GERALD EVERSLEY’S FRIENDSHIP

A STUDY IN REAL LIFE

BY THE

REV. J. E. C. WELLDON

HEAD MASTER OF HARROW SCHOOL

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1895

[All rights reserved]

TO

D. M. A.

CONTENTS

GERALD EVERSLEY’S FRIENDSHIP

CHAPTER I
THE NEW BOYS

It was a day in September 186-. It was between five and six o’clock in the afternoon. The railway station of St. Anselm’s seemed to be asleep save for the movement of four people, or, more strictly, of two pairs of people, who were pacing up and down at opposite ends of the platform, apparently awaiting the arrival of the same train to take them to London. Each pair consisted of a gentleman and a boy. It was evident that the two pairs were not acquainted one with the other. Once, but only once, in their patient promenade they approached and passed each other; and in so doing each of the two boys eyed the other with the curiously distant inquisitiveness of English schoolboys who have not met before, but who are dimly conscious that, as members of the same great institution, they have entered, or are about to enter, into a mysterious relation; and, as soon as they had got out of earshot, each of them, turning at the same moment almost half round, whispered to his father, ‘I’m sure that fellow is a new boy; I wonder whose house he’s in.’ It was one of the many questions that are asked in life more for the sake of putting them than in the hope that they will be answered. But there would have been no disposition to answer it, if answer had been possible; for just then a train drew up at the opposite platform, and out of it poured a number of boys, of all sorts and ages, clamouring for porters, clamouring for luggage, greeting one another, chaffing one another, rushing out of the station to secure cabs or other conveyances, rushing back to recover articles which they had left in the racks or under the seats of the carriages, turning the quiet of the little station into such a Babel or Bedlam as can be caused by no human beings but English public school boys in the last half-hour of freedom before the ringing of the bell which marks the fatal time when they must be all in their boarding houses—the end of the holidays, the beginning of a new term.

At last the train, looking desolate when it had discharged its freight of youthful humanity, moved on; the platform on which the boys of St. Anselm’s had alighted was deserted once more, and the two fathers and their sons, who had watched the scene with unmistakable amusement and interest, resumed their walk on the other side of the station. The pairs were strangely different in appearance. One of the gentlemen was tall and strongly built; his face was sunburnt; he possessed the indescribable athletic, unliterary air of an English country gentleman. He walked with a rapid step, spoke in hearty, cheery tones, appeared to be in good humour with himself and with the world, and it was difficult, in looking at him, to mistake the characteristics of easy temper, ample fortune, and high breeding. The boy at his side, lithe and stalwart, whose bright complexion and soft blue eyes were passports to favour, even without the radiant smile that played now and again, like a wandering sunbeam, on his mobile features, was a type of generous, healthy English boyhood. No being, perchance, is so distinct, none so beautiful or attractive, as a noble English boy. He is open-hearted, open-handed; there is not a cloud upon his brow; he looks the world in the face; for him all life is, as it were, sunshine without rain. Such a boy was Harry Venniker. He was like his father, yet with a delicate grace that was not altogether his father’s. He was now nearly fourteen years of age, and he seemed a little older than his years. The boy at the other end of the platform, who was nearly of the same age, though he looked younger, was thin and pale; he wore spectacles, and stooped a little in his walk, and there was a certain nervous anxiety, not unmixed with a fine intelligence, in his demeanour whenever he met the gaze of any man or woman, even of one of the porters in the station, directed towards himself. His father was a country clergyman (like so many another) with a small income and a large family—an income growing unfortunately smaller and a family growing, shall it be said fortunately? larger—who, though he had come down a little in the world, as he would at times rather sorrowfully confess, had set his heart upon giving his eldest son—the only child of the first Mrs. Eversley—a good education; and, finding him clever, much above the average of boys in his own rural experience, had been so far encouraged by his success in winning a scholarship and by the generosity of a wealthy friend, a near relative of the first Mrs. Eversley, who had offered to undertake all responsibility for his educational expenses, that he had resolved, not without many painful misgivings, to send him to school at St. Anselm’s. There was an aspect of bygone gentility about Mr. Eversley; he looked like a man who had seen better days, though nobody could tell or guess how long it was since he had seen them. The memory of those days was somehow written upon his face; and yet, if the truth must be told, a casual observer would have been more likely to notice that his coat was a little threadbare at the elbow, and his clerical hat a little soiled about the brim, than that his personal appearance was not unworthy of a better garb.

Different, however, as the fathers were and the sons, the conversation at the two ends of the platform was not entirely dissimilar. ‘Train’s due, Harry,’ said Lord Venniker, taking his watch out of his pocket and looking at it with just sufficient attention to forget in half a minute what the time was when he looked. ‘Here she comes. Now here’s a 5l. note for you, and when you want more, you must write for it; don’t spend it all, you young rogue, at the tuckshops. Go straight back to Brandiston’s as soon as I’m off and make yourself happy.’ Then, after a brief pause, ‘You’ve not got to earn your living, you know, so you need not work your eyes out; I’d much rather you got into the eleven; but do your duty like a Christian; don’t swear, don’t cheat, don’t ...’ and Lord Venniker’s speech, one of the longest he had made in his life, was cut short by the train. He had barely time to add, as a summary of moral wisdom, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do anything unworthy of a gentleman—and a Venniker.’

At the same time, but at the other end of the platform, Mr. Eversley was saying in a low voice, ‘My dear Gerald, before the train, which is to part us for so long, comes in—she is signalled now—let me say this last word to you. You are going to an expensive school, more expensive, I am afraid, than it is right for me to afford; but I have longed to give you a good education—for your dear mother’s sake, and your own, Gerald—and when I have done that, you must make your own way in the world. Work hard then; remember that Satan finds some mischief for idle hands. You have been brought up in the faith of Christ as your Redeemer and your Master; be true to Him, pray to Him every morning and night, and, whatever you do, don’t forget what is expected of you as a Christian gentleman, and always ask yourself what He would wish you to do, if He were present.’

The train drew up. Lord Venniker stepped into a first class, Mr. Eversley into a third class, compartment; a few hurried last words—the world-old effort to say in half a minute all that might have been said, and ought, it seems, to have been said, in the past half-hour—and there was a whistling, a waving of hands, a tear rising in the eyes that would disown it if they could, and the parting was over. Who is there among us that has ever waved ‘Farewell’ and has not felt as though it were ‘Farewell for ever’?

Harry Venniker stood gazing after the train until it wound its way along the curve some three or four hundred yards from the station, and he could see nothing of it but the smoke-wreath fading away into thin air; then he turned quickly upon his heel, and as he turned almost ran into the other boy, who was making his way with slow steps towards the exit from the station.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I’m always doing that kind of thing.’ Then he looked at the straw hat and broad white collar which are the infallible marks of a boy at St. Anselm’s, and added, ‘I say, are you a new boy? So am I. Was that your governor? Whose house are you in? There’s no cab; those chaps have taken them all; we may as well walk up to the school together, eh? There’s time, isn’t there?’

Gerald Eversley made no attempt to answer the questions which came leaping from his companion’s lips, but contented himself with saying that he was a new boy, he had only once been at St. Anselm’s before, and then with walking quietly at his side. In his heart he could not help wondering how any boy, being new to public school life, could feel so much at his ease.

Both boys, it is needless now to say, were taking the fateful step—more fateful perhaps than any other that is taken in life—of entering a great public school. Their parents had brought them earlier in the day to be introduced to the master in whose house they were to be placed, and after the introduction they had been permitted to see the last of their parents at the station. They had never met before; they did not know each other’s names; it was only by such a chance as has been described that they came to be walking together. Who can tell at any moment of his life that for him there may not be some one coming from a distant home, drawn onwards by divine guiding, some one whose name he has not heard, and yet whose destiny is indissolubly linked to his own?

For two or three minutes they walked in silence; but it was not in Harry Venniker’s nature to be silent for long, and he soon began to interrogate his companion with the good-natured, but almost brutal, frankness which is exclusively characteristic of schoolboys.

‘I say,’ was his first remark, ‘what’s your name, though?’

‘Gerald Simeon Eversley,’ was the reply, delivered in a low tone, and with something not altogether unlike a choking of the throat.

It was not, perhaps, a remarkable name; but Mr. Eversley had called his son ‘Simeon’ after the great Evangelical leader whose funeral at King’s College in Cambridge he had himself, as a young man, attended.

‘Oh! Eversley, is it?’ The name did not appear to awaken any reminiscences in Harry Venniker’s mind.

‘Whose house are you in?’

‘Mr. Brandiston’s.’

‘Brandiston’s! Bless my soul! why, so am I,’ said Venniker; but there was something in his tone which seemed to imply that the pale, spectacled boy to whom he spoke was not quite the kind of boy whom he had expected to find in Mr. Brandiston’s house, the most popular and fashionable house at St. Anselm’s. ‘They say he’s not a bad sort, old Brandiston, but awfully strict. However, I don’t mind that so long as he’s just. I know a lot of fellows there, some of them were at my preparatory school; it’s cock house at cricket; it has got five of the eleven in it, and one of them is the captain—Stanley, you know. But, I say, what school have you been at? Were you in the eleven there? What was your top score?’ But here he paused, as if a gentle voice had reminded him that the boy at his side was not quite likely to have achieved reputation as a cricketer, and he repeated his first question quickly, ‘What school?’

Gerald Eversley was fain to confess that he had never been to school before—in fact, had never left his home; and he felt that the confession somehow lowered him in his companion’s eyes, and would lower him in the eyes of all his schoolfellows at St. Anselm’s. It certainly seemed to make a breach at the moment between his companion and himself; they walked nearly fifty yards without speaking. But again Harry Venniker’s spirits were too buoyant to make prolonged silence natural or possible. His conversation took an air of superiority—that unconscious, unintentional superiority which is the prerogative of greater knowledge or wider experience. He felt somehow as if he had spent half his life at St. Anselm’s, and, being long familiar with its practices and observances, were called upon to initiate a young novice into the secret of them. He began to realise in himself a sense of patronage, a duty of protection, to the boy who was walking at his side. Just because Gerald was so ‘green’ (as schoolboys phrase it), and wholly unversed in the ways of the world, it was his office to give him a helping hand. A boy of duller or coarser temperament than Harry Venniker, even if he had abstained from teasing or harassing such a creature, would have left him severely alone. But Harry Venniker was full of manly, generous impulses; he was conscious of strength, but not less conscious of the obligation to use it beneficently; and while he would not himself have submitted to any bullying, he would have felt it a shame to let another weaker boy be bullied without coming to his rescue.

He resumed the conversation in a more sympathetic tone, turning it to those subjects which seem to be eternally interesting to males of thirteen years of age who are entering upon school life—a boy’s sisters’ names, his pocket-money, the sport he has had at home, and the means of satisfying a master’s requirements with the smallest possible expenditure of personal trouble. But he discovered—and the discovery was a great surprise to him—that these subjects, so natural among schoolboys, were nearly all painful or difficult to Gerald Eversley.

Boys have been always strangely sensitive about their female relations. They have often felt, or affected to feel, a shame of their sisters—though, heaven knows the sisters had generally far more cause to be ashamed of their brothers than their brothers of them—and it has been a point of honour to conceal their names and their very existence. Boys have been known to deny that they had sisters, though at the time they were receiving letters and presents from them. It is said that a boy once carried his dislike of the female sex to the point of denying that he had ever had a mother. Gerald Eversley was not experienced in the ways of school life; but when he was asked for his sisters’ names, he found a difficulty in admitting that he had eight sisters possessing an accumulated total of nineteen Christian names; and Harry Venniker, who had only one sister, and had not conceived the possibility of anybody having as many as eight, grew conscious, after hearing some half-dozen of the names, that his question was rather an awkward one, and he did not press for a complete answer to it.

He was not much more successful in introducing the subject of sport. To most British schoolboys, of the upper classes at all events, sport is a subject of fascinating and absorbing interest. Not to be a sportsman is in their eyes not to be an English gentleman. There is a story that a clever schoolmaster, who was conscientiously opposed to vivisection, offered a prize to any boy who should come back to school after the summer holidays without having killed any living creature; and the prize was not claimed, probably not because there was no boy in the school who had not handled either a gun or a rod in the holidays, but because there was not a boy bold enough to admit in the presence of his schoolfellows that he had spent the holidays in so unsportsmanlike a manner. But the 12th of August and the 1st of September were only common days to Gerald Eversley; they enjoyed no mystical significance in his eyes. Mr. Eversley, his father, was not a sportsman; he had neither the means nor the taste for ‘killing’ (as he would himself have said) ‘God’s dumb creatures.’ To say the truth, it is probable that he felt, like Sir Thomas More, a secret astonishment at finding that so many sober, responsible, Christian gentlemen experienced a pleasure or exhibited a pride in the magnitude of their slaughter. So it was that Gerald Eversley had never thought of handling a gun. A gunshot was apt to send a tremor through his body. It happened once that, as he was walking with a book of poetry in his hand in the covert immediately adjoining a part of his father’s glebeland, he came upon a number of pheasants that the keepers who were out with a shooting party had left—bedraggled, bleeding, some of them hardly yet dead—to be picked up in the evening when the day’s sport was finished. The sight was so painful that he turned away from it as if it sickened him, and the tears came into his eyes, and he wondered if any satisfaction derived from killing these beautiful creatures could be greater than his in being innocent of their blood. It was not much use, then, to talk to Gerald Eversley about sport; the subject was unwelcome to him, and Harry Venniker instinctively dropped it.

His growing conviction that his companion was a ‘rum ’un’ was not diminished when it appeared that Gerald had not come to school with any thought of waging war against the masters, or with any animosity towards them as the natural enemies of boyhood; that he was not looking forward to any ‘larks;’ that he did not understand what a ‘beak’ or a ‘crib’ was; that he hoped to be left alone to study by himself; that he cared more to know where the library was than where the cricket-field was; and that he shrank at heart from contact with a company of strangers, not the less because those strangers were public school boys. But his astonishment reached its height when at the mention of pocket-money and of the ways of spending it on a large scale—Harry Venniker having a 5l. note in his pocket and being empowered to write home for more as soon as he wanted it—his companion, who had been sent to school with only half a sovereign (though he did not confess the amount), and that a sum which his father had given him with the solemn air of one who is making a sacrifice that it would be impossible to repeat, stammered and faltered, and at last broke into tears. He had lived a solitary, sheltered life until then; he was quite unworldly; he had never known what it was to receive gold as a present; and it was more than he could bear to listen to a boy of his own age talking about ‘fivers,’ not at all boastfully, but in the most natural manner possible, as if they were matters of almost everyday experience. He did his best to check his tears, but they would come.

Harry Venniker looked at him with a mingled sentiment of surprise and commiseration. He had an awkward consciousness (to express his own thought) that he had ‘put his foot into it,’ and that, if he had chosen his topics of conversation with more delicacy or discretion, this ‘scene’—disagreeable as ‘scenes’ always are to boys—would not have occurred. For the moment it was difficult to avoid a feeling of contempt for this strange, emotional creature. Boys have a horror of tears; they think them fit only for women or for Frenchmen; they regard them as essentially un-English. But Harry Venniker’s heart was touched to sympathy; he realised the fact of sorrow, and tacitly blamed himself for being, although unwittingly, the cause of it. He wanted, if he could, to make amends, though he hardly knew how, and so, after hesitating for a moment, he put out his hand and said hastily, ‘I say, never mind; don’t blubber. You’ll want a little more pluck, I can tell you, if you’re to get on among fellows; but I’ll be your friend; I’ll stick up for you—I swear I will; I’ll be your friend, whatever happens.’

By this time they were ascending the short, steep road which leads to the crest of St. Anselm’s hill. Harry Venniker had not long finished speaking when they came in sight of Mr. Brandiston’s house—it juts out a little into the road just beyond the chapel—and without another word they walked to the door of it and entered, passing through a group of boys who were clustered by the entrance, and who stared at them with the supercilious curiosity of older and superior beings at the sight of a new boy.

‘I say,’ cried Harry Venniker, who had been holding a brief but earnest consultation with the butler, ‘you fellow, Eversley; we’re in a room together, No. 13; come along, let’s have a look at it.’ And so saying, he hurried the butler and Gerald up two flights of stairs and along a narrow, tortuous passage, actually known in the language of the house as the ‘corkscrew,’ to a room which bore the external signs of being intended for the conjoint but exclusive occupation of two boys. The walls were bare; for its former occupants, whether they had left the school or had only migrated to some better room in the house, had bequeathed to their successors no traces of decorations except the nails which had supported their pictures and now remained without any apparent use, like ghosts of an ancient and departed glory; but it contained two beds, which it was the fashion to fold up during the day and let down at night, two chairs, two tables deeply scarred with the names of several generations of boys who had occupied the room, two bookcases, two washstands and basins—in a word, all the conventional phenomena of a dual existence. The butler—a venerable character in the house—stood quietly by while the two boys surveyed the scantily furnished apartment, the virgin soil, as it were, which they were destined to cultivate; then he claimed the privilege of long experience by giving vent to the hope that they would ‘chum along all right together,’ and left them alone, telling them they must come down to the hall when the bell rang for prayers.

While they were unpacking their boxes, which were, it must be admitted, widely different in character and contents, Harry Venniker received a good many visits from old friends who had known him at home or at school, who greeted him and were greeted by him with much cordiality, passed some merry jokes with him at the expense of two or three of the masters and of their houses, which were declared to be in all respects vastly inferior to Mr. Brandiston’s, so that the boys professed themselves unable to imagine how ‘any decent chap’ could go into such ‘holes,’ and informed him in a congratulatory spirit that Stanley had been heard to express the intention of conferring upon him the singular honour of choosing him as one of his fags. Nobody asked for Gerald Eversley, or addressed any word to him, though to one of the boys who came into the room Harry Venniker introduced him as ‘an old friend of mine,’ using a form of speech not unnatural to schoolboys to whom a day is a long time, and a ceremony or practice which came into use a year ago is as if it had existed since the Creation. The business of unpacking boxes, interrupted as it was by numerous sallies of Harry Venniker to the window or the door, for the purpose of taking observations or renewing acquaintances, filled a considerable time. Then there was the further business of adorning the walls with pictures and trophies. Poor Gerald endured a fresh mortification at finding that he was expected to have brought certain decorative ornaments with him, and that he had not brought them. But Harry with great good nature did his best to set him at ease. He produced from the bottom of one of his boxes a number of engravings, all of a sporting kind, exhibiting with rare uniformity the triumphs of human skill over wild boars, elks, tigers, bears, and lions, to say nothing of the various species of British game, an enormous stag’s head—a ‘royal’ he called it, but Gerald had no idea what he meant—the trophy of his father’s prowess in sport, a clock, a hand-screen, two cabinet photographs of his father and mother, and the picture of a beautiful girl whom he explained a little apologetically to be his sister Ethel, a year younger than himself, ‘a real good sort, you know, for a girl; it was she who gave me this knife just as I was starting. Now we’re beginning to look a little shipshape,’ he continued; but just then the bell rang, and the two boys went downstairs with all the others for prayers in the hall.

