornament of his exalted station! Through his condescending liberality I am enabled to fulfil the wish long nearest my heart; and by taking, as I humbly hope in due time, Holy Orders, to enter upon a more extended sphere of Christian and national usefulness.’