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
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE NEW BOYS 1
II. TWO HOMES 26
III. FATHER AND SON 49
IV. FIRST EXPERIENCES 73
V. THE RIPENING OF FRIENDSHIP 103
VI. THE HOLIDAYS 133
VII. ‘DE PROFUNDIS’ 160
VIII. DRIFTING APART 199
IX. LAST DAYS AT ST. ANSELM’S 227
X. THE CRISIS OF FAITH 248
XI. THE LIGHT THAT ARISETH IN DARKNESS 275
XII. ST. MARTIN’S SUMMER 317
XIII. THE VALLEY OF THE DARK SHADOW 333
EPILOGUE 353
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 5_l._
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 5_l._ 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.