It was the rule of Mr. Brandiston’s house that, as soon as prayers and supper were over, all boys (excepting the Sixth Form) should return to their rooms and silence should be observed until bedtime. The interval between supper and bedtime was perhaps half an hour. The lights were extinguished at ten, or soon afterwards. Then Mr. Brandiston would begin the tour of his house, looking into all the rooms to assure himself that the boys were in bed, and wishing them ‘Good night.’ It was a kindly practice, and it might have been useful, but it was so methodical as to lose the chief part of its value. The boys knew that he came, and knew the precise hour of his coming. A good many of them were fast asleep before he opened the doors of their rooms—so light and facile is the slumber of boyhood—and it may be suspected that a still larger number feigned to be asleep. Mr. Brandiston, like other masters of boarding houses, had acquired in the process of years a comprehensive insight into the manners and attitudes of boys in bed. The boy who sleeps hidden deep down under the bedclothes, so that it needs a careful investigation to discover that there is a human being in the bed at all; the boy who starts up at the flash of his master’s candle, and makes a fierce attack upon his master’s legs; the boy who mutters ‘What’s that?’ or ‘Go away, do,’ and turns heavily to sleep upon his side again; the boy who sleeps sitting nearly upright or on his back with his arms clasped beneath his head; or the wakeful boy—rare creature, but real—who is seldom asleep, but lies with open vacant eyes the long night through—all these were familiarly known to Mr. Brandiston. He could have given an entertaining lecture upon the varieties of sleep; but, as a rule, the boys, being tired out with the fully occupied days of school life, fell asleep within a few minutes of going to bed, and however rude and rough the beds were at St. Anselm’s, it was their fixed unalterable belief that no other beds in the world were half so easy or soporific. Happy, thrice happy, the sleep of the young! Mr. Brandiston, himself a bad sleeper, had often watched it with envious eyes, and, as he softly shut the door, had whispered to himself ‘God bless them!’

To-night, the boys whose story I am telling had not much appetite for supper. As soon as prayers were finished, they went back to their room and made preparations for bed. Gerald Eversley, having divested himself of his jacket, knelt down by his bedside, took from his pocket a little volume of prayers which his father had given him, and prayed. He had been always in the habit of saying his prayers night and morning. It would be difficult to say whether he was conscious of a definite help or happiness in prayer. Perhaps it is truer to say that he would have experienced a pain or void if he had not prayed. Prayer was to him a natural act of life, like eating or walking. He had always been accustomed to pray; it did not occur to him that there could be any persons who did not pray. He was entirely free from the shyness which boys of greater worldly wisdom than his own feel about prayer. He knelt down, and his thoughts ascended to heaven. Will it be always so with him in after days? God grant it!

Harry Venniker, too, was in the habit of saying his prayers. His mother had taught him to say them, and many a time had heard him say them at her knee. She had begged him, when he first went to school, not to give up the habit of praying. But he did not always say them. Sometimes he omitted them in the morning, if he got up too late, or in the evening, if he felt too tired. Probably he would have omitted them on the first night at St. Anselm’s, his mind being full of other things, or would have hurried over them in bed when the light had gone out. But seeing Gerald Eversley kneel down, and seeing him lose all consciousness of another’s presence in the communion of his soul with its Maker, he too knelt by his bedside, spent perhaps a minute in devotion, then rose from his knees, having done all that he wanted or was wont to do. Gerald was still kneeling when Harry’s prayer was finished, his lips were moving earnestly, reverently, upon his face was the far-away look of one who sees visions. At last he rose, hardly before the light went out, and crept into bed.

‘Good night,’ said Harry cheerfully; ‘what a time you’ve been!’

There was a certain sadness, such as can hardly be defined, unless by the beautiful French expression, ‘tears in the voice,’ in the tone of the answering ‘Good night.’

It was not long before Mr. Brandiston’s step was heard in the passage. He opened the door; his candle played upon the faces of the two boys, and seeing they were still awake, he said, as if speaking to himself, ‘Let me see; yes, Venniker and Eversley; I have put you in a room together, I hope you will get on well. Good night, I will see you to-morrow.’

Harry Venniker wished the schoolmaster ‘Good night’; Gerald Eversley had not the courage to say it. And Mr. Brandiston went out, shutting the door softly behind him.

Harry Venniker turned on his side and fell asleep; or, if it was not sleep, it was the unconsciousness which anticipates sleep. He was awakened by a sound proceeding from a corner of the room. It was a noise so low that it seemed ashamed of itself. He sat up in the bed. He listened, but the noise was hushed; then it began again. He became convinced that it had some connection with Gerald Eversley. He got out of bed. The light of the moon was streaming through the window, and by the light of it he was aware that the boy, whose face was turned away, was sobbing with a heartbroken passionateness. His first thought, natural to a schoolboy, was, as it had been on the hillside, one of contempt. But again his kindness of heart guided him aright. He went and sat down on his room-fellow’s bed and laid his hand upon his shoulder. He was breaking a rule of the house in getting out of bed after the lights had been extinguished; but it may be that a Higher Authority than Mr. Brandiston would have acquitted him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said in a whisper. No answer came, unless, indeed, it were a sob; but Harry knew by a sort of instinct that the boy was weeping for very loneliness and strangeness, and was experiencing that most honourable of human sentiments which is called home-sickness. It dawned upon him once more that he was called to be the friend and protector of this strange boy, his equal in years, though, if he had been asked what form his friendship or protection would assume, he could not have told it. After all, in this life, the deepest, holiest feelings are inexpressible. Gerald would not have understood him better, and would, I think, have trusted him less, if he had delivered a consolatory oration than when he put his hand upon his shoulder and kept it there. He said only, ‘Don’t cry any more. I’ll be your friend, I said I would, whatever happens, for ever.’ ‘For ever’ is not a long time in the parlance of schoolboys; it seems longer, perhaps, as we grow older.

At last the sobbing became less convulsive; the tears ceased to flow; Gerald laid his head anew upon the pillow, and was at peace.

Oh! the sorrows of a young heart, how strong they are and how terrible! penetrating, agonising, possessing themselves of the whole being, and turning the rich, prolific life into a wilderness! We speak of childhood as the time of cloudless joys, of unsullied happiness; but it is also the time when sorrow is most helpless, and the anguish of an hour is as that which endures eternally.

Harry Venniker returned to bed and slept. In the morning he made no allusion to the incident of which the pale moon, throned in heaven, was the sole arbitress. Never since has he referred to it in conversation with Gerald Eversley; nor is there anyone who has learnt from him or will learn what took place.

CHAPTER II
TWO HOMES

It has been cynically remarked that the young have no faults; they have only the faults of their parents or their teachers. Certain it is that the knowledge of parents is a clue to the understanding of their children. Without that knowledge the teacher enters upon the study of character as upon a property that has never been surveyed. For we are creatures of circumstances; we are what others who live before us have made us; nor is it possible for any man, however chequered his life may be, to emancipate himself from the determining influences of his home life.

Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley were alike the creatures of their homes. But how different were those homes! It is a strange thought that men and boys may live side by side, and may see each other every day, and yet be as far apart as if they were dwellers in opposite continents.

Harry Venniker was the elder son of an English peer, who possessed a stately ancestral seat at Helmsbury, in one of the Midland counties, and a house in Grosvenor Square. His father’s time was divided between Parliamentary attendance, which he regarded sometimes as a relaxation, but more frequently as a bore, and sport, which he considered to be the serious business in life. If Lord Venniker lived a good part of the year in town, he was never at home there. He remembered a few words of an old Horatian stanza, which he had learned by heart as a schoolboy—something about fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ; it was his solitary Latin quotation, and he was fond of making use of it to express his satisfaction at escaping from the business and bustle and vaporous fogs of the great city into rural peace and felicity. It is possible that he had not realised all the causes which rendered London distasteful to him. One of them was that he was unconsciously intolerant of a place where there were people who did not know him or salute him. At Helmsbury he was everybody’s friend and everybody’s master. He deserved his popularity and enjoyed it. His family had been settled in that part of England since the Revolution; and the house, which had been built in Queen Anne’s reign, had scarcely been altered, except in some of its sanitary details, during two centuries. When he drove his four-in-hand along the country roads, the silver bells jingling upon the necks of his handsome bays, the villagers would come out of their cottages and bow or curtsy in the doorways, and in answer to his kindly greeting would say, ‘Good morning to you, my lord; God bless your lordship!’ It would in those days have seemed as unnatural, as contrary to the established and recognised system of human affairs, that they should not be respectful to him and his family as that he should not be just and generous to them. His social superiority was taken for granted by them as much as by himself. It was the foundation of society in Helmsbury. Could it be denied or disputed, the world would come to an end; so he thought, and so his neighbours thought with him. But he was alive to the duties as well as to the rights of landownership. It was his boast that he knew the names and histories and had set foot in the farmhouses or cottages of all the tenants on his estate. One touch of feudal or patriarchal distinction he jealously retained. He was fond of arriving just a minute late on Sunday morning at the village church, in the hope that the rector, out of deference to his rank and dignity, would allow him a little grace and would not begin the prayers until he had taken his seat, after burying his face for two or three seconds in his tall hat and then depositing it on the cushion, when he would give a sort of nod to the reading-desk, as much as to say, ‘I am ready now.’ The long avenue of chestnuts stretches from the Hall to the Park gates, and the church is just outside them across the road, so that the sexton, who was set to keep watch, could see ‘my lord’s party’ coming churchwards and could give the signal for the rector to leave the vestry. Lord Venniker never failed—not even in the worst weather—to occupy his seat at the morning service in the square, tall family pew with its red baize cushions and hassocks, and the little grate in which his lordship, if the sermon were too long, would somewhat ostentatiously poke the fire, and the hatchments of the Venniker family looking down from the walls above it. He was a good and worthy man, Lord Venniker, but he believed in the world as it was, with a noble Venniker always supreme at Helmsbury Hall. He hated what he called ‘ideas,’ though it would seem that the opinions of the lord of Helmsbury were not ‘ideas.’ He belonged politically to the country party, and all Helmsbury, including its voters, belonged to him. There were three epithets which he was in the habit of hurling at such persons as were the objects of his animosity or aversion, and it was believed that the epithets represented ascending degrees of iniquity; but he did not always use them with a nice discrimination. If a person of different political or economical views gave him offence (as was generally the case if they came into contact with him at all), he would probably call him an ‘agitator.’ If the offence was aggravated, he would call him a ‘Chartist’; for he remembered the days of blazing hayricks and farm-buildings, and it was his conviction that a ‘strong hand’ was needed to crush the early symptoms of revolution. But there was a worst epithet of all not often employed, but reserved for such outrageous persons as presumed to dispute the natural right of the lords of Helmsbury to rule and homage in their own domains: Lord Venniker would speak of them as ‘atheists.’

His family consisted of Lady Venniker, two sons, the elder Harry, whose full Christian name was Henry Alfred Brabazon, and a younger boy, now six years old, and the daughter Etheldreda, or, as she was always called, Ethel, whose portrait has been already mentioned as adorning (along with the stag’s head and other trophies) the wall of her brother’s study at St. Anselm’s.

If Lord Venniker’s influence was visible everywhere, as, indeed, I think it was, in the village of Helmsbury, it was the influence of his wife that gave charm and character to the home. Lady Venniker was one of those rare beings who seem born to diffuse happiness without knowing it. It would have surprised her to be told that she did good; she would have said that her ill-health, limiting her activities, made it impossible. But she did good in the only way in which it is sure to be done—by being good. Her personal beauty, marked as it was with that wonderfully sanctifying transparency which nothing but congenital delicacy can impart, was irradiated by the light of virtue. There are some faces, women’s faces especially, that excite an unwilling admiration; we look at them, and look again, but we do not care to remember them. Other faces there are—not so beautiful, perhaps, theoretically—that linger as sweet memories in the mind and heart. Lady Venniker’s was a beauty, not of feature only, but of expression. Though she was generally confined to her couch, yet her interest in her family and household and in her neighbours never failed. No word of complaining, no word even of recognising her own sufferings, escaped her lips. Her thought was for others, not for herself. It was not without reason that the villagers, who seldom saw her unless illness or misfortune drew them to her side, would speak of her as ‘the good lady.’

But upon no one was Lady Venniker’s sweet influence felt so powerfully as upon her husband. He had loved her when she was a girl of seventeen, the only daughter of a country gentleman in the same county, and as a lover he loved her still. Time had wrought no change or lessening of his affection. Between him and her no cloud had ever spread. Her pleasure was the law of his life. She did not bend him to her will; he did not need to be bent. Abrupt and imperious as he was at times in his dealing with others, it seemed as if his manner were softened and his voice subdued when he came into her presence. There are marriages which preserve to the end the dream—who will dare to call it a delusion?—of the wedding morning, and such had been his. In his eyes she was still the same as when he had seen and loved her sixteen years before. She was still the same when she died. She has long been dead now; but the villagers of Helmsbury, some of whom never saw her, still speak of ‘the good lady.’ No one so good, no one so beautiful, has been known to them since.

Harry, her eldest born, in face and manner resembled his father. The mother’s beauty, something too, perhaps, of her delicacy, reappeared in her daughter. There was the same pale lustre, the same transparency, the same (yet not the same) foreshadowing of death. A stranger looking at either of them would have said that she was one of those whom the gods love too well. To her children, as to her husband, Lady Venniker seemed ever as a vision of delight—a being too good, too fair, too sensitive for earth.

Born and bred in such a home, Harry Venniker, if he looked to his future life, must have seen it traced for him in clear and definite lines. To go to St. Anselm’s, the school in which his family had been educated for four generations, to distinguish himself not so much in work as in cricket and football, to get into the army, to spend a few years in the House of Commons and then to become a respectable peer and country gentleman, to be in fact what his father had been before him, and his grandfather before his father, was his ambition, if anything so natural and, as it seemed, so inevitable, could be strictly called an ambition. He was at this time, like so many English boys when they enter upon public school life, a splendid animal, healthy, vigorous, proud, elate, with no low tastes, possibly without any high aims, taking life as it came, and being content to enjoy it fully, but having no special sense of a vocation or mission in life. After all, the world’s missionaries are but few, abroad or at home, and the world would not be so comfortable if they were numerous. For it is the missionary’s business to disturb and upset established things, and there are secular missionaries (who are sometimes called ‘bores’) as well as spiritual. Harry Venniker must not be blamed if his vocation or mission remained obscure to him in boyhood. But he owed to his mother not only his sunny smile (although his had not as yet, like hers, a tinge of sadness) and his rich curling auburn hair, but the generous sympathy—derived from her example still more than from her precept—which made it impossible for him to resist the silent appeal of suffering or to withhold his aid if it were invoked in the cause of weakness and sorrow. It was this sympathy, spontaneously elicited, which had led him to swear eternal friendship with a boy so dissimilar to himself as Gerald Eversley. Until now Harry Venniker had had no great friend, or his only friend had been his sister.

The contrast between the stately pile of Helmsbury, which was Harry Venniker’s home, and the vicarage of Kestercham, where Gerald Eversley had spent the first thirteen years of his life, was strongly marked. But the two boys, when they met at St. Anselm’s, were not conscious of it, as neither of them had ever seen the home of the other. If I can succeed in delineating both these homes, the progress of this story will be more easily understood. Fortunately, in speaking of Kestercham vicarage it is possible to use some letters of Gerald’s—written partly to Harry Venniker and partly to another—which lie before me.

The village of Kestercham is situated in the heart of the most beautiful of English counties. It is hidden, I had almost said, it seems to hide itself, from human eyes. The rare traveller who should happen to pass through it, making a slight détour, perhaps, to catch the view of the cathedral which bursts upon the eyes at the sharp turning where the road emerges from the valley of Depedown, about a mile and a half from Kestercham, would be likely to judge (and not unreasonably) that it was cut off from the affairs of the outer world. The large manufacturing town of X—— lies at a distance of some ten miles from Kestercham; its tall chimneys rise like giants into the air; but the smoke dies away, and the din of the great city, long before you come to the blacksmith’s shop where the three roads meet, and the left arm of the time-worn signpost bears the inscription ‘To Kestercham.’ In one of Gerald Eversley’s letters, written some years after the beginning of this story, the following passage occurs:

‘How well I remember that blacksmith’s shop! Often and often, when driving home on winter evenings with my father from one of the neighbouring villages where he had been doing duty, have I strained my eyes to catch the jolly inspiring glow of the blacksmith’s stithy, and I think the drive always seemed less cold and dreary when once the ruddy flame, shining through the little windowpane, came into view. The blacksmith himself was my particular friend. I remember how I used to stand by his side, when I was a child, in silent eager admiration of the force with which he brought down the large hammer on a bar of red-hot iron, sending the sparks in wild confusion through the stithy, like so many fireworks, and what a delight it was to me—never to be forgotten—when he took my little arms in his brawny black hands and let me play at producing the same luminiferous effect. I do not know or did not reflect in those days that it was an operation used long ago by a sacred writer to exemplify the multitude of human troubles. The blacksmith was kind to me, and I think he was my first boyish hero. Certainly, if anyone had asked me in these days what was the profession that most satisfied my ambition next to the clerical (for I always put the clerical first, as being my father’s), I should have answered “the blacksmith’s.”’

A little afterwards in the same letter he says: ‘From there (i.e. from the blacksmith’s shop) to Kestercham every inch of the way is familiar to me. The tall late-flowering limes—I never knew why they were so late in flower, but they always were—the hedgerows in which it was my boyish pleasure to search for the clematis and the wild rose, or to whisk off the heads of the ox-eyed daisies for violating my father’s rule that flowers, like young ladies, ought not to be staring, the two trim high-gabled farmhouses, hardly distinguishable one from the other, between which the road passed (the daughter of one of the farmers in these houses was a teacher in the Kestercham Sunday school), then the cottages, straggling at first, but gradually becoming closer until you descend a steepish hill and come upon a gully where a torrent rushes across the road in the winter or even in the summer if it is unusually wet, and you go through the green gate where the path turns off the high road and leads to the vicarage. That green gate was a great feature in the life of the vicar’s family at Kestercham; it marked the boundary between the vicarage and the world, the world being the parish of Kestercham with its barely three hundred souls. A walk to the green gate was a regular incident of the day; my father and I took it always, even if we did not go farther, after breakfast. I think he must have taken that walk nearly five thousand times since we came to Kestercham. Perhaps a hundred yards or a little more before reaching the gate on the way from X——, if you lift your eyes, you may catch a distant glimpse of the church nestling sleepily among the elms (unless it is summer, and the foliage so thick as to spoil the view), or if the wind is from the south, and your ears are sharp, you may hear the cawing of the rooks from their immemorial home in the churchyard. No gun was ever pointed at those rooks, or at the old owl that lived in the venerable riven elm between the churchyard and the Grange; for Mr. Seaford, the farmer who occupied the Grange, protected the owl as being the enemy of the mice which infested his farm and stackyard, and the rooks were the traditional favourites of my father, who looked upon them as possessing a special right of sanctuary within the precincts of the church.’

The vicarage, as this letter shows, lies off the high-road, nearly half a mile away from it. You go through several fields of oats and barley (or perhaps of mangoldwurzel and turnips, if it is the turn for root crops), then through a hay-field, generally the last to be cut in the village, then past the church and the moated Grange, and finally a sharp turn in the road or lane brings you in sight of the single cadaverous-looking poplar by the vicarage gate. The house itself is invisible until you stand at the front door; it is literally embedded in the trees.

This was Gerald Eversley’s home; he had never known any other. A quiet, sober red brick house with a facing of flint-stones built into the rubble; two rooms on the ground floor, looking into the garden, one of them the drawing-room with its ample bay-window, the other the dining-room, though in Gerald’s mind it was associated with lessons as much as with meals; above these rooms two corresponding bedrooms, in one of which Mr. Eversley had slept ever since he became vicar of Kestercham; on the other side of the house, which extended some way backwards, other bedrooms above the kitchen and the morning-room (which was seldom used until the afternoon) and Mr. Eversley’s study. Just outside the front door a noble birchtree raised its branches high above the roof of the house: how those boughs would creak and whistle in the north wind! Gerald had often lain awake in the still hours of the night listening to the rhythm of their moaning and wondering how long it would be before one of them fell with a thunder-clap to the ground. In front of the doorway was an oval grass-plot with a flowerbed, containing a large cactus in the middle, and a gravel carriage drive encircling it; beyond, a level bowling-green carefully kept and overshadowed by firs. There had been trees at the far end of the bowling-green as well as at its sides when Mr. Eversley came to Kestercham; but they had been cut away so as to allow a clear view from the vicarage of the church and the meadows leading to Kestercham Green. For it is a peculiarity of Kestercham, rendering the life at the vicarage still more solitary than it would otherwise have been, that the church and the vicarage are removed by a long distance—a mile and a half, even if one takes the short cut across the fields—from the ordinary scenes of the village life. It would seem that the church was originally designed to subserve the spiritual needs of several hamlets (for it is fully as near to the confines of Ripenham or Coddington as it is to Kestercham Green) and that the vicarage was built in due proximity to the church. The result is that at Kestercham the spiritual centre—the church—and the secular centre—the public house—are as far divided locally as possible. There is not a human habitation near the vicarage or in sight of it except the Grange, and even that is not visible from the vicarage itself. The vicarage stands in a solitude which may be felt.

But to Mr. Eversley, and therefore, of course, to Gerald in his early days, the heart of Kestercham parish—the building to which it owed its unity and sanctity—was the church. Mr. Eversley, who had some slight knowledge of architecture, would delight in pointing out to his young son the traces of many hands and different ages in the structure of the church—the outline of the old Norman archway at the west end, the six (would be) decorated windows of the nave, the groined roofing in the chancel and the massive tower built in the reign of Henry VII. by Edward Rickling, then the head of the Rickling family who for many generations owned the manor of Kestercham and lived at the Grange—it was then called the Hall—before it passed into the hands of the Seafords. The Ricklings have left many marks of their importance upon the church, perhaps the most striking being a large monument on the north wall representing the same Edward Rickling laid out after his death, and his wife and three sons and two daughters weeping beside him. Nearly opposite to the memorial of the Rickling family is a monument in brass supposed (though nobody knows) to have borne the name of a certain Balthazar Gardereau, a French Huguenot and silk-merchant of Lyons who settled at Kestercham, when he had been driven out of his own country by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, acquired the great tithes of the living, and presented to the church the service of Communion plate which still exhibits the letters B. G. in monograph. But this is history, or it is legend, the best of which Kestercham is capable.

The Kestercham folk were not, it may be supposed, loyal to the Crown in the seventeenth century, or, as is more probable, they displayed no interest in politics or war, and so escaped the anger of Cromwell’s army which is said to have been once encamped somewhere in the neighbourhood; for there is a royal coat of arms of Charles I., with the date 1640, hanging in the church, and it can hardly be thought that the Roundheads, if they had caught sight of it, would have left it there. Mr. Eversley, as a loyalist and a believer in the divine right of kings, was very proud of it. The south porch of the church is or was a little remarkable; for under its gable was the figure of a flying angel bearing a scroll with the legend, ‘Gather my saints together unto me,’ the church being dedicated to All Saints. When Mr. Eversley came to Kestercham a tall cross rose behind the figure of the angel and surmounted the gable. Mr. Eversley left the angel, not without a qualm of conscience, but he caused the cross to be taken down at the same time as he removed all traces of a holy-water basin which some workmen in repairing the porch had brought to light.

Gerald Eversley’s earliest recollections were associated with Kestercham church. Twice every Sunday, in the morning and the afternoon, he accompanied his father thither. Its simple services impressed themselves upon his mind. They represented his ideal of public divine worship. In after days, when his thoughts and feelings had become liberalised, he was fond of dwelling with a certain irony upon some quaint prehistoric customs which lingered on at Kestercham. But these very customs seemed venerable to him as a boy. The church had no vestry, but a curtain (which Mr. Eversley himself provided, for before his time there had been none) hung in front of the belfry—if, indeed, it can be called a belfry, when there was only a single bell—and behind that curtain, underneath the tower of the church, Mr. Eversley would assume his surplice before the prayers, and would exchange it for his black gown before the sermon. He had a commanding air—so Gerald felt—as he slowly walked the length of the church, joining heartily in the hymn that was being sung. He did strange things, or things which would seem strange in more modern times, for he was exempt from the fear of criticism which affects the minds of men, and especially of clergymen, living in the eye of the world. The parishioners of Kestercham did not regard or read the newspapers; they did not care to inquire what other people said. Thus it was, for instance, that Mr. Eversley would pause in his sermon and address some poor woman whose infant exhibited signs of crying, saying kindly, ‘Never mind. Stay where you are. Better a screaming baby than an absent mother!’ So, too, he has been known, in passing up the church, to ask a parishioner about his health or his family. All this would seem odd nowadays, perhaps irreverent; but nobody thought it odd at Kestercham.

Mr. Eversley, ever since he was appointed vicar, had been troubled in mind by certain established and apparently immutable local practices, against which he waged war long and valiantly, but with less result than his courage and persistency deserved. For instance, it was a rule of the village, and had always been so within the memory of the oldest parishioner (though nobody justified it, nobody could tell how it had grown up), that the men and women, and the boys and girls too, should sit on opposite sides of the church. Whatever the origin of this ritualistic rule had been at Kestercham, it was certainly not ritualism. Mr. Eversley argued that husbands and wives should sit together; he preached upon the propriety of husbands and wives sitting together; he went so far as to call upon some members of his flock, and to beg that they would sit together. They assented, or seemed to assent; but on the next Sunday they were not in church, and on the Sunday after they were sitting on opposite sides. Nothing is so hard to change, in the country especially, as a thoroughly irrational custom; it is proof against all the resources of civilisation. The males and females of Kestercham had always, it was whispered, sat apart, and apart it seemed that they would always sit.

Another practice which greatly exercised Mr. Eversley’s mind was this. It was the habit of the farmers and labourers, or of a considerable number of them, to seat themselves in the church porch half an hour or more before the beginning of divine service, and, while sitting there, to discuss secular parochial affairs in strident tones, and sometimes to smoke, until the clerk ceased tolling the solitary bell, and Miss Seaford, the farmer’s daughter, began playing a hymn-tune, which served as a voluntary, upon the harmonium; then they would come into the church by two and two according to a rough but recognised order of precedence, all alike dressed in their best Sunday clothes, and would follow Mr. Eversley, like the mutes in procession at a funeral, up the church until they dropped into their various places on the south (or masculine) side of the church, the most important of the farmers sitting nearest to the chancel, and Mr. Seaford himself, in virtue of his churchwardenship, in a large pew immediately under the pulpit. It was rumoured that in Mr. Eversley’s early days at Kestercham two or three of the parishioners had been known to sit in the porch, enjoying the gossip, until he emerged in his surplice from behind the curtain, and then, instead of entering the church, had retired to meditate and smoke in the fields during the hours of divine service. But this must, I think, be a calumny. Nothing was more curious or characteristic of Kestercham, and nothing was a source of greater trouble to Mr. Eversley, than the extreme suspiciousness with which any stranger who might happen to enter the church while divine service was going on, was regarded by the whole congregation. The people of Kestercham had no idea of admitting casual or occasional worshippers to their church; they expected a person to worship there regularly or never. The unhappy visitor found himself the object of a hundred inquisitive and indignant eyes. He became conscious that he was an alien, a heretic, a Gentile, who had no right to set foot within the sanctuary. Not being a parishioner of Kestercham, he possessed no title to enjoy the spiritual privileges of that favoured locality. There might be vacant seats in half the pews, but nobody invited him to occupy one of them. It happened not seldom that Mr. Eversley himself, after making futile signs to the churchwarden who was staring at the interloper over his spectacles, would leave his reading-desk and escort the stranger to a seat in the vicarage pew, running the gauntlet, as he did so, of all the farmers who looked daggers at him for being so foolish or immoral as to encourage the presumption of trespassers upon the spiritual preserves of Kestercham parish.

It would be easy to multiply instances of the eccentricity or exclusiveness that prevailed in Kestercham during Gerald Eversley’s early days. But this chapter is long enough; it may fitly conclude with an extract taken from one of his own letters.

‘The place I loved best in Kestercham,’ he wrote once, ‘was the churchyard. The solemn stillness entranced me. I spent many hours there. I knew by heart most of the inscriptions on the gravestones, and I sometimes wondered, though I never dared to ask my father how it was, that the world, or the parish of Kestercham at least, had grown so much worse in the last few years; for the people buried in the churchyard seemed nearly all to have been virtuous and godly, and yet I often heard my father say in church that the people whom he knew and saw every day and got on with very well, were “miserable sinners,” and their hearts “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” But to me Kestercham churchyard was holy ground. My mother’s grave was there, under the yew tree by the chancel of the church. It was there that she had wished to be buried; the spot was so peaceful (she said) and the trees shaded it so beautifully except on the east side, where the morning rays fell upon it, and she would lie in the midst of her own people. Next to her grave is a space reserved for my father when he dies. Sometimes, when the grass was green above the dead, I would take a book and lie all the summer’s afternoon by the graveside, looking up to the blue heaven. I used to think I should be laid to rest there too. I cannot remember my mother; she died when I was born. All that I can think of her is fancy, imagination. It may be false, but I love the thought that it is true. For now and then, in the early morning, in the golden time between sleeping and waking, a vision comes to me of a sweet calm face, with wistful eyes looking far into the future. It is a vision only; it endures but a little while; then it vanishes, and I see it no more. But I awake, and it is as if I had beheld the face of my mother.’

CHAPTER III
FATHER AND SON

Mr. Eversley did not long remain a widower. He was, it may be supposed, one of those persons of warm hearts and transient affections who imagine that the sincerest compliment which can be paid to a wife who is dead is to marry another wife as soon as possible. He announced his approaching happiness to such of his people as he chanced to meet in his parochial visitations, by saying that he was going to ‘give his little boy another mother,’ Another mother! The words fell painfully upon Gerald’s ears at a later time when he had begun to make an idol of his own mother. Lying by her grave and gazing upwards to the heaven of heavens, he had dreamed of meeting her again. It had not occurred to him that she could be replaced.

Mr. Eversley’s habits were not much changed by his second marriage. He had never cared for society, but had lived much to himself. Visiting is always a serious matter in the country; it cannot be undertaken without a good deal of thought and trouble; it involves a long drive, and that is often difficult (as the readers of Miss Austen’s novels will remember) unless there is a moon, and even so the moon is not to be depended on. But Mr. Eversley at the time of his bereavement got out of the way of associating even with the neighbouring clergy. He seldom received a visit, seldom paid one. He devoted himself to his parish and to his son. They were his world—the only world that he thought of or cared about. For them he felt himself responsible to God; for all beyond the responsibility rested with others. Except when he helped the clergyman of an adjoining parish during illness or absence by taking an evening service after his own regular services at Kestercham, or attended (occasionally, but with decreasing regularity) the annual missionary meeting at X——, he hardly ever left his home. Once after an attack of bronchitis he was persuaded by medical advice to go to the seaside for a month in the hope of recruiting his health, but that was his one holiday between the death of his first wife and the beginning of Gerald’s schooldays at St. Anselm’s, and he was heartily glad when it was over. He was fond of describing himself as a ‘home bird.’ He disbelieved in the migratory tendencies of the age. That a rolling stone would gather no moss was one of his favourite proverbs. It did not, I think, occur to him that if the stone never moved at all, the crust of superincumbent moss might possibly in the lapse of years become excessive.

The second Mrs. Eversley did not alter his opinions or his practices, except accidentally by the introduction of an annual infant, and in one year of twins, into the household. She was not young when he sought her hand in marriage; her enemies might perhaps have called her middle-aged. He had become acquainted with her by correspondence in the prosecution of some charitable undertaking, when she had offered to collect money for an evangelical cause which he had at heart; then he had met her, and after a time he had married her. It could hardly be said that she seemed much nearer to him after the marriage than before it. Her affection was indifference with the chill taken off. But then the feelings of a man and a woman in respect of matrimony are not always the same. The man loves the person. The woman sometimes loves the state. The one desires to marry a particular woman, the other desires to be married.

It would require a skilful artist to paint the character of the second Mrs. Eversley. Whatever she did she did always from a sense of duty. Duty was the keynote of her life. It did not prevent her doing disagreeable things to other people; but it comforted her (not the other people) when she had done them. If it generally happened that her sense of duty coincided with her inclination, that was only what might naturally be expected in a universe ordered by Providence with due regard to the circumstances of the second Mrs. Eversley. Not that Mrs. Eversley ever looked upon her performance of duty as constituting a title to the divine favour; she knew that her righteousness (like other people’s) was no better than ‘filthy rags.’ She belonged to ‘the elect;’ other people, or nearly all other people, did not belong to ‘the elect,’ but to some other body. Mrs. Eversley’s principal horror was of ‘the world.’ She fought a hand-to-hand fight with that mysterious impersonation, which seems to be the sum total of all that a narrowly minded religious man or woman is unwilling that other people should do. If she spoke of a neighbour as ‘worldly,’ there was no hope for him or her. To save her own soul in the first instance, and in the second the souls of her husband and her family (Gerald being included by a sort of special compliment), and in the third, if the Electing Power were so gracious, the souls of the people of Kestercham, was (in Mrs. Eversley’s eyes) the lifework of Mrs. Eversley. It must not be said that her desire was hypocritical. The motives of human action are always hard to classify. They are generally mixed, partly good and partly bad. Two things only may be said to have been clear about Mrs. Eversley, one, that she was a good woman, the other, that she did not make goodness particularly attractive.

Being such as she was, and having been so for a greater number of years than she would perhaps have been willing to confess, it was not to be expected that she would draw Mr. Eversley out of his solitary, meditative mode of life. Apart from other reasons, there is in women, especially in such women as are married late in life, a specious selfishness which takes the form of keeping their husbands perpetually at their sides; but this selfishness appears to them so true a virtue that I have known a woman (who in the phraseology of religious society would have been called ‘a good woman’) take a positive pride in maiming and crippling the active beneficence of her husband’s life. If Mrs. Eversley had been asked why she kept her husband more and more within the confines of his own parish, she would have said that it was not for those who had been ‘converted’ to take a pleasure in the ‘beggarly elements’ of the world. But if anyone else had been asked, he would have said that the reason was—not perhaps wholly, but principally—that she liked to monopolise his society.

Certain it is, however, that Mr. Eversley, after his second marriage, was not less assiduous—he was, if possible, even more devoted than before—in the discharge of his regular parochial duties. Day succeeded day with easy welcome monotony. The morning, after prayers and breakfast, he would devote to reading and writing, or, as the years went on, to teaching Gerald, or sometimes to conversing with his parishioners upon subjects of general or local interest which to them were all-important; in the afternoon, wet or fine, he would visit his people, striding along the road with Gerald at his side; the evening was again a time of study, except on Sundays when Mr. Eversley read aloud a Sunday book or expounded a passage of the Bible. The people of Kestercham felt an affection not unmingled with awe for his tall figure, associated as it was, or would be, with the solemn incidents of their history—baptism, public worship, marriage, sickness, death; one old lady seeing him set out on a snowy evening wrapped in his long Inverness cape remarked that he ‘looked like a warrior.’ But there was not a case of distress or suffering that he did not seek to relieve, nor was he ever weary in his efforts to reclaim and reform those who in the dark theology of his household were known as ‘vessels of wrath.’ It might be thought that his treatment of spiritual and moral evils erred a little in the way of uniformity; he dealt with them all alike, believing, as he used himself to say, that there was ‘one Gospel for all, rich and poor, bond and free,’ and one sole remedy provided by that Gospel for all the varied ills of sorrow-stricken humanity. But it had been well for the Church of England if all her ministers had been as devoted as Mr. Eversley. He won from church-people and dissenters alike the respect which is due to a consistent and God-fearing character. Gerald in all his early years could conceive no idea of a higher or more beneficent life than his father’s. It was his hope, his ambition, to follow in his father’s steps, though he looked forward to finding as much difficulty in keeping pace with those steps in after life as he now found in keeping pace with them in his parochial rounds. He was generally, almost invariably, his father’s companion in visiting his people. As a rule, when Mr. Eversley entered a cottage to bring solace to the distressed or exhortation to the erring, he would leave Gerald outside; but now and then—if the sickness was of a touching kind—Mr. Eversley would take him in, on the principle that it was not good for any Christian soul, however young, to live in ignorance of the dark or painful side of life.

‘I don’t want you, Gerald,’ he would say, ‘to think life is all sunshine; it is often dark, my dear boy, and full of sadness, but to the Christian conscience the shadows, no less than the sunshine, attest the presence of the Sun.’

Mr. Eversley’s manner of visiting his sick people was simple. He generally began with some reference to the sufferer’s health, or family, or worldly circumstances; he showed much kindness in inquiring about them; then he offered prayer, or, in the current phrase of the village, ‘engaged in prayer,’ kneeling reverently by the bedside; then he opened his well-worn Bible and read a Psalm—the 90th and the 103rd were, I know, his favourites—interspersing it with comments, or a passage of the Gospel, most frequently of St. John, and when he had done reading, and perhaps had given some slight pecuniary relief, if it were needed, he took his leave with a divine benediction, solemnly spoken. ‘Always end with the pure word of God’—that was his rule—‘it leaves a taste in the mouth, maybe a savour of life unto life.’

One strange feature of Mr. Eversley’s parochial visitation Gerald seems to have remembered with interest; for I find it recorded long afterwards in one of his letters. ‘It was characteristic,’ he says, ‘of my father, who was a man of very few words, that the observations which he addressed to a sick person were often punctuated by long pauses. I have known him sit for as long a time as five minutes in a sick-room, saying nothing, and without a word being said by anybody. Such silence would seem intolerable. But as between him and his parishioners it did not excite any feeling of constraint. I have sometimes wondered in later days how they could endure it. It appeared that they liked it. There was a subtle sense of sympathy between him and them; he felt for them, and they realised that he felt for them; there was no need to put the feeling into words. I have noticed that lovers in the country will walk for a long time on a summer’s afternoon, hand in hand, but not speaking a word, only conscious of each other’s affection, and delighting in it; that is what was called “keeping company” at Kestercham. Consecutive speech, which is so easy to the cultivated, is to the ignorant an effort or a pain. My father’s parishioners did not always take in the meaning of such words as he used in speaking or reading to them; one old labourer, to whom he had read the fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, I have heard repeating over and over the words, “Arise, let us go hence,” as if they were full of comfort to his soul. The parishioners did not need that my father should sustain a conversation with them, it was enough that he was at their side in the dark hours; they were sure of his sympathy, and content with it.’

Living such a life in such surroundings, and feeling Kestercham to be his one world, and the world of all whom he knew, Gerald Eversley would, perhaps, have called his life dull if he had realised the possibility of any other life. But his glimpses of the outer world were few and far between. He had no companions of his own age; for there was not a gentleman’s family in Kestercham, and the few young children in the farmhouses were such that Mrs. Eversley, who prided herself (so far as she would admit the possibility of pride) upon the uncontaminated gentility of her birth, would not hear of his associating with them, except upon terms of distance and superiority. She was sorely afraid of his losing his ‘gentlemanlike’ manners and sinking to the level of ‘common people.’ For Mrs. Eversley was haunted by a singular dread of any person or any thing that could be called ‘common.’ Whether she imagined herself to be the model of distinction it is difficult to say; but she certainly thought she was the antithesis of what was ‘common.’ The scriptural direction to ‘call nothing common or unclean’ was not interpreted by Mrs. Eversley as having any relation to her own view of her neighbours. Mr. Eversley, in one of his rare humorous sallies, told her once that he could not help doubting if, in her heart, she really approved the Book of Common Prayer. Mrs. Eversley possessed a wonderful scent for the faintest suspicion of ‘commonness’ in friend or foe. To dissenters she was radically hostile, not only because they were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,’ or because a godly dissenting minister resident in one of the neighbouring parishes had the impudence (as she regarded it) to institute open-air services in the summer months on Kestercham Green, but chiefly because they were so ‘common.’ It was a ground of self-complacency in her mind, nor did she feel it to be in any sense unchristian, that at a meeting in behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society she had refused to shake hands with a dissenting minister. He was a worthy little man—Mrs. Eversley did not deny that—he had laboured for a great many years in a quiet way on a miserable pittance among the scattered members of his flock in Kestercham and some half-dozen villages lying around, but nevertheless, in Mrs. Eversley’s eyes, he was a spiritual poacher, against whom she would, if she could, have invoked the protection and the penal severity of a whole code of spiritual game-laws; and, above all, he was so ‘common.’ So the unhappy minister was doomed to forego the privilege of grasping Mrs. Eversley’s hand. It was not known that he ever spoke of this denial, but probably he felt it, and it did not make him love the Church.

The visitors were few who came to Kestercham vicarage in Gerald’s early days. Some cousins, boys and girls, the children of Mr. Eversley’s only surviving sister, who had married a well-to-do stationer—a union which excited something like a qualm in Mrs. Eversley, as the stationer’s deportment, especially his manner of drinking his tea, was not altogether above suspicion—two or three maiden ladies, friends of Mrs. Eversley before her marriage, and, like her, interested in ‘good works,’ so that, when they arrived, she was generally closeted with them for some hours every day, and the room in which their conference had been held was found to be strewn with a débris of calico and tracts; and now and again a college friend of Mr. Eversley, who was always a clergyman, and nearly always preached two sermons for a Missionary Society. Gerald did not take much notice of these guests, except of the clergymen, who left on his mind the impression that clergymen were all grave and tall, and had long beards, and spoke in rather loud nasal tones, wore white neckcloths and stiff collars which must have caused them a great deal of chin-agony, and rejoiced in an almost exclusive, but quite indubitable, possession of a mysterious and all-important commodity called ‘the truth.’ When they were gone, he used to reflect with mingled feelings that some day he would be such a person himself.

Mrs. Eversley’s relation to her stepson, though eminently proper and conventional, was, it may be supposed, not marked by any undue display of warmth. Not one stepmother in a hundred can enter into solemn feelings of the past without intruding upon them. Mrs. Eversley did her duty, or what she conceived to be her duty, by Gerald. She looked after his meals, his clothes, and his prayers; but, for the most part, she left him alone. It was impossible that sympathy should exist between them, for during her early married life she was much occupied with ‘good works,’ and afterwards with the care of her children—an office which by ladies of her disposition is generally distinguished from ‘good works.’ She was not what would be called a good mother; she was a good stepmother, and a good stepmother is, I am afraid, a bad thing. At all events, Mrs. Eversley’s influence upon Gerald’s life was essentially refrigerating and depressing. But she did her duty, and she said she did it.

The result of all these circumstances—the isolation of life at Kestercham, the lack of domestic sympathy, the limitation of experience—was to throw Gerald more and more into the society of his father. They lived not two lives but one. They had few thoughts apart. The father came more and more to treat his son as his equal in years and worldly knowledge, asking his counsel, or seeming to ask it, upon a hundred little matters of parochial interest which it was impossible for a boy of eleven or twelve years to understand. The son looked upon his father as a friend; he had no secrets from him as so many boys have in early boyhood from their fathers: he talked to him freely, laid his soul bare before him, and invited, nay, entreated him, to scan it. For instance, it was taken as the most natural thing in the world that, if a letter came for Gerald—he was not the recipient of many letters—Mr. Eversley should open and read it. It may be that this perfect intimacy of father and son is hardly attainable except where circumstances create an isolation around them. They knew so much of each other because they knew so little of anyone or anything besides. It is possible at Kestercham, it is not possible in London, but wherever it occurs it is precious and beautiful. Mr. Eversley lived for Gerald, lived in him. Of him, if of any living father, it might be said in the sacred words, ‘His life is bound up in the lad’s life.’ He was a stern man, one of those men who veil intensity of feeling beneath an austere and unemotional exterior; but once when Gerald was lying ill of fever and it was thought that he would die, Mr. Eversley’s passion of grief was terrible. He said nothing, but his face in the morning was like the face of one who had passed the night in weeping, and the servants, who had lain awake in the room above him, said that at every hour they had heard his voice ascending in prayer.

Great as had always been the interest which Mr. Eversley displayed in Gerald’s every action and every thought, it was increased as he became aware that his son possessed unusual intellectual powers. He was so little a man of the world that he had never thought of comparing Gerald with other boys, until one day the Rural Dean, whose annual inspection of the church and the church property was a great occasion, having found him reading Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates’ in a corner of his father’s study, and having questioned him upon it, remarked, ‘That’s a very clever boy of yours, Eversley; why don’t you run him for a scholarship somewhere?’

Gerald was now nearly twelve, and he had gained a good deal of rather curious knowledge. He had read much with his father, and more by himself. The books in Mr. Eversley’s library, some of them heirlooms bearing ancient dates, were familiar to him. One advantage too he enjoyed which many boys lack. It had been his father’s practice, when walking with him around the parish, to impart such information as was possible about the natural world. Thus, Mr. Eversley, who was a fair botanist, had taught him the names of all the common wild flowers and the principles of botanical classification. Mr. Eversley was no devotee of natural science, he had rather a distrust of it as tending to infidelity, but he thought the flowers harmless. He had taught him too the names and positions of the stars and something about the illustrious men who had been the founders of modern astronomy, but hardly ever without alluding to the famous epitaph written by Copernicus for his own tomb, or perhaps by another in his honour; and Mr. Eversley, with his scholarly instinct, would point out that the false quantities in the epitaph, much as they were to be regretted in speaking of so great a man, did not affect the true evangelical character of the theology.

Gerald, then, was different from most other boys and knew more than they did, but neither his father nor he had as yet thought of the time when his education could not be carried on at Kestercham. Thus it was that the casual remark of the Rural Dean came upon them as a revelation. Rural Deans are important personages in places like Kestercham; their words are as weighty (and sometimes perhaps as ambiguous) as oracles, and the compliment paid by the Rural Dean to Gerald’s ability opened a vista of splendid possibilities before the eyes of Mr. Eversley. He set about cultivating his son’s powers with a new zest. They read together for some hours every day the old classics, Cæsar, Virgil, Herodotus, Sophocles, which gained for Mr. Eversley himself a new and living interest by the rapid interchange of question and answer, and above all Homer, the unfailing well of delight to youthful minds. It was no less a surprise than a happiness to Mr. Eversley to observe with what keenness of appreciative sympathy Gerald entered into the wonderful story of the Odyssey, that story which is to the intellect of every schoolboy what the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ is or should be to his spirit. Mr. Eversley was a believer in Latin versification, not on any theoretical ground, but as somehow creating the indefinable distinction of a ‘gentleman.’ So Gerald, like many another boy, wrote Latin verses, and wrote them better than most boys. Mr. Eversley was a good scholar, but in mathematics he was not proficient, though he succeeded in teaching his son arithmetic and a good part of algebra, and three books of Euclid. Modern languages were not taught in Kestercham vicarage. It came to be understood that Gerald was to compete, in his fourteenth year, for a scholarship at some public school. What the school should be was long debated, as Mr. Eversley, who had not been at any public school, discovered some pecuniary, or social, or theological objection to nearly all of them; but at last the rich relation of Mr. Eversley’s first wife, who has been already mentioned, not only recommended St. Anselm’s, his own old school, but generously offered, if Gerald was successful there, to defray the necessary expenses of his education, having unfortunately no son of his own. Mr. Eversley took this offer as a providential leading. He accepted it gratefully. It was decided that Gerald should aspire to become a scholar of St. Anselm’s. But how many doubts arose in Mr. Eversley’s mind, as soon as the decision was made, and kept him awake during long hours of the night! Would Gerald succeed in winning a scholarship? and would the success, if it were given him, afford him happiness—the divine happiness which alone in Mr. Eversley’s eyes was worth possessing? Would he learn extravagant ways, above his proper station in life? Above all, would he lose the simplicity, the uprightness, the pure and cloudless faith of his old days at Kestercham? These were not light questions to Mr. Eversley. He debated them anxiously, prayerfully. Eager as he was for the scholarship, it is but just to say that he would unhesitatingly have cast away the hope or thought of it could he have foreseen that it would create a coldness or severance of heart between the son who was so dear to him and himself.

At the time of the examination Mr. Eversley himself took Gerald to St. Anselm’s. The occasion was so special that it seemed to demand a breaking up of Mr. Eversley’s established way of life. They could not get rooms in the little hotel at St. Anselm’s, but were quartered in the village over a saddler’s shop. Gerald had never seen so many boys before, he was bewildered by the sight of them; he had not thought there could be so many boys of his own age in the world. The examination papers frightened him. The examiners, dressed in cap and gown, astonished him. He did his best but the other boys looked so clever and talked so knowingly that he felt sure he should be nowhere.

How slowly the two days passed after the examination was over before the result was known! It was to be announced on Friday evening at seven o’clock. Gerald spent the days at home. So great was Mr. Eversley’s own excitement, as the fateful hour drew near, that he had arranged for a telegram to be sent at once to Wickeston, the postal town nearest to Kestercham, and a special messenger to be despatched with it from Wickeston—a distance of four miles—to Kestercham. He did not tell Gerald of the expected telegram, fearing it might not arrive owing to some mistake. It arrived between nine and ten o’clock. Gerald had gone to bed. Mr. Eversley went up to his room, the telegram in his hand, and opened the door gently. Gerald was asleep. The expression on his face was a little anxious, even in sleep. Mr. Eversley stood over him for several minutes, uncertain whether to wake him or not. At last he resolved to leave him in his peaceful slumber, and turning away he retired to his study and humbly rendered thanks to God. Nor did he omit to pray that the event which seemed so happy might in its issue prove a blessing for his son and for himself.

Early next morning Gerald awoke. He became conscious that a face was bending over him. He muttered wearily, ‘Oh! this dreadful day! When shall we hear?’

‘It is all well, my dear boy,’ said his father’s voice. ‘You are elected; you are third.’

And the father and son embraced each other.

Kestercham vicarage was a scene of rejoicing that day, and for many days afterwards. Even Mrs. Eversley’s heart warmed towards the boy who had conferred distinction upon her name and household, and she caused a large birthday cake to be made for tea-time. The neighbours, lay and clerical, who had never taken much notice of Gerald before, called to congratulate Mr. Eversley, not a few of them, especially the ladies, declaring that they had always discerned conspicuous classical ability in his son, and predicted his success. Gerald’s scholarship was the topic of general conversation in the porch of the church before the morning service on the following Sunday, not that the farmers and labourers who forgathered there knew anything—good honest souls!—about scholarships, but they had a vague idea that the vicar’s clever son had somehow passed into a higher sphere than their own; and two or three, as a sort of delegation, went behind the curtain after the service to wish Mr. Eversley (who was just taking off his black gown) joy of the event.

‘Oh! Master Gerald,’ said Mr. Seaford, who, when Gerald was very small, had often let him put his little legs astride of the big cart-horses as they drew the heavily laden wains into the stackyard under the bright harvest moon, ‘ye’ll be too great a man to sit astride o’ my Captain any more; it’s ye who’ll have to give us a lift now!’ and with that he laughed a hearty laugh, and put out his hand to Mr. Eversley who clasped it warmly.

Everyone was glad, everyone admitted that no such honour had been done to Kestercham since the First Lord of the Admiralty, who was staying at Wickeston Manor, had walked over some eight years ago to the afternoon service in Kestercham church; everyone felt himself or herself to be somehow involved in the halo of glory surrounding the name of Kestercham.

At family prayers that night Mr. Eversley gave thanks in grave tones, his voice trembling with emotion, for ‘the light which has to-day shone upon this household,’ imploring that it might be a light which should ‘shine more and more unto the perfect day.’

When prayers were over and Gerald was going to bed, his father said feelingly, ‘God bless and keep you, my dear boy! This has been indeed a happy day.’

Gerald replied with simple truthfulness, ‘I am so glad, papa, for your sake.’

Mr. Eversley stooped down and kissed him; his heart was too full for speech.

What need to tell of the preparations for school-life; the stir and bustle of the house, the fitting on of clothes (the tailor being deaf, and the interviews with him being in consequence long and vociferous), the packing and unpacking and packing again, the anticipations, the promises of letters, the thousand and one things that need to be done, and yet seem always to leave the most important things undone after all?

At last the eve of Gerald’s departure came. Then the excitement gave way to anxiety. Most parents are anxious when they are sending their boys to school for the first time. Mr. Eversley, so inexperienced as he was in the world, felt the enhanced anxiety which is the outcome of ignorance. Who would not be anxious, for himself or for others, if he could foresee the trials, disappointments, sorrows, victories, of the coming days?

Mr. Eversley was even graver than usual that night. He took Gerald into his study, and talked to him earnestly and long. His was not the counsel of a man of the world reviewing the experiences of his own life. It was the counsel of a man of God looking with prophetic vision upon a society in which the Divine Name is or may be dishonoured. His concluding sentences lingered long in Gerald’s mind. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘you are going now into the world of school. I never knew it myself, but I know it is perilous. I cannot help you except by prayer. I shall pray for you every night and morning—at other times too. But pray for yourself. Fear God. Don’t fear man or boy. Remember that right is right, if there is only one soul that believes in it. Never let the devil get the thin end of the wedge in. Principiis obsta. I can say no more to you. The path of heaven is not easy. The way is narrow, the gate is strait. Oh! Gerald, my dear boy, be true to Christ.’

Then the father and the son knelt down side by side.

Mr. Eversley said no more about the future until he parted from his son, as has been said, on the platform of St. Anselm’s.

CHAPTER IV
FIRST EXPERIENCES

There was once a certain person called Procrustes who is said, in his reception of his visitors, to have adopted a simple and uniform procedure. He invited or compelled each one of them to pass a night in his house. He offered each a bed. He offered them all the same bed; he insisted upon their occupying it. It was a bed so constructed as to suit a man of mediocre size and stature. If any guest of Procrustes was too long for the bed, the superfluity of his limbs was lopped off. If any one was too short, his limbs were stretched to the proper length. It was only the guest whose stature exactly corresponded to the dimensions of the bed that escaped without mutilation.

The modern bed of Procrustes is or was a public school. Nowhere in the world is there so keen an appreciation of those who adapt themselves to local tone, temper, and custom. But nowhere is departure, however slight, from the recognised standard of propriety, visited with consequences so unfailing. The society of a public school is a world in itself, self-centred, self-satisfied. It takes but slight account of the principles and practices which obtain in the world of men. It has its own laws, its own fashions, its own accepted code of morals. To these all persons must submit, or the penalty of resistance is heavy. Its virtues are not altogether those of men and women, nor are its vices. Some actions of which the world thinks comparatively little, it honours with profound admiration. To others, which the world thinks much of, it is indifferent. Mere physical courage, for instance, is esteemed too highly. Self-repression is depreciated. Hypocrisy is loathed. But the inverted hypocrisy—the homage which virtue pays to vice—or, in other words, the affectation of being worse than one really is, is common among boys and is thought to be honourable. Truth, again, is not esteemed as a virtue of universal application, but is relative to particular persons, a falsehood, if told to a schoolfellow, being worse than if told to a master. Nobody can be intimate with a community of schoolboys and not feel that a morality so absolute, yet so narrow, and in some ways so perverted, bears a certain resemblance to the morality of a savage tribe. It is rather the germ of morals than morality itself.

It is true that the general softening of manners, which is the one clear gain that the world seems to make as it grows older, has in some degree affected even schoolboys. Public school life is not what it was in the days of ‘Tom Brown.’ Thirty years ago, at the epoch of this story, a boy who entered a public school was sure to suffer a certain number of annoyances, if not of positive hardships. To-day, it is probable that the only boys who are actual sufferers are those shy, delicate, sensitive creatures who do not understand the rough give-and-take of life, who imagine injuries and brood upon them, who have no sense of humour nor any such companionableness as is necessary in a society of human beings. Public school life is milder than it was. The sum of happiness in it is increasing, the sum of misery is diminishing or disappearing. But this story relates to thirty years ago; things were rougher then than they are now. Still it is not difficult even now to discuss the traces of what may be called the uncivilised or unsoftened spirit in public school life. It is seen in the homage paid among public school boys to physical faculties and performances. Of the achievements of the intellect, if they stand alone, public school opinion is still, as it has always been, slightly contemptuous. But strength, speed, athletic skill, quickness of eye and hand, still command universal applause among schoolboys as among savages.

It is this uncivilised character of the young which accounts for the lack of sympathy—nay, the positive indignation and contempt—with which they regard anything like eccentricity or individualism. Science teaches that the progress of the species depends upon the preservation and improvement of varieties. Perhaps the reason why schools have made so little progress is that they have never encouraged variation, but have suppressed it. The bed of Procrustes is not favourable to varieties. Individualism among the young is looked upon as a form of conceit. Far stricter, and enforced by far more terrible penalties than the rules which masters make for boys, are the rules which boys make for themselves and for each other. Woe to him who consciously or unconsciously transgresses them! Their absurdity is itself the measure of their severity. It is not long since a mother, walking with her boy through the muddy streets of St. Anselm’s after a thaw in mid-winter, suggested to him that it would be a good thing to turn up his trousers at the bottom, and he told her with a biting scorn (which was provoked not by the rule but by her ignorance in needing to be informed of it), that the turning up of trousers was a privilege reserved to the select mysterious beings who are known as ‘swells.’

A public school, then, is the home of the commonplace. It is there that mediocrity sits upon her throne. There the spirit which conforms to custom is lauded to the skies. There the spirit which is independent and original is apt to be crushed. And yet to these public schools of England come boys of all sorts, conditions and characters, strong boys, delicate boys, rough boys, impudent boys, sensitive boys, unhappy boys, boys who have many friends, boys who have no friends, boys who are capable of fighting their way against odds, and boys to whom every harsh or inconsiderate word is a pang; they are all sent without discrimination to live as they may, and to shape their own characters or the characters of others by the simple primitive process of rubbing down inequalities through constant friction. Parents and schoolmasters often assume that the English system of public school life is suited to all boys, and that, if boys dislike it, it is all the better for them. It is forgotten how many boys of highest temper and keenest feeling have derived not benefit but injury from their school. There is no reason to deny that the public school system is good for the majority of boys. But it has its victims. How often has it happened that the boys, whose names have in after life been the glory and pride of their schools, have been ignored, depreciated, persecuted in their school lives! It is not needless—it cannot be wrong—to plead for a kindly sympathetic forbearance from masters and boys, yes, from masters as much as from boys, towards the stricken, suffering, despised members of the flock. For of these was Gerald Eversley.

It will, perhaps, be thought that the masters of a public school, as being presumably men of wisdom and experience, should correct the sympathies and prejudices of their pupils. But to think so is to exaggerate the power of masters. Masters have less influence upon a school than is sometimes supposed, perhaps than they themselves suppose. They do not always create public opinion, and often they follow it. They take their tone from the boys, as well as the boys from them. Sometimes they admire the boys whom the boys themselves admire; they ignore those whom the boys ignore. It is only here and there that a master has the courage and the self-denial to leave the popular, pleasant, responsive boys to themselves and seek those who are destitute and out of the way. There are masters who do this, and they deserve great credit for it. But too often masters waste their favours upon those who do not need them, and the misunderstood boys whom their schoolfellows neglect are equally neglected by their masters.

Mr. Brandiston, in whose house Gerald Eversley had been placed, was what is sometimes called ‘a master of the old school.’ It does not exactly appear what is the meaning of the phrase, though it may be presumed that the master, who is so described, does not altogether belong to the present school of masters. He was a tall and handsome man; in youth he must have been very handsome. Even now, when his hair was silvered and his figure a little bent, it would have been difficult to pass him without tacitly complimenting him on his appearance. He had held a boarding house at St. Anselm’s for over twenty years. It was a very popular house, and if Mr. Brandiston had a weakness, it lay in his belief that all the virtue and all the distinction of the school were centred in that one house. That a considerable part of the virtue and distinction were centred in it was undeniable. Mr. Brandiston’s critics (who were rather numerous) were wont to say of him that he did not care for any boy who was not either an aristocrat or a scholar. He would have admitted a weakness or predilection for scholars, but he would have said that the aristocrats came to his house of themselves. At all events they came. Mr. Brandiston was so upright a man that his word, especially in regard to his own house, deserved to be accepted unhesitatingly. There was only one reason—and it might not occur to everybody—for harbouring a suspicion that he would perhaps not altogether shrink from a purely accidental connection with the aristocracy. Mr. Brandiston was in politics a Radical.

But there can be no doubt that the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house were proud of their house and of him. The conversation which Gerald Eversley heard on the first night of his school life exhibited that pride. If Mr. Brandiston’s boys found fault occasionally with him themselves, they never suffered a boy who was in any other house to find fault with him. It was the general fashion of the house to assume that its traditions and its methods were the best possible. This fashion the boys derived from Mr. Brandiston. They went so far as to maintain that the food provided by Mrs. Brandiston was superior to the food provided elsewhere. It was not so, and boys are critical of their food, however excellent it may be; but loyalty to the house and to Mr. Brandiston forbade the admission that other boys ate as good bread and butter as his. A master who excites this kind of loyalty is not an unsuccessful schoolmaster.

Mr. Brandiston excited loyalty by two qualities. One was a certain bluff straightforwardness of manner; to use the boys’ phrase, ‘there was no humbug about old Brandiston.’ Boys do not mind bluffness, roughness, or even gruffness of manner; what they hate is humbug. And they are apt to assume that anyone whose manner is at all effusive or demonstrative is a humbug. They do not, as a rule, themselves indulge in forcible eulogistic expressions; ‘not bad’ is one of their strongest forms of eulogy. It is somewhat curious that boys, whose expressions of censure or condemnation are so vehement, should be so moderate in their expressions of approval. But so it is, and they are often distrustful of anyone whose words or actions go beyond their own usual practice. But Mr. Brandiston was admitted to be as good as his word.

And he was just. Boys admire justice, and Mr. Brandiston was just. It may be that he plumed himself a little upon his justice. If so, the boys were not unwilling to forgive him. Boys despise weakness, and are wholly unmerciful in taking advantage of it. But they do not resent severity, so long as it is impartial. They are strangely impatient of undeserved punishment, forgetting how often they escape punishment which is richly deserved; but if they have done wrong, and are fairly detected in doing wrong, they do not mind being punished, they expect punishment, and rather like it.

One point in Mr. Brandiston’s favour it would be unfair to pass over. It is that he was generally called ‘old Brandiston.’ The epithet ‘old’ is apt to be taken as descriptive of age. It may denote age, but it may denote something quite different. There are some persons who in the vocabulary of boys are always ‘old,’ and always were ‘old.’ They are persons varying in age, character, and experience. But I do not recall any instance of a man or boy being known in a school as ‘old,’ if he was permanently unpopular among the boys. Mr. Brandiston was just, and he was called ‘old Brandiston.’ More fortunate than Aristides in the ancient story, he did not forfeit his popularity by his justice.

Mr. Brandiston, or ‘old Brandiston,’ if for once it may be permitted to call him so, took a definite and precise view of the duties of school life. His formality of view was rather like his formal manner of going round his house at night. He held that boys ought to work and ought to play. If a boy both worked well and played well, he set him on a pedestal in his affections. If he either worked well or played well, he regarded him as a not unworthy member of his house. But if a boy was not distinguished in work or in play, it was Mr. Brandiston’s opinion that he ought to have gone to some other house. Yet even this is not a complete exposition of Mr. Brandiston’s educational theory. For he expected his athletes to work with sufficient assiduity to obtain respectable places in the school, and he expected his scholars to follow the regular recognised lines of public school education. He had no idea of any athletes who were not cricketers or football players. He had no idea of any scholars who were not good at Latin and Greek, or at mathematics; he was sometimes suspected of not setting much store even by mathematics. It would have been as disagreeable to him that any of his pupils should achieve distinction in Chemistry or German as that they should achieve it at hoops or marbles. He was a worshipper of the mens sana in corpore sano. The thing which he disliked most cordially was ‘loafing;’ but under ‘loafing’ he included not only idling about the street or lolling in the confectioners’ shops, but the irregular studious habits of boys who sat reading books in their rooms or in the library, instead of taking part in the games.

Such being Mr. Brandiston’s theory of school life, it is easy to imagine what sort of language he would address to his two pupils, Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley, when they were successively called into his study on the morning after the first night which they had spent as schoolfellows and companions in the same room. He had purposely placed them together, not so much from the love of paradox as on principle, because it was a fixed article of his belief that boys of widely different characters and antecedents, by being placed together, did each other good, rubbing off angles (as he said), the shy scholar becoming more a man of the world, and the athletic aristocrat imbibing a qualified love of learning.

To Harry Venniker, who entered the study with his usual sunny smile, Mr. Brandiston expressed the hope that his mother, whose delicacy he had heard of, was better; he alluded to his father and other members of his family who had been at St. Anselm’s; then he added: ‘I dare say you will soon make friends, or find them ready made in the house. I shall expect you to work and get up the school, for the credit of the house. I hear you are a good cricketer, a lefthand bowler; is that true?’

Harry said ‘Yes, sir, I bowl a little,’ with a flush of pleasure mantling upon his cheek.

Well, you must get into the Eleven,’ continued Mr. Brandiston, ‘and I shall look to you to win the great match.’

It was in a different spirit, timid and trembling, that Gerald Eversley entered the study. A tête-à-tête with his house master was to him like the ancient ordeal of fire or water. He did not venture to lift his eyes from the floor until he heard Mr. Brandiston say kindly:

‘Well, Eversley, and how do you like St. Anselm’s?’ A pause. ‘But it is too early to ask that yet. Rather strange, is it not? You have not finished unpacking yet, I see,’ looking, as he spoke, at Gerald’s neck and chin, so Gerald thought. ‘Your father tells me you have not been at school before. All the more credit to you,’ he added, seeing the boy’s look of pain, ‘to have won a scholarship straight from home. You must try for some of the classical prizes soon. I hope you will do the house credit. I shall expect you to be captain of the school some day. Now you may go and get your books from Arkwright’s.’

Harry Venniker, who had been waiting for his companion in the passage outside the study, prevented the possibility of any remark that Gerald might have wished to make by his rapid questions. ‘What did you think of him? Not a bad sort, is he? He asked me if I wasn’t a bowler, and told me he hoped I should get into the Eleven. What did he say to you?’

It was not necessary for Gerald to reply to the question respecting his opinion of his house master, for Harry ran on with his sentences like a mountain-stream flowing over the pebbles in its bed but not delayed by them; but he thought of Mr. Brandiston as the incarnation of law and order and felt disposed to worship him accordingly.

They went off to Arkwright’s, the bookseller’s shop.

‘I say, Arbuthnot,’ cried a little red-haired boy named Thornton, who had been watching the two new boys as they rounded the corner of the passage leading from the boys’ entrance of the boarding house into the street, ‘here’s a new chap come who has got “stick-ups” and a jacket.’

Thornton, as having been exactly one term in the school, had arrogated to himself the position of an authority upon scholastic etiquette. Seniority soon confers authority at a public school. It may be necessary to explain that the social solecism of which Gerald Eversley was thus pronounced to be guilty consisted in wearing the ‘stick-up’ collars which are at St. Anselm’s the traditional accompaniments of a tailcoat, instead of the smooth flat-lying collars—sometimes known as the Eton collars—with a jacket. His costume had thus become a curious blending of the dress of the senior and the junior boys at St. Anselm’s. It offended the sentiments of both classes of boys.

Arbuthnot opened his eyes in astonishment. It seemed impossible to believe that any boy, however ‘green,’ would be ignorant of the immemorial laws of dress at St. Anselm’s.

‘No,’ he said; ‘that’s too rich.’

‘I swear he is though,’ was Thornton’s reply; ‘he’s just come out of Brandiston’s study. I wonder what the old ’un said to him.’

The impeachment of Gerald Eversley’s costume was unfortunately true. Mr. Eversley, knowing nothing of public schools, had not imagined that it could matter what kind of collars a boy in jackets might wear.

‘Well, he must be a “green,”’ said Arbuthnot.

‘I believe you,’ answered Thornton. ‘I took a wink at him this morning in Hall, and, my eye, if he hadn’t been blubbing all night! We’ll have some fun out of him when the fag-spotting’s over.’

It was the humane and merciful rule of Mr. Brandiston’s house that a new boy might not be molested or persecuted by impertinent interrogations until twenty-four hours after his entering the house. The reason of it was that on the evening of the second day of the term all the boys liable to fagging (including, of course, all the new boys) were divided by a long-established principle of selection among the Sixth Form, and after that time, but not before, a new boy was felt to possess a natural patron or protector, and therefore to be a legitimate victim for the shafts of his natural enemies.

The ceremony of choosing the fags, or, as it was technically designated, ‘fag-spotting,’ deserves something more than a passing notice. It was a strange and almost barbarous ceremony. In some respects the nearest parallel to it may be said to have been the sale of slave girls in the market at Constantinople. The fags, or rather the boys liable to fagging, were marshalled after supper at one end of the Hall, and the Sixth Form boys stood at the other. Between them, seated at the different tables and turning their faces now to one end of the Hall and now to the other, according as they were interested in the deliberations of the Sixth Form or in the behaviour of the various candidates for their favour, were the mass of boys in the house, who had risen, by seniority or by position in the school, above the obligation of fagging, but were still below, and some of them much below, the dignity of the Sixth Form who were alone entitled to choose or ‘spot’ fags. These boys constituted what may perhaps be called a neutral or buffer state between the fagmasters and their fags. The Sixth Form boys chose fags in turn according to an order of precedence which depended upon their rank in the school, and the choice might be made either by calling a boy’s name, or, if his name were not known, by walking up to him and laying a hand upon his shoulder. When every Sixth Form boy had chosen a fag, the choice began over again, and so continued until the number of the fags was exhausted, every one of them having now received his fagmaster. It was open to any Sixth Form boy to inspect these candidates (if they may be so called) for the privilege of waiting upon him, for cleanliness was a recommendation in a fag as well as attractiveness of appearance or alacrity, and it would happen not unfrequently that one Sixth Form boy, acting the part of the Præpostor Immundorum or Præpostor of the Dirty Boys in the ancient days of English public school life, would cause a boy, whom he thought of choosing, to hold out his hands amidst the critical applause and laughter of his schoolfellows. With the fags it was a point of honour to be chosen early. Happy indeed was he who was so fortunate as to obtain the suffrage of the head of the house. Sometimes a fag was chosen on grounds of personal friendship, or of domestic interest, if a Sixth Form boy ‘knew him at home’ or had been specially asked to select him as a fag; but in general the choice was determined by the superficial merits or demerits of the fags themselves.

It was rumoured among the smaller boys of the house (though with what truth was not known) that Stanley, the captain of the Eleven, had announced his intention of making Harry Venniker his fag, and had in fact used his personal influence to prevent his being chosen by any Sixth Form boy higher in the school than himself. Whether that was so or not, it turned out that Harry had not yet been chosen when it came to Stanley’s turn to make his choice, and he uttered the momentous words ‘I’ll have that chap, Venniker.’ Meanwhile, as the choosing of the fags proceeded, it became probable that Gerald Eversley would be left to the last. No Sixth Form boy knew him or was interested in choosing him. He saw one companion after another named and taken from his side. He was left. The ignominy of being constantly passed over was like ‘the iron entering into his soul.’ He hoped, he ardently prayed, that he might not be left to the very last. But still the election went on, and still his name was not called. At length came the terrible moment when he remained alone. All eyes in the Hall were fixed on him. It fell to a Sixth Form boy named Browne—a boy who was not in any way conspicuous—to ‘spot’ the last fag.

‘I suppose I must have this fellow,’ he said contemptuously. ‘What’s your name—you in the “stick-ups”?’

There was a momentary profound silence in the Hall. The attention of all the boys had been called to the disgrace which Mr. Eversley’s ignorance of the rules of dress had brought upon his son. A boy in the fourth form whispered to his neighbour, who was also in the fourth form, that his nickname was sure to be ‘Stick-ups.’

‘Eversley, sir,’ he replied at last amidst a general outburst of laughter; for in his confusion he had addressed Browne as if he were a master. ‘Well,’ said Browne, ‘I see I’m reduced to you,’ then turning with a smile to his colleagues in the Sixth Form, he added, ‘Eversley’s my horse—rather a dark one.’

In this way Gerald Eversley became a fag. The ‘spotting’ of the fags being now concluded, and their social destiny decided for the term, the Sixth Form, according to custom, left the Hall.

The boys who were not in the Sixth Form stayed behind, according to custom, for a second ceremony in which (as may be supposed) the inherent dignity of the Sixth Form forbade them to participate. It was called the ‘trying of voices.’ Like the ‘fag-spotting’ it always took place in the Hall on the second evening of the term. It was customary that the boy highest in the school below the Sixth Form, who was known as the captain of Hall, should choose a song: it was played by some boy who possessed sufficient musical knowledge to accomplish a tune on the piano, then the new boys sang it, or some verses of it, in turn. On this occasion the captain of Hall was a boy named Tracy, not a boy who enjoyed a very admirable reputation among his schoolfellows. He had brought down a comic song called ‘Uncle Sam’ which had lately acquired a certain popularity in the London music halls. It described, in language not particularly coarse, but on the other hand not particularly refined, how the hero of the song, Uncle Sam, had maintained an imperturbable demeanour amidst a variety of trials, partly financial, partly social, and partly conjugal, which were related with a good deal of detail. Like most songs of similar nature it contained a chorus, sung at the end of every verse by the soloist and then taken up by all the boys. The chorus was in these words:

You may laugh, said Uncle Sam,
But I do not care a d—n;
I’ll be jolly, jolly, jolly as I am.

It is possible that the song is still remembered in some quarters.

The new boys were called upon to sing it, one after another. There were eight new boys in all. The first three of them sang it with more or less success, the second, indeed, less successfully than the other two; for he had no ear, and the sounds which issued from his lips bore at the best a dim and distant resemblance to the tune that was being played on the piano. But he persevered to the end, and was loudly cheered. Then the captain of Hall called ‘Venniker.’ Harry Venniker had a good voice; his appearance and manner were prepossessing, and he sat down amidst general applause. The same fourth form boy, who had whispered to his neighbour before, remarked now, though in a less audible tone, that he seemed ‘rather a good sort.’

All this time Gerald Eversley, holding the words of the song in his hand, was in agony of mind. It was not that he could not sing, as he was fond of music, and possessed some little skill upon the organ. But there was a word in the chorus which his scrupulous conscience felt to be wicked. It was not a word that he had known to be used, except once, on a very hot day, by a labourer at Kestercham. But he conceived it to be an offence against God. He had heard his father speak of its solemn and terrible meaning in preaching upon the text—‘He that believeth not shall be damned.’ It was one of the words that he had promised never to use. No doubt he magnified the sinfulness of using it, if sinfulness there were. You who read this story are wiser than he was; you use it, perhaps, and think nothing of it. But would it not be better for you, in the presence of the angels, if your conscience were as pure and sensitive as his?

Another boy was called upon to sing after Harry Venniker; then Gerald.

He hesitated a little, and did not begin when the pianist began.

‘Look sharp, I say,’ said Tracy; ‘we can’t wait here all night.’

In a low tone, rather tremulously, he sang a verse; then, as he approached the words of the chorus, his voice showed signs of faltering. At the second line he stopped; the pianist left him behind again. The boys all looked at him in surprise.

‘I tell you what it is, youngster,’ said Tracy, ‘every new chap has got to sing a verse; that’s the rule of the house; and if you don’t choose to sing, it will be the worse for you.’

Gerald looked round the Hall as the victim at an auto-da-fé may often have cast his eyes around the ring of spectators without discerning a movement of sympathy on any face; the boys did not even understand what his difficulty was.

‘Now, then,’ said Tracy; and the boy at the piano began the chorus once more.

Gerald repeated the words:—

‘You may laugh ... said Uncle Sam,
But ... I ... do not ... care;’

then he broke down, hid his face in his hands, and rushed from the Hall.

The boys sat gazing at each other. Nobody spoke.

‘What the devil is the matter with the young fool?’ said Tracy at last.

‘Don’t you see?’ suggested another fifth form boy, Coleridge by name, next in seniority to Tracy, and of higher character, ‘he didn’t like the little word—d, a, m, n. That’s the fence which he refused.’

Immediately there was an outburst of discordant voices expressing astonishment, doubt, indignation, anger, and some few compassion, the boys all talking at once, and eagerly discussing the procedure to be adopted. Some boys (among whom Tracy was conspicuous) urged that Gerald ought to be brought back at once perforce, and made to sing, being subjected to corporal chastisement if he refused; others that his behaviour, as being an unprecedented violation of the rules and customs of the house, should be referred to the Sixth Form; others, again, that he should be sent to Coventry for a month; others, that he should incur a double measure of fagging. But there were not a few boys—and some of these the most influential—who felt in their hearts, and after a time began to express the feeling, that Tracy had made a mistake alike of taste and of judgment in choosing a song which contained any word of a questionable nature, even though it was one that boys used habitually without much thinking of it; it was a shame (they said) to compel ‘a kid like that’ to use the word at all, and the incident, if it got abroad in the school, would reflect no great credit on the house. The one point, therefore, upon which the whole house agreed was that the incident must not be allowed to get abroad. For the rest, as generally happens when a multitude of counsellors deliberate upon a plan of action, it was resolved to take no action at all. But the ‘trying of voices’ was at an end for that night. The meeting broke up, and the boys stood in knots in the passages or outside the rooms, discussing what had taken place. It was universally felt that Gerald was ‘not up to snuff,’ and that the sooner he was initiated into that mystery, the better; but opinion was in favour of letting the initiation be effected by the gradual and subtle awakening process of school life, rather than by the searching test of the ‘trying of voices.’ This opinion was confirmed when it became known that the Sixth Form, who were the supreme arbiters of all moral or social questions in the house, had decided against inflicting any pains and penalties upon Gerald Eversley, and that the particular member of the Sixth Form who had chosen him, or had been reduced to taking him as a fag, had pronounced the treatment which he had experienced to be a shame.

When Harry Venniker returned to his room, he found Gerald Eversley weeping by the fireside.

‘Well, you young fool,’ he said, ‘you’ve made a pretty shindy. The whole house is talking about what’s to be done to you.’

Gerald was silent.

‘You don’t mean to say,’ continued Harry, ‘that you object to saying damn. Why, it’s what everybody says.’

‘But I promised I wouldn’t say it,’ replied Gerald amidst his tears.

‘Why not?’

‘My father says it’s a wicked word,’ was the answer.

It was an answer which Harry Venniker found some difficulty in meeting, for it was an article of his moral code that parental authority ought to be respected, however irrational it might be.

‘All I can say is,’ he continued after an interval, ‘that I don’t see how you are to get on if you are always thinking things wrong.’

‘But isn’t it wrong?’ said Gerald.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied Harry; ‘I suppose it is, if you look at it in that way; but it’s what everybody does, and, upon my word, I don’t see the harm of it.... However, if you object to it,’ he added, when he had meditated upon the problem for a few moments, ‘I suppose you are right, and if fellows try to bully you, I’ll let them know what I think, only you can’t exactly wear a pinafore in a house like this.’

And that was the limit of the sympathy which Gerald experienced in his first protest against public opinion.

Still, it soon became known in the house that Harry Venniker, while regarding his room-fellow as ‘rather a muff, don’t you see?’ was not disposed to see him the victim of systematic persecution. He was reported to have ‘punched’ the red head of the boy Thornton, who had intruded with malicious purpose into the room, whistling the tune of the song which had proved fatal to poor Gerald’s peace of mind, and making two or three mimetic pauses in the first lines of the chorus. This tacit championship was of the highest value to Gerald Eversley. For boys possess a singular faculty (if they care to exercise it) of making other boys’ lives intolerable. They are masters of the art of annoyance and irritation. They understand how by speech, and still more by silence, to convey the killing sense of their displeasure. I will undertake to say that half a dozen small boys, without committing any such action as could bring them within reach of the law, will drive a schoolfellow to the verge of despair. But against this organised, though indeterminate, persecution, the voice of one boy, if clear and courageous, possesses great weight. Gerald Eversley owed more than he was aware of to the stalwart, if somewhat unsympathetic, defence of Harry Venniker. But for that, it is probable that his social error in coming to school with ‘stick-up’ collars, and his moral error (for so it was widely considered) in refusing to sing a song selected in due order by the captain of Hall, would have brought him into considerable trouble. As it was, however, the boys did nothing worse than leave him very much to himself; they would look at one another in a knowing way, and perhaps shrug their shoulders, when he passed, or one of them would nudge his arm at dinner to prevent his eating with absolute equanimity, or ask him the Latin for a saint, or inquire if his mother or his sisters knew that he was out; once or twice he found his boots filled with water in the morning, or a blot of ink upon his carefully written exercise; or his hat was hidden away, to make him late for chapel; or he received on the first of April a packet of ‘stick-up’ collars as a present.

Boys’ memories are generally short-lived. Nine days’ wonders do not last nine days in a school. Events follow each other with such rapidity and variety that neither successes nor defeats are long remembered. The nickname ‘Stick-ups’ adhered to Gerald Eversley for about five weeks, and then, as the original cause of it had disappeared after the first two or three days of the term, it dropped. The incident of the song was remembered a little longer; but its only permanent result was that the Sixth Form decided not to leave the choice of songs to the captain of Hall, but to prescribe a song of which a verse should be sung by all new boys, and after much consideration the ‘March of the Men of Harlech’ was adopted for this purpose as being at once simple, moral, and inspiriting.

There came to be a tacit understanding among the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house that Gerald Eversley was not altogether like others, and that it was necessary to treat him differently from them, that he was a fair subject for good-humoured chaff, but that it was a ‘chouse’ to bully him, and that as Venniker (who was admitted to be a downright good fellow) could put up with him in his room, the boys generally could put up with him in the house.

Harry Venniker wrote home to his father a long letter telling him that the ‘chap’ whom they had seen on the platform was in his house and in his room, that he was ‘awfully pious,’ and Harry doubted if he had ever been out of his nursery; that he had got himself into trouble by refusing to sing a song in which the word ‘damn’ occurred, and that Harry did not know what a boy was to do ‘with notions like that;’ but, added Harry at the end of his letter, ‘he is not such a bad fellow, though a terrible milksop, and if other boys are down upon him, I mean to stick up for him as well as I can.’ In addition, Harry said that he was ‘getting on all right,’ and life at St. Anselm’s was ‘good fun on the whole.’

Gerald Eversley, in writing to his father, made no allusion to the ‘trying of voices;’ he did not know whether he ought not to tell his father about it, but he could not make up his mind how to describe it, though he began it several times, but after fully describing the other incidents of his first days at St. Anselm’s, and especially his association with Venniker, he went on to say that he found school-life very different from his expectation, a great many things of which he had had no experience were said and done in it; he could not say he liked it at present, but he hoped he should come to like it better as time went on. Mr. Eversley read the letter more than once, then wrote Gerald, No. 1, on the envelope, and put it away in his desk by itself.

CHAPTER V
THE RIPENING OF FRIENDSHIP

It is not the object of this story to describe in detail the progress or system of public school life. That story has often been told. One public school does not differ greatly from another in character, or sentiment, or interest; and the life that is lived in one is essentially the life of them all. I am concerned only with the strengthening or development of friendship between the two boys who are the heroes of this narrative.

What is it in this life that is the secret of friendship? Is it voluntary or involuntary? Is it formed by likeness or by opposition? Does it spring up of itself? Does it need cultivation and tendance? Is it not true that there are persons whom we feel we ought to like more than we do—very estimable persons, very dutiful, but not quite those of whom we make friends? and other persons who are not free from reproach or criticism and yet for whom we cannot help in our own despite cherishing an affection? Does friendship depend upon character or upon circumstances? The one thing certain seems to be that it is not a matter of the reason. We cannot make friends at will. We may say to ourselves perhaps that we will unmake a friendship, that we will not hold intercourse with a person any more (though that too is difficult), but nobody ever yet resolved that he would be the friend of a person, whether he liked him or not, and became his friend and remained so for life. Like all the most sacred things in human experience, friendship is a boon, in some sense independent of human volition. It cannot be acquired by perseverance or resolution. God reserves it like personal beauty, like the appreciation of beautiful sounds and colours, in His own hands. It is His gift; He bestows it where He wills; we can but accept it with grateful and reverent hearts when it is given.

Probably there were no two boys at St. Anselm’s whose lives might be deemed to be parted by a wider gulf than Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley. They came from opposite poles of society. Except in the universal human functions, such as eating and drinking, and the universal experiences of life, they had no common ground. Conversation between them, apart from topics of school interest, was limited by the lack of sympathetic understanding. If the one had spoken of dances or shooting parties, or the other of Bible readings and parochial visits, he would have seemed to his companion to be living in a different world from his, and to be using a language of which he had no comprehension.

And the gulf threatened to grow wider as time went on. Harry Venniker plunged more and more eagerly into the brimming waters of school life; Gerald Eversley stood trembling more and more fearfully on the bank. It was only within the walls of the room which they occupied together, that they could be said to have a common existence.

Harry Venniker advanced every week in popularity. His frank manner, his good humour, his manly disposition, won the hearts of his schoolfellows. It was a common saying that he had never been known to lose his temper. He was eminently unselfish, always ready to do a good turn and never anxious to spoil it by claiming credit for what he had done. His sense of fun was keen, and he took a leading part in the ‘larks’ of his house, though he never went the length of giving pain to boys or getting into serious trouble with his masters. He enjoyed too the conspicuous advantage of excellence in games. He had plenty of pluck, the virtue which in the schoolboy code of honour is supreme. Even in his first term his ‘runs’ and ‘charges’ on the football field excited the admiration of veteran players. But when the summer term came, and it began to be rumoured in the school that so good a left-handed bowler as he was might actually have a chance of getting into Mr. Brandiston’s house Eleven—for had not the great Stanley himself been heard to remark that ‘that young Venniker kept a good length,’ and ‘he could make the ball break both ways’?—then Harry Venniker tasted for the first time the delicious joy of fame, so dear to all finely tempered minds, but to none dearer than to minds that are young and ardent. Several boys high in the school or prominent in athletics began to take notice of him, one or two of them invited him to breakfast, and there was a general feeling in Mr. Brandiston’s house that he was ‘the coming man.’ Nor was he less a favourite with the masters than with his schoolfellows. It is true that he was not intellectually distinguished; but he was not idle, he was always pleasant and cheerful, he kept a very fair place in his form, generally somewhere about the middle, he was seldom in punishment, and his athletic distinction appealed to the sympathetic feelings of masters as well as of boys. Mr. Brandiston was obliged to own that he was a boy who would do his house honour in one of the two lines recognised by Mr. Brandiston himself. At the end of his first term at St. Anselm’s, Mr. Brandiston had written to Lord Venniker, congratulating him upon ‘the excellent start that his son had made,’ and bearing testimony that ‘his lordship had every reason to be proud of his son.’ ‘He is,’ he added, ‘a boy who works well and plays well, and I have the highest opinion of him.’ It is only fair to add that Harry retained his simplicity, and was in no sense injured by the praises showered upon him.

Very different was the case of Gerald Eversley. It was not that he was ever involved in a serious trouble. He was not a boy who incurred or deserved punishment. But there was nothing in him that attracted popular favour. It was reported in the school that he was ‘awfully clever.’ It was beyond dispute that he was ‘a dreadful sap.’ Some of the more discerning boys or masters may have ventured upon the prediction which can hardly be considered as unduly hazardous that ‘he would do something some day.’ But that ‘something,’ if it were destined to be done, would be apparently as far away from the sympathy as from the ambition of other boys. His tastes were not theirs. He lived in a different world from them. They were glad sometimes to avail themselves of his assistance, and I am afraid they availed themselves of it rather freely, in the preparation of their lessons; for his knowledge was multifarious, and it was believed that he had once or twice proved capable of answering questions which had puzzled Mr. Brandiston himself; but an oracle is not consulted except for a special purpose, and, when it is not required, it is treated with indifference. So it was with Gerald Eversley. Perhaps there is no isolation like that of a sensitive spirit surrounded by others which never come into contact or sympathy with it at all. It is what Byron has described in some memorable lines.

Gerald Eversley was not unhappy in his isolation, of which others were more conscious than himself. He had always led a lonely life (except for the society of his father), and it was no surprise to him or disappointment that his life should be lonely now. Besides he had his consolations, as the lonely often have. There is a pleasure in solitude itself. The old Roman was not wrong in his assertion ‘that he was never less lonely than when he was alone.’ There is a pleasure even in being misunderstood, though it is a pleasure that belongs to age, when the heart is soured a little and has become cynical, rather than to youth. But Gerald was old beyond his years. When his schoolfellows were at cricket or football he went for a walk, if he took any exercise at all, his eyesight disqualifying him for games. He was clever, and always high in his form; but he derived less pleasure from his high place than others who had striven for it more anxiously. The beautiful library of St. Anselm’s is known to all visitors, and there in a corner of the great oriel window he sat for hours, never looking at the view of the wide champaign that stretches beneath it, but scanning books of all kinds—novels, travels, biographies (of which he was especially fond), poetry, books of science (particularly archæology) and art, even sermons and books of controversial divinity. Whatever he read he assimilated. I do not mean that it was all remembered, but it soaked down into his mind and became a reservoir of knowledge upon which he would draw in hours of need. He realised what so few who are young, nay, indeed so few who are old, can be said to realise—the love of learning in and for itself, without the thought of prize or praise. Learning, alas! will some day be smothered by its own children, examination, competition, the calculation and publication of results.

In every school there are some boys to whom a library is more valuable than any classroom. For it is not what the young are compelled to do, but what they do of themselves and for themselves, that is the lasting educational result. Education rightly considered does not follow narrow hard lines—that perhaps was Mr. Brandiston’s mistake—it expatiates in a wide and ample domain, and its country walks are sometimes worth more than its dusty high road. Gerald Eversley had other tastes than literature, though none perhaps so dear, so delightful. He loved music, he heard in it, as so many have heard, the voice of heaven. When he had been some time at St. Anselm’s, he obtained the privilege of going now and then on weekdays into the chapel. Seated there at the organ in the little gallery, with the shadows of the evening gathering around him, alone and happy, he would fill and thrill the sacred building with the voluminous strains of some passages taken from a noble and dearly loved oratorio, the ‘Creation’ perhaps, or the ‘Elijah,’ or the ‘Messiah,’ and listening to their strains, so mighty, so unearthly, so much vaster and grander than the hand which called them forth, as the echoes of them faded and died away in the distance amidst the memorials of the dead who were dear to St. Anselm’s, he felt as if the angels of God were ascending and descending upon him in that holy place.

For the chapel had other hallowed associations. To most boys perhaps religious services at school are apt to appear mechanical if not irksome duties. It was not so with Gerald Eversley. To him the great act of communion with God was a vivid reality. It seemed as if his very alienation from the practices and thought of ordinary boys drew him nearer to the Divine Presence. Sunday was not, nor had it ever been, a dull day to him. He had always reckoned his life from Sunday to Sunday. But the parts of the Sundays which he liked best at St. Anselm’s were the evening services when Dr. Pearson preached. Dr. Pearson’s sermons seemed different from other people’s, not only because he was the head master, but because he was Dr. Pearson. Others spoke of the temptations, trials, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, of boyhood, as though they stood outside them. But he spoke of them as one who had lately passed through them, and had not forgotten the art of expressing them. Other preachers in addressing the boys generally said you; Dr. Pearson said we. That was perhaps why the boys liked to hear him. Gerald wrote one Sunday evening to his father that he did not see how a boy could go on sinning willingly who listened every week to such sermons as these.

Yet one more point of his life must not be omitted. In front of the old church at St. Anselm’s is a terrace commanding a wide, impressive view of the wold. To this he would resort in the evening when the sunset tinged the horizon and the hills and woods beneath with an exquisite wealth of colouring. Under its elms he would stand, thinking and thinking. Somehow, whether from association with the graves or from the setting of the sun, the view, beautiful as it was, impressed him with a feeling of sadness; or perhaps it was that few views so extensive are so free from the traces of human habitation. Anyhow it harmonised with his own solitary temper. Thus it was by a strange coincidence, that, as at home, so at school, a churchyard became an element of his life. He was fond of it because he was naturally serious, and it made him more serious still. But nobody knew how often he went thither.

So divergent in all outward appearance were the lives of the two boys, living together at the same time, in the same school; yet between them a strong mutual attachment was springing up. They were still occupants of the same room. They might have changed; sometimes they thought, or at least Harry did, of changing; but they remained together, though they might have had rooms to themselves.

The motives of this singular intimacy were not the same.

On Harry Venniker’s side it was in the main a generous sense of protective obligation. Since the night when, in an impulse of sympathetic emotion, he had promised to be Gerald’s friend for ever, he had somehow felt that it would be a dereliction of duty to leave this strange unsophisticated boy to shift for himself. Harry believed that he could help him, and that nobody else could or would, and that, if he were left alone, he would be sure to be bullied. Helplessness is itself a title to the service of generous souls. The mean, cruel soul may impose upon it, but the noble soul reverences it, and nobility of thought and action was native to Harry Venniker. It ought to be said, too, that he was in some sense an admirer of Gerald’s intellectual ability. Being no student himself, he could not help respecting a life devoted to study. And, in proportion as learning assumed for him the general aspect of a difficult and irksome duty, he looked with a reverential surprise upon one who loved it as a mistress.

Gerald Eversley’s feeling for his friend was of a different kind. Although standing to some extent outside the common interests and quarrels of school life, he was not unappreciative of those who shone in them. No one can live in a busy and intent society without thinking somewhat of the subjects of which it thinks much. And there had arisen in Gerald’s mind a passionate admiration, a sentiment akin to hero-worship, for the boy, his inferior in intellect, but so brilliant, so prominent in the common ways of school life. It was a sentiment of which he could give, or did give, no account to himself. But he felt, as others felt, the charm of Harry’s presence. To be near him was a delight. To be parted from him was a bereavement. If the exquisite Aristotelian test of love be true, that it is not so much the sense of pleasure in the presence of the beloved one as the sense of pain at his absence, it was satisfied by Gerald Eversley. In his admiration for Harry Venniker there was no tinge or trace of jealousy. He looked up to him as to a being of higher order. That his own intellectual distinction could be weighed in the balance against Harry’s popularity and athletic powers, was an idea that never entered his mind. Who will say that it had been better if he had formed a more just estimate of human worth? What would not the world lose in happiness, nay in sublimity, if there were no souls exalted by strong, unspoken reverence for those whom they mistakenly deem higher and nobler than themselves?

Harry Venniker was totally unaware of the devotion which he had stirred in the deep places of his friend’s heart. He knew that Gerald was kind to him, and even submissive, but he was not unaccustomed to kindness and submissiveness; they were the attributes of his position and character, and he regarded them as matters of course. Could he have known how his lightest word was cherished by the boy who was so near him, and yet so far away, he would have been filled with a sentiment of awe.

He who has many friends knows not, and cannot know, the value of one. To Gerald Eversley Harry Venniker was all in all.

When boys become friends they begin to talk about their homes. No sign of friendship is surer than this. It is true that Gerald was generally the listener; for what could he tell about Kestercham Vicarage that was worth telling? Besides, he knew something of Harry Venniker’s father, who had paid his son a good many visits at St. Anselm’s; he had spoken to him, and had once been invited by him to luncheon at the hotel. Harry, of course, talked chiefly about his father. But he often spoke of his mother, of her grace and gentleness and goodness, of her long illness and her never-failing patience.

‘I don’t think,’ he said once with unwonted gravity, ‘I don’t think I could ever go far wrong, for fear of breaking her heart.’ He spoke of his sister too, the beautiful girl, so like her mother, whose portrait hung above the mantelshelf; she was only a year younger than himself, and they had never been separated until he went to school, and he wrote to her every week; she was so thoughtful, that he always consulted her about everything in his life, and found her opinion better than anybody’s—except his father’s. Once he held out the hope of inviting Gerald to stay for a few days at Helmsbury in the holidays, but the idea was forgotten, or some difficulty came in the way of it, and the invitation did not arrive. Gerald was partly disappointed, but partly relieved, as he did not know exactly how he should adapt himself to the ways of aristocratic society.

One reason, no doubt, why Gerald clung so passionately to Harry Venniker was that he was himself not understood by masters or boys. Mr. Brandiston in particular misunderstood him. He liked, as has been said, a boy who worked upon the regular recognised lines of school life. He preferred a boy who was first in his form to one who was second; and a boy who was second, to one who was third. It was his opinion that Gerald, as being an elected scholar, ought to be first. With the studies which occupied so much of Gerald’s time and thought in the library he did not sympathise. Happening one day to come upon him when he was reading Lyell’s ‘Elements of Geology,’ he told him he had better not waste his time. That Gerald’s ability was remarkable he did not doubt. But he thought it might be better employed. He wrote to Mr. Eversley that he wished his son (with whom he had, as he admitted, no positive fault to find) would ‘concentrate himself more,’ and would not be ‘always taking up some new subject that did not bring in any marks.’ The association of Harry and Gerald, in one sense, did not appear to him to have been entirely successful. It had left Harry a healthy, bright, athletic boy; that was well enough. But it had left Gerald what he was at the first—awkward, shy, erratic, studious, recluse. Mr. Brandiston was not wrong in his view of his two pupils; but was he right? Summum jus, says the proverb, summa injuria. The teacher’s profession demands a fine combination of qualities. It needs justice, and justice Mr. Brandiston possessed; the suspicion of favouritism, that one unpardonable offence among boys, never attached itself to his name, and justice, standing by itself, satisfies the needs of ordinary boys—and ordinary boys or men are always (fortunately for the world) the large majority—but there are the few who need not justice only, but the tender, sympathetic insight which is, if any human grace is, the gift of God, and this was not Mr. Brandiston’s. Between him, then, and his strange pupil the gulf widened, slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it widened. Yet Gerald Eversley was not left to fight his way in the school without any appreciation from the masters. The sympathy for which he longed he did not find in his house master. But he found it, by a strange event, in a young master with whom he had never been brought into official connection—Mr. Selby. No story of St. Anselm’s in the years of Mr. Selby’s mastership would be complete without some reference to him. He was not a man whose name was known outside St. Anselm’s. He did not wish to be known. He evaded society. He lived in lodgings in the village, having only three rooms. It was believed that he was poor, that he made himself poor; some said by supporting a large family of nephews and nieces, whose father had gone bankrupt; others said by giving large sums to charitable institutions. It was believed, too, that at some time of his life he had gone through a great sorrow; nobody knew what the sorrow was or when it happened, nor did Mr. Selby ever allude to it; but it was noticed that he always wore a black hatband, and that sometimes, when the conversation was gay at dinner parties or on other festive occasions (if he ever attended them), he would become suddenly silent, and a look of pain would pass over his face; then he would collect himself by a forcible effort, and plunge into conversation again. The boys all felt a deep respect for him as for one who had passed through the shadows of the dark valley which they knew not. They often went to him—he encouraged them to go—when they were in trouble. They were sure that he was their friend. He stood nearer to them than other masters. They felt that, if he could do them any service at the cost of a great personal sacrifice, he would not shrink from doing it. They knew, or at least it was the common belief, that he prayed for them. I think the knowledge of a master’s intercession has a wonderful effect even upon rough and coarse boy-natures. They could not help noticing that in chapel, when the sermon was over and the boys and masters rose from their knees almost immediately, Mr. Selby would remain kneeling often until the chapel was nearly emptied, his face (when it was not hidden in his hands) illumined with a spiritual radiance, and his manner showing the absorption of one whose soul was prostrated by the realisation of the Awful Divine Presence. Mr. Selby was a bachelor and a clergyman.

Gerald’s introduction to Mr. Selby happened in this way. He was sitting one day alone in the library, when Mr. Selby came in. Gerald had a book in his hands as usual, but he was not reading it; he had let it fall on to his knees. He was looking straight before him, meditating upon something that had lately occurred in the house. Mr. Selby, while taking a book from its shelf, caught sight of his face. He went up to him—his power of sympathy had given him an almost intuitive understanding of boys’ thoughts, especially when they were troubled—and said,

‘Is not your name Eversley?’

Gerald, who was surprised at his name being known, answered, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘My dear boy,’ said Mr. Selby, ‘I am sure you are in some trouble. Do tell me what it is; perhaps I can help you.’

And he sat down by Gerald’s side and laid his hand upon his arm.

If Gerald had been like other boys, he would perhaps have tried to parry the question. Or if there had been other boys in the library, it would have been difficult for him to open his heart to a master; nay, it is possible that Mr. Selby would have sought another opportunity of speaking to him. But they were alone. There was something in Mr. Selby’s voice and manner that made deception difficult.

Gerald hung his head down and said nothing.

‘What is it, my dear Eversley?’ Mr. Selby repeated.

Then Gerald told him the following story—not all at once, for Mr. Selby helped him by a good many kindly suggestive questions, and the story was drawn out of him only slowly, but he told it in the simple confidence of truth.

‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘they think I have sneaked of them.’

‘Who are they?’ said Mr. Selby.

‘Please, sir, the fellows in the house,’ was the answer.

‘What makes them think so?’ asked Mr. Selby.

‘Because Mr. Brandiston caught them boxing on Sunday, and they say I told him,’ answered Gerald.

It appeared (although Gerald was careful not to mention any names) that some boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house who were proficients in the noble art of self-defence, Tracy being one of the ringleaders among them, and a boy named Vansittart another, had arranged for a grand display of pugilistic skill at five o’clock one Sunday afternoon. They chose that day and that time, not as having any special desire to violate the law, divine or human, of the Sabbath, but because it was then that Mr. Brandiston, as was well known, devoted himself to his family and friends and perhaps a few boys who were invited to join his domestic circle at tea. Nobody had ever heard of Mr. Brandiston appearing among the boys of his house on Sunday afternoon. The pugilists had, therefore, assumed that it would be safe to begin operations at that time. The boxing would be doubly offensive to Mr. Brandiston as being calculated to bring discredit upon his house, partly because it was itself an exhibition which was wholly opposed to his feelings, but still more because it took place on a Sunday, a day which ought, in his opinion, on grounds of social etiquette even more than of religious obligation, to be kept sacred. But if he had dreamed of the possibility of his house becoming the scene of Sabbatarian pugilism, he would have entertained the further objection that pugilism in a boarding house is at the best only a disguised form of bullying; for it is sure to mean, not that the boys who box are experts or volunteers, but that pressure is put upon young and delicate boys to enter the lists against boys a great deal stronger than themselves. And this was actually the case; for the combatants consisted not only of fifth form boys who were allowed to arrange sparring-matches among themselves, but of lower boys who were expected to box against anybody who might be chosen as their opponent by lot, or more probably at the discretion of Tracy and his friends. These considerations, however, Mr. Selby mentally supplied; they were not part of the story as told to him. What he learnt from Gerald was that the company had assembled on Sunday afternoon in one of the largest rooms of the house; the tables had been pushed back, a ring had been formed, an immense assortment of boxing-gloves of various sizes and colours had been produced; Tracy and Vansittart, acting at once as seconds and umpires, had seated themselves, with towels and sponges in their hands, on chairs at opposite extremities of the ring; two lower boys who had been told off to begin the boxing had divested themselves of their coats and waistcoats, donned the gloves, and sparred a couple of rounds amidst as much applause as was deemed compatible with the secrecy of the proceedings, when the door was suddenly and quietly opened, and in walked—Mr. Brandiston.

A meteorite falling from the sky would not have created deeper consternation than the appearance of the house master at that time among the boys of his own house.

Mr. Brandiston surveyed the scene with an air of terrible but repressed indignation.

‘And this,’ he said at last, ‘on a Sunday afternoon in my house!’

It was but the work of a moment for him to take the names of the boys who were present.

‘Go to your rooms, all of you,’ he said, ‘and remain there (except during chapel) for the rest of the day. I will see you all at nine o’clock to-morrow morning.’ Then, turning to the seconds and umpires, he added, ‘You, Tracy and Vansittart, are, I suppose, the ringleaders in this disgraceful affair; pick up these gloves and carry them at once to my study.’

Slowly the two boys, their arms laden with boxing-gloves, made their way to the study, where they deposited the gloves on the floor in a rude pyramidal heap like the pile of cannon-balls at an arsenal. The other boys, none venturing to speak a word, dispersed to their rooms. When all had gone out, Mr. Brandiston shut the door. The echoes of his footsteps as he strode along the passage rang in the boys’ ears. It was remarked after chapel that evening that some of the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house looked unusually pale.

The interview with Mr. Brandiston next morning, the reporting of the guilty boys to the head master—Mr. Brandiston reported them all, but recommended the lower boys, as being only reluctant accessories, to mercy—the stern rebuke and severe sentence of the head master, belong to the secret history of St. Anselm’s.

But in the house the question was, How had old Brandiston got to know about the boxing?

It was a question more easily asked than answered. The first theory was that he must have derived his information from the butler or one of the servants. But upon inquiry it came out that the butler had himself been in total ignorance of the boxing, and it was in the highest degree improbable that, if he had been ignorant of it, it could have been known to any other servants. The secret had been well kept—and yet had leaked out. But if the traitor was not a servant he must be a boy; for that some traitor there had been nobody doubted. The boys argued that ‘Old Brandiston would never have come into the house at that hour and gone straight to No. 3 if he had not been told what was going on there; besides, he looked as if he expected to come upon it.’ At last the suggestion was made—it was impossible to say by whom—that the only boy who could have ‘peached’ was Eversley. It was remembered that he would of course entertain a strong conscientious objection to Sunday boxing. It was remembered, too, that he had evinced a great dread of boxing when it was proposed before, and had begged to be excused it; but Tracy had insisted upon him sparring, and he had been a good deal ‘bruised’ by a bigger boy. And then a small boy, Thornton or some other, testified to having seen him come out of Mr. Brandiston’s study, or somewhere near the study as if he had just come out of it, that very morning.

This was the sort of evidence upon which the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house, or at least the majority of them, including all the lower boys, decided that Gerald Eversley deserved to be branded as a ‘sneak.’ But boys are bad judges of evidence. It is possible that they are not above forming their opinion first and supporting it by evidence afterwards. But the evidence, such as it was, was not put before Gerald; he did not hear it, did not know of it; he had no opportunity of meeting and refuting it; it was bruited about, it passed from mouth to mouth, being exaggerated as it passed, and poor Gerald became conscious that a painful unpopularity was descending upon him like a cloud, without at first understanding how it had sprung up. Boys in the house turned away from him. In Hall there was a gap on his right hand and on his left. Harry Venniker did not out him, but Gerald thought he was cooler than usual.

‘But, my dear boy,’ said Mr. Selby, ‘what in the world made the boys fix upon you?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ was the reply; ‘but you see, sir, I’m not popular like Venniker.’

There was a gleam of fire in Mr. Selby’s eyes at the thought of the injustice which this innocent boy was suffering at his schoolfellows’ hands.

Is it only among public-school boys, Mr. Selby, that unjust suspicions arise and spread themselves and poison life? Does not human nature all the world over possess a strange faculty of seeing what it wishes to see, and not seeing what it wishes not to see? and what is harder than to overcome prejudice, all the more when it is blindly unreasonable?

Had Mr. Selby been a man of the world, it would have been no surprise to him that public opinion in the school should form so quickly and so cruelly against Gerald Eversley. As it was, he said only ‘Well, never mind about popularity; that is not the great thing.’ And he added solemnly, as if speaking to himself, ‘The blackest crime in history was the act of one who wanted to be popular;’ then aloud, ‘But was there any ground at all for the supposition that you would tell Mr. Brandiston about the boxing?’

‘No, sir,’ replied Gerald; ‘only once before when I was made to box, they saw I could not bear it. You know, sir, I’m no good at games, like Venniker; and some of them laughed when I was “punished,” as they call it, and then the other boy hit out at my face worse than ever. And this time it was on Sunday, and it’s wrong to box on Sunday, isn’t it, sir?’

‘Certainly it is wrong,’ said Mr. Selby; ‘but it is worse to make small boys box who don’t like it.’ Then he added, after a pause, ‘But you are sure Mr. Brandiston cannot have heard of the boxing, directly or indirectly, through you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ cried Gerald, talking up, ‘quite sure.’

‘You didn’t speak to anybody about it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then I will clear you, my dear Eversley,’ said Mr. Selby, emphatically, ‘I will clear you.’

And with one gentle pressure of his hand upon Gerald’s shoulder, he left the library.

Gerald’s heart felt lighter; he took up his book again, and read.

Mr. Selby’s action was simple, yet not free from difficulty. It was clear that, if Gerald Eversley’s tale was true, as Mr. Selby fully believed it to be, the one person who must know the truth of it, the one person who could set him right in the eyes of the house, was Mr. Brandiston.

To Mr. Brandiston, therefore, Mr. Selby resolved to go. The resolution demanded more courage than might be supposed. For Mr. Brandiston, priding himself, as has been said, upon the excellence of his house, was known to be extremely impatient of all interference with his administration of it. If it was true that he did not mind punishing his boys himself, it was not less true that he minded other masters punishing them. Any criticism of his house, any censure or dispraise of it, he resented. He liked to find out the faults of his house (supposing there were any) for himself; he did not like to be told of them. And the long years of his mastership at St. Anselm’s had rendered him a little vain of his experience. He was apt to quote it as an argument in the presence of younger masters. But experience is not an argument; it is not even a guarantee of prudent conduct; it is the most overrated of the virtues—nay, it is not a virtue, for it makes the wise better, but it may make the foolish worse.

It was therefore with no slight hesitation that Mr. Selby sought a favourable opportunity of referring to the subject of the Sunday boxing in Mr. Brandiston’s house. He approached it from the side of Gerald Eversley’s unhappiness. Mr. Brandiston had not noticed that he was unhappy; but he said that some boys would be unhappy anywhere. When he found that Mr. Selby was leading up to a subject which was naturally distasteful to him as a house-master, he interrupted him, saying, ‘I tell you what it is, Selby. When you have been a schoolmaster as long as I have, you will think twice before you begin trying to set other masters’ houses in order.’ Still he listened to Mr. Selby’s burning words. It was repugnant to his sense of justice that a boy in his house should be left to labour under wholly unmerited suspicion. He admitted at once that Gerald Eversley had not been the source of his information. As being a man of experience, he did not reveal what the source of his information had been. But he gave Mr. Selby to understand that, if he would leave the matter alone, it should be set right. Mr. Selby was more than content. So long as Gerald Eversley was delivered from unpopularity, he cared not who might enjoy the credit of the deliverance. That same night Mr. Brandiston summoned the head boy of his house into his study.

‘Powis,’ he said, when the door was shut, ‘I hear there is an impression in the house that it was Eversley who told me about the boxing on Sunday.’

‘Yes, sir,’ answered Powis. ‘I believe the boys do think so.’

‘Has anything been done to him by the Sixth Form?’ asked Mr. Brandiston.

‘No, sir,’ said Powis, ‘not by the Sixth Form, but I heard one or two fellows talking against him, and I am afraid he has had rather a bad time of it.’

‘Well, then,’ continued Mr. Brandiston, ‘I should like you to know and to let it be known in the house that he had nothing whatever to do with it.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Powis. ‘I am very glad. I don’t think the boys would have been so hard on him, only he is such a queer fellow, they can’t make him out.’

‘Nor can anybody else, I think, Powis,’ Mr. Brandiston replied. ‘But it would not be creditable to the house to victimise an innocent boy.’

‘No, sir,’ said Powis, and he went away.

News travels swiftly in a boarding house; and before the lights went out that night it was known to every one of Mr. Brandiston’s boys that Gerald Eversley was not the ‘sneak’ who had revealed the Sunday boxing to Mr. Brandiston.

One or two of the baser spirits, such as Tracy, muttered that his innocence had not been conclusively established, forgetting that the suspicion of his guilt had not been established at all. But for the house generally the acquittal pronounced by the Sixth Form to whom Powis had reported Mr. Brandiston’s words, was sufficient.

As Harry Venniker was undressing that night, he said, ‘Eversley.’

Gerald looked up.

‘I’m awfully glad,’ continued Harry, ‘that you’re cleared. The house was pretty well down upon you, I can tell you, and upon my word it looked bad; but I told them I didn’t believe you would “peach.”’

So ended Gerald’s first trial. Mr. Selby, meeting him soon afterwards in the street, stopped to ask if it was all right, and when he heard that it was, smiled and said only ‘God bless you, Eversley.’

The secret of Mr. Brandiston’s information was never disclosed.

CHAPTER VI
THE HOLIDAYS

It will be believed that Gerald’s return from school to Kestercham for the holidays succeeding his first term was eagerly anticipated by Mr. Eversley. It is no figurative expression to say that he counted the days to it. He would, perhaps, have been ashamed to own that, when Gerald went away to St. Anselm’s, he did what is more commonly done by schoolboys in anticipation of their holidays than by their parents, i.e., he placed upon the desk in his study a calendar showing all the days from the time of his departure to his return, and every night, before he went to bed, carefully drew his pencil through the number of the day that was verging to its close with a feeling of thankfulness in his heart that he was so much nearer to the longed-for reunion. For if Gerald had been lonely in his school life, he had not been so lonely as his father at home. He had exchanged his home for other scenes and interests; he had companions, if not friends, at his side; but his father, left at home, found nobody to fill the place of his son. The second Mrs. Eversley, as her family grew up, became increasingly occupied with domestic affairs; there was even a danger that her ‘good works’ would be neglected; nor had she ever been the centre of his hopes, as Gerald was.

Gerald’s letters, which arrived every Tuesday morning, were a never-ceasing spring of interest to Mr. Eversley. There was no post-office at Kestercham; the letters were brought by a carrier who walked from Wickeston. If he walked briskly, he ought to arrive at the vicarage before breakfast; but he was rather a loquacious person, and, having a large and not very prosperous family, was apt to linger at the cottages and shops of his acquaintances, or at other places, to lament the happiness of one whose domestic quiver was, through no fault of his own, unduly full—a happiness guaranteed (as he was wont to say) by sacred authority, and the more familiarly known to him from the circumstance of his acting on Sundays as parish clerk in Kestercham Church. Instead of ‘speaking with his enemies in the gate,’ Mr. Dawes (for that was the letter-carrier’s name) was not ashamed to be found speaking with his friends in the public-house. This garrulous dilatoriness was a great annoyance to Mr. Eversley, who wanted his letters, and in the early part of Gerald’s school life went near to costing Mr. Dawes his official position in the parish church. On the Tuesday mornings when Mr. Dawes was behind (not his usual, but) his proper time, Mr. Eversley’s impatience would not suffer him to sit down to breakfast before the arrival of the post; but he would walk as far, or nearly as far, as the green gate to meet him and take the letters—or one particular letter—from him; and Mrs. Eversley, as she waited for him—the most exact and punctual of men on other days—would see him walking slowly up the lane, poring eagerly, as if he had no other thought in the world, over the big boyish characters of the letter which he held in his hand, and apparently unconscious of his home or wife or breakfast. On one such occasion she remarked to the parlour-maid, who was putting the poached eggs down to the fire to keep them warm, that ‘she believed her master cared for nothing and nobody but that boy.’ Sometimes Mr. Eversley read the letters or parts of them to his wife; but always he numbered them, as he had numbered the first, on the envelopes and put them away carefully in his desk. The letters themselves were not altogether unworthy of Mr. Eversley’s devoted attention. They were frank natural letters, full of the details which are so wearisome if the heart of the reader is not at one with his who writes, but when they are at one, so delightful. Gerald related whatever interested him, and all that possessed an interest for him interested his father. Perhaps they differed a little from the ordinary letters of schoolboys, and were not the less attractive, by their freshness, as exhibiting the sense of wonderment or surprise which public-school life aroused in the boy who had never known anything like it before. There is always a charm in the narrative of one who observes the phenomena of Nature or Life as if no one had observed them before him. It is the charm of Homer’s similes. Mr. Eversley noticed with the keenest pleasure that the letters showed no sign of alienation from the circumstances of thought and habit at home. Gerald manifested all his old interest in the life of Kestercham. He asked many questions, not only about his family, but about the church and its congregations, about the Harvest Thanksgiving Service which was held at the end of October, about the farmers and their affairs, especially about Mr. Seaford’s horses, and whether the village pond had dried up during the drought, and how many sixpences his father (as his custom was) had paid the school children for the discovery and destruction of wasps’ nests.

The letters, too, were full and candid in their account of St. Anselm’s. One incident, as this story has shown, Gerald did not relate to his father, and his father was never informed of it. But the common events of daily life, the lessons, the games, the books read in the library, the half-holidays, the meals, the fagging, his place in form, his association with Harry Venniker, ‘the son of Lord Venniker,’ the decoration of their room, their conversation, the names of the masters, of those especially with whom he came into personal contact, Mr. Brandiston’s words and doings, all carefully recorded, were delineated with the simple confidence that, as they were supremely interesting to the writer, so would they equally be to his correspondent. Nor did it surprise Mr. Eversley that Gerald should experience some slight unhappiness in the early days of school life; he looked upon it as a part of the discipline which the children of God are called to endure in the world. But nothing pleased him so much as the spirit in which Gerald spoke of the pleasure that he found in the chapel services, and most of all in Dr. Pearson’s sermons, from which he would sometimes quote passages or phrases. Mr. Eversley did not feel quite so happy about the sermons themselves. They did not appear to be always what he would call ‘Gospel sermons,’ instinct with the sentiments of human depravity, divine redemption, and eternal judgment. But Mr. Eversley hoped for the best.

When Gerald was coming home to spend his first holidays, it was a question whether he or another boy who had been his rival all through the term would come out head of his form in the examination at the end of it. He had written home several times about his chance of winning the highest place; and his father had replied, urging him not to be disappointed if he were second, as he ‘would do his best,’ and ‘the issue was in God’s hand,’ but plainly showing—he was too simple a man for disguise—how great his own longing was that he should be first. The list would not be read out until the morning of the day on which he came home. He would reach X—— about four o’clock in the afternoon. It was arranged that Mr. Eversley should go not all the way to X———he was prevented from doing so by some parochial duty—but to a little hill about halfway between Kestercham and X——, from which a view of the train, as it speeded by, was easily obtained; he was to be there in time for the train, and Gerald, if he were first in his form, was to wave his pocket-handkerchief from the window of his carriage; if not, there was to be no sign. It was a bitter day, the snow lay upon the ground; but Mr. Eversley was at his post, waiting fully half an hour for the train. As it sped by, a white handkerchief waved in the cold wind. Mr. Eversley thought he could discern a happy boyish face half hidden behind it. He knelt down for a moment in the snow and gave God thanks. It was a bitter day, the winter was strong upon valley and wold; but the summer had come again to Mr. Eversley’s heart.

What rejoicings there were that night at Kestercham Vicarage! Gerald’s little sisters all sat up (except the baby) in honour of his home-coming. Mrs. Eversley’s sternness relaxed under the influence of the genial occasion, she kissed him with unusual warmth, looked him all over, and, while remarking that his clothes would need a good deal of mending, gave it as her opinion that he was ‘very much improved,’ and she ‘had never seen him look so gentleman-like.’ The servants, including the gardener, who was married and lived by the green gate, came in a body to welcome Master Gerald. And tea was hardly finished when the voice of Mr. Seaford was heard in the hall, inquiring if the vicar was within, and if ‘the young gentleman’ had got home safely ‘from that nasty ingin.’ For Mr. Seaford himself made it a rule not to travel by rail; he firmly believed, and did not scruple to express his belief, that the locomotive engine was an invention of the Evil One; and by way of impressing his view upon his domestic circle, which was composed of Mrs. Seaford and an unmarried daughter—the same who played the harmonium in church—all the other members of his family being married and out in the world, he was fond of reading aloud on the winter evenings a detailed account of some terrible railway accident which had lately occurred, enriching it with a stirring commentary of his own, which was not calculated to mitigate its horror. The question addressed by Mr. Seaford to the maidservant in the hall would suggest that he imagined passengers by rail to occupy places on the engine; but, of course, he may have spoken inexactly. At all events, in the eyes of Mr. Seaford, Gerald’s safe return to Kestercham was not only a pleasure, but in some sense a surprise; he looked upon it as an instance of a special Providence. For Mr. Seaford’s own travels seldom extended beyond a drive in his brougham to attend the fortnightly market at Wickeston, or on rare occasions, and always under protest, with Mrs. Seaford to do some necessary shopping at X——.

Nothing would satisfy Mr. Eversley on the evening of Gerald’s return but that Mr. Seaford should stay and drink a cup of tea at the vicarage, despite something of the nature of a protest from Mrs. Eversley, whose rigid adherence to the inviolable social distinction between the clerical and the agricultural classes seemed to be threatened with a serious assault. But Mr. Eversley’s enthusiasm was not to be gainsaid.

‘Now, Mr. Seaford,’ he exclaimed, ‘this is good of you. You must let Mrs. Eversley give you a cup of tea; you must indeed.’

‘My dear!’ interposed Mrs. Eversley, who foresaw an air of ‘commonness’ descending upon the house if a farmer like Mr. Seaford should be known to have taken a seat at her tea-table.

But Mr. Eversley would not hear of opposition; so his wife was fain to pour out the tea, and with her own orthodox hands present it to Mr. Seaford, who gulped it down, though it was so hot as almost to choke him, feeling a little awkward at the unwonted familiarity. He did not fail to inform his family, when he went home, that he had been invited to take tea at the vicarage, but he paid a delicate compliment to Mrs. Seaford by protesting that the tea was ‘nothin’ like his own home-brewed.’

But the cup of tea was not the only privilege accorded to Mr. Seaford on that memorable evening; for Mr. Eversley bade Gerald run upstairs and bring down the prize which he had received as being head of his form, and Mr. Seaford, after inspecting it for some time with an air of enlightened admiration, returned it to its owner, observing that an intellect which yielded such a crop as that must have had ‘a pretty sight o’ manure.’ High farming and wide reading were parallel forms of cultivation in Mr. Seaford’s view.

Who will doubt that Mr. Eversley, when he retired to his study that night, lifted up his voice in reverent thanksgiving to the Eternal? He read the story of Joseph and his meeting his father in Egypt; it seemed appropriate to the occasion in his own life. Tears of joy were in his eyes as he read it. When at last he went upstairs, he could not resist the satisfaction of peeping into Gerald’s room just to see that all was well with him; the boy was asleep, sleeping as peacefully as on the morning when Mr. Eversley had stood over him with the telegram announcing his election to a scholarship at St. Anselm’s; he stooped down and kissed him. Oh! happy, blessed self-forgetfulness of love! We live two lives, our own and our children’s, and it is often in our children’s lives that we live most truly. What success that could have happened to Mr. Eversley would have given him as much pleasure as his son’s? What preferment in Church or State would have been equal in value to that little volume that lay upon the drawing-room table with the arms of St. Anselm’s on its cover?

The old life at Kestercham seemed to revive the next morning. Once more Mr. Eversley in the morning sat in his study with Gerald at his side, though I think he found it necessary, more often than of old, to interrupt his work for the sake of putting questions which, if the truth must be told, were somewhat alien from the sermon upon which he was engaged. Once more when he visited his parishioners in the afternoon Gerald trudged at his side, and there was not a farmer or labourer whom they passed but wished the boy well, some remarking in their rough honest way that he ‘fared hearty,’ others that he ‘had grown wonderful,’ and others again that they were ‘right glad to see him back with all his larnin’ in little Kest.’ The people of Kestercham did not ‘hold with’ education, at least in Kestercham; they did not feel that the village of Kestercham stood in need of it; but they supposed that for the unfortunate outer world, whose affairs were in general not so well ordered, it was desirable, and perhaps even necessary. Once more, too, when Sunday came, Gerald accompanied his father to church, took his old seat in the vicarage pew in the chancel, immediately behind the labourers and schoolchildren who formed the choir, and Mr. Eversley listened with grateful satisfaction to his young voice joining fervently, as of old, in the responses and hymns.

There was much to think of, much to talk of, it will be believed, in the long winter evenings of the first holidays. But the days and nights passed only too quickly, and still the father and the son found ever new topics of conversation. For conversation is not the conveying or receiving of knowledge, but the interchange of sympathetic feelings.

One of the topics to which Mr. Eversley referred in almost the earliest of their walks through the fields was the suspicion entertained against Gerald of having reported the Sunday boxing to Mr. Brandiston. Several letters about it had already passed between them. Gerald had not failed to tell his father of the kind part played by Mr. Selby. He was convinced, though he could not have proved, that he owed his deliverance from suspicion to Mr. Selby’s advocacy. Mr. Eversley had expressed the hope of being able some day to thank Mr. Selby personally for his kindness. But of the boxing on Sunday he spoke in emphatic terms. He looked upon it as a definite act of sin, the violation of an express divine commandment. He regretted extremely that any boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house should have been guilty of it. He thought that the house, having been implicated in the sin, ought to make some sort of special atonement for it. But he accepted the suspicion which had lain upon Gerald as part of the discipline which the children of God are called to undergo in a wicked world. He was not anxious that Gerald should escape it; he was only anxious that he should bear it in the spirit of Christ. The story of Joseph, which was much in Mr. Eversley’s mind just then, afforded an example of unmerited accusation and of good resulting from it under Divine Providence.

But the subject on which Gerald talked most eagerly, and his father listened with the keenest interest, was his friendship with Harry Venniker. To his father Gerald descanted in terms of generous enthusiasm, and even more during later holidays than at first, upon the achievements and attractions of his boyish hero. Mr. Eversley heard him with somewhat mingled feelings. It was only a partial pleasure to him to learn that his boy’s heart had been so drawn out towards a schoolfellow. No doubt he appreciated the sympathy and protection which Gerald owed—more, perhaps, than he was aware of—to his robust and popular friend. It is possible, too, that he felt a secret satisfaction in his boy’s connection with a member of the social class which he had himself always regarded with a distant and respectful veneration as being in some unexplained manner a necessary part of the constitution. But he could not conceal from himself that the friendship was not altogether free from danger. It might excite in Gerald’s mind ideas and ambitions which a country clergyman like himself could not hope to satisfy. It might render him indifferent to the narrow circumstances in which he had been brought up, and in which his father and his family were destined to live. It might—oh! painfullest thought of all!—it might alienate Gerald’s affection from himself. For deep down in Mr. Eversley’s mind there was a jealousy (though he himself understood it not) of whatever could come between his dear boy and himself. Nor could he be blind to the fact that Harry Venniker, though a good average Christian English boy, had not been trained in the strictly orthodox evangelical lines of the theology which ruled in Kestercham Vicarage.

Still, Gerald was so happy, so ardent, so enthusiastic in his friend’s favour, that Mr. Eversley would not have had the heart, even if he had had the wish, to interfere with the friendship. After all, as he reflected, great and terrible is the responsibility of one who cuts a young soul adrift from the moorings of innocent friendship. Is not friendship sanctified by the Divine Example? Did not He whose life on earth is the model of all human lives say to His disciples in the most solemn hour of His soul’s history, ‘But I have called you friends’?

And for the present at least—I am speaking of the first holidays—none of the ill effects which Mr. Eversley apprehended as possible were seen in Gerald. He was still as frank and genuine as ever, as full of interest in all that made up the life of Kestercham. He seemed not to need, not to desire, any companionship but his father’s. He seemed to have no secrets from him. He showed him all his letters, and among them one or two from Harry Venniker. He consulted him upon all his doings at St. Anselm’s. He spoke with the same certainty as before of being a clergyman; it did not seem that any other calling presented itself to his mind. In a word, he was still the same simple, dutiful, religious Gerald as before. Mr. Eversley thanked God for that; it was all that he had wished and prayed to find.

So the first holidays passed, and so the succeeding holidays. It would not accord with the purpose of this story to say more of them. Gerald passed from thirteen to fifteen or sixteen, and Mr. Eversley was conscious of no change, or of none such as caused him any disquietude. A developed character indeed, a deeper thoughtfulness (though discernible only when something called it out), a wider knowledge of human things, a multifarious information which at times surprised his father, a somewhat more critical tone in speaking of the school—these things Mr. Eversley saw or felt; but no moral or spiritual change—no change in his boy’s relation to himself. They had, in his own words, lived one life until Gerald went to St. Anselm’s; they lived, or he thought they lived, but one life still.

One morning, when Gerald was just sixteen, as he was sitting at breakfast with his father and Mrs. Eversley, the letters were brought in, and an envelope bearing a coronet upon it was handed to him. He recognised the handwriting at once; it was Harry Venniker’s; but, as he read the letter, a flush mantled upon his cheek. The flush did not escape Mr. Eversley.

‘What is it, Gerald?’ he said; ‘I see there is something important in your letter.’

‘It’s from Venniker,’ was Gerald’s reply, and he passed the letter to his father.

The letter, after various allusions to the affairs of school life, and to a certain ‘spree’ which Harry had been enjoying in the holidays, went on to say that Harry’s mother wished him to ask if Gerald could come and spend a few days at Helmsbury before going back to St. Anselm’s; she had heard so much about him (Harry said), but had never seen him, and being an invalid, and unable to bear the journey to St. Anselm’s, she was afraid her only chance of making his acquaintance lay in the hope that he would give them the pleasure of his company at Helmsbury. ‘Mind you come,’ added Harry on his own account; ‘this is an awfully jolly country, and we can give you a mount if you like; and if you don’t care about shooting, there is Ross Abbey and Sedgefield within a drive, and you can go there with Ethel.’

At the time when this letter was written Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley were not living on quite the same terms of intimacy as before. The progress of school life had parted them a little from each other; they were no longer occupants of the same room. But Gerald, being now in the Lower Sixth Form, enjoyed the privilege of having breakfast and tea in his own room, and of inviting a friend, whenever he wished, to share them with him. It is needless to say that that friend was always, or almost always, Harry Venniker. The friendship between them was thus maintained in its integrity, and Gerald had the happiness of reflecting that he was able to confer a slight favour while receiving so many. There was also a tacit understanding that they should, if possible, go for a walk together on Sundays—how many school friendships have been consecrated by the happy rule of Sunday walks!—or, if the weather was too bad for a walk, that they should meet for a long talk in the room of one of them. Thus the friendship, so vital to them both, continued. It was in a sense even purified, as being free from the petty frictions and bickerings which are the incidents of great and constant propinquity, which sometimes occur, it is said, even between husband and wife. Harry and Gerald did not now need to meet unless they chose; but their meetings were the more highly valued. Perhaps, however, it was because they saw less of each other during the term that Harry had thought of asking Gerald to his home in the holidays. There was much talk in Kestercham Vicarage at breakfast and afterwards about the unexpected invitation to Helmsbury Hall. Mr. Eversley and his wife were at one in assuming that it could not be refused. Mr. Eversley had once or twice—not oftener—been invited to dinner with a noble lord who possessed a mansion (to which he seldom came) in the neighbouring parish of Wickeston—it was known as Wickeston Manor—and who owned a great part of the land in Kestercham, and he had always looked upon the invitations as commands. The feudal feeling for the great lords, which is dying out among the farmers and agricultural labourers, will, I think, find its last resting-place in the breasts of the country clergy. Mr. Eversley anticipated the visit to Helmsbury with some anxiety; for might it not exalt Gerald’s ideas above his station? He reminded him that all men were equal in the sight of God. Mrs. Eversley opined that the visit would give him ‘polish,’ though she exhorted him to be on his guard against ‘the world.’ However, the result, which had been visible enough from the first, was that Gerald wrote, and Mr. Eversley revised, a letter, saying how grateful he was to Lord and Lady Venniker for the honour done to him, and that he would gladly come in the week before returning to St. Anselm’s.

Such arduous and absorbing questions as the clothes he must wear on week-days and on Sunday, the money he must take with him (as if he would be expected to pay a subscription every day), the style of language he must adopt, and the attitude he must assume, towards his hosts having been settled at last to the satisfaction of Mr., and still more of Mrs., Eversley, Gerald was put into the little carriage with the old grey mare and driven to X——, where he was to take the train for London; after that he was to take a cab and drive across London and so catch the train to Helmsbury. Mr. Eversley accompanied him to the station at X——, and took leave of him with the remark that wherever he was he would (Mr. Eversley felt sure) behave like a gentleman and a Christian.

Gerald Eversley’s stay at Helmsbury was limited to a week. During that week he wrote as many as five letters home. Mr. Eversley noticed that after the first two letters, in which he described the size and grandeur of the house, especially its picture-gallery with the works of many artists whose names he had never heard of, but one or two masterpieces—a Murillo and a Titian—that awoke strange memories and imaginations in his mind, and the organ in the hall, Gerald referred more frequently to Lady Venniker than to anyone else. Her delicacy of health prevented her entertaining many guests. Lord Venniker and Harry and such friends as were with them spent the days in sport, so that Gerald (whose defective eyesight would have disqualified him for sport, had his inclination led him to it) was left for a good many hours to the study of books in the great library—a privilege exceeding his highest expectations—and to the society of Lady Venniker. Once, but only once, he mentioned Miss Venniker, as a beautiful girl, rather like Harry, but with softer and more sensitive features than his.

The transition from the simple country vicarage, where his step-mother would often lend a helping hand in laying the cloth or clearing away, to the ancestral home of a noble family, with its army of male and female servants, could not but impress, and might easily have disturbed, the mind of a boy less unworldly than Gerald Eversley. But Lord and Lady Venniker, though so different in character, were alike in possessing the exquisite tact which prevents wealth from being felt as a burden, or rank from appearing in the light of a reproach. They soon made Gerald feel at his ease. Instead of reminding him of the points of difference in his life and theirs, they drew out whatever was sympathetic between them. They understood the art of leaving him alone. It is only when the guests feel bound to be amused and the host feels bound to amuse them, that life in a country house becomes intolerable.

Gerald took several drives with Lady Venniker, who was able to go out sometimes in the summer months, and on one of these an incident occurred which formed a bond of union between them. They were returning from a drive to Ross Abbey and were nearing a cottage which belonged to one of Lord Venniker’s tenants, when at the turning of the road, near the foot of the hill, a little girl, attracted by the sound of the carriage, ran out of the wicket-gate at the entrance to the cottage-garden and came, as it seemed, actually under the horses’ feet. Lady Venniker, seeing what was inevitable, gave a faint scream, and fell back in the carriage as if in a swoon. Gerald, who dreaded what the effect of the shock might be on one so delicate, turned to her.

‘Never mind me,’ she said in a low voice, ‘look after the child.’

The coachman had pulled the horses to the side of the road, and the child lay in the middle, screaming. The footman had already descended from the box and was standing by her side, doing nothing, as the way of servants is in an emergency. Gerald got out of the carriage and passed his hand rapidly over the child’s body. It seemed that when he touched her left leg, her screaming grew worse. He told Lady Venniker that he was afraid one leg was broken, but that the child was as much frightened as injured.

Neither the father nor the mother of the child was in the cottage. Gerald said he would stay with the child until one of them came back. By this time she was screaming less convulsively, though she continued to lay her hand on the injured leg. Lady Venniker, whose face was deadly pale, said she would drive for the doctor, whose house was three miles distant. The evening was closing in, and there was a chilly feeling in the air; but she insisted upon fetching the doctor herself. Meanwhile Gerald, who with the footman’s help had carried the child into the cottage, sat by her side, doing his best to soothe her pain. A neighbour, who had seen the accident, was sent for the child’s mother; but she was in the harvest-field, and it was some time before she could be found. When the doctor arrived in the carriage with Lady Venniker he pronounced that the child had sustained a fracture of the tibia—probably one of the horses had trodden upon her leg—but it was a simple fracture, and he did not doubt it would do well. Lady Venniker and Gerald drove back to Helmsbury; neither of them spoke a word. Lady Venniker looked very ill. She retired at once to her room, and did not appear any more that night. Next morning she was said to be suffering from the combined effects of cold and fright, and the doctor expressed anxiety about her. It was some days before she left her bed. But she did not fail to send each day some article of food or dress, and a kindly message with it, to the mother of the suffering child. Gerald did not see her any more; for on the second day after the accident he left Helmsbury. But she sent him a message through her daughter, to say that she was better, and to thank him for his kindness to the child and to herself; she hoped he would come to Helmsbury again.

Gerald, upon his return to Kestercham, learnt to his surprise that the news of his adventure was already known. It had got into the papers, as affecting Lady Venniker, and most improbable and grotesque accounts of it were in the air. That he had carried a peasant’s child out of a burning house; that he had saved a child from drowning; that he had been wounded in warding off a blow aimed at Lady Venniker; that he had gallantly stopped her ladyship’s runaway horses—these and other versions of the story were current. He found himself the hero of the hour in Kestercham and the neighbouring parishes. At one of the clerical parties to which Mr. Eversley occasionally went and took his son, the conversation turned almost exclusively upon his feat of daring. The clergy and their wives and daughters were forward in congratulating him. A comical incident connected with this party may be mentioned here; for Mr. Eversley and he sometimes laughed over it in after-days. Among the guests at the party was an elderly clergyman, so deaf that it was practically impossible for him to join in the general conversation. He understood, however, that something unusual was astir. To him, as he sat in a corner of the room, Mr. Eversley made his way, partly out of kindness and partly to escape the embarrassment of so much talking about Gerald.

‘A fine afternoon, Mr. Drummond,’ he said to the old gentleman, raising his voice a little, for there was a buzz of conversation everywhere.

‘What?’ said the old gentleman, in a state of excitement.

‘I only said it was a fine afternoon,’ repeated Mr. Eversley.

‘What do you say?’ cried the old gentleman. ‘I cannot hear what you say. You must speak louder.’

Mr. Eversley repeated his striking observation once more. But the old gentleman did not catch what was said; so, raising his voice to a stentorian pitch, he called to his wife who was at the other end of the room.

‘Harriet, come here, my dear. Mr. Eversley is making some observation; it is important, and I cannot hear what he says.’

By this time the attention of the whole room had been attracted to the old gentleman and Mr. Eversley, and there was a breathless silence as Mrs. Drummond made her way across the room and said, with a pleasant smile,

‘Will you be so kind as to tell me what it was that you said to my husband? He is so very deaf, but he cannot bear not hearing what is said to him, and he will never be satisfied now until he is made to hear what it was.’

Mr. Eversley, his face turning crimson at the predicament in which he was placed, repeated in a low tone that he had casually remarked it was a fine afternoon.

Mrs. Drummond turned to her husband, who was exhibiting every sign of impatient curiosity, and, making a speaking-trumpet of her hands, shouted with great deliberation:

‘My—love—Mr. Eversley—says—it is—a fine—afternoon.’