Gradually he came to take a more real interest in his neighbour. The
books that Sutton read, Sutton's love of poetry--surprised him; little
things he would say now and then seemed to show indications of sensitive
fancies and shy feelings hardly in accordance with his dry exterior.
What a thing it would be for him, Foley thought, if the poor young
man's taste could be really cultivated; if he could only be set free
from his narrowing ideas and made to look at life for himself, instead
of seeing it always through the grey fog of Puritan prejudice!
Sutton took everything that Foley said with delightful seriousness; the
well-worn arguments against Democracy and Republicanism were new to him,
and seemed to puzzle him--he would come days afterwards with carefully
thought-out answers to them. Or he would give his friend tracts to read,
as if he was worried by Foley's ritualistic tastes, and hoped to convert
him to Methodism; and once he persuaded him to go and hear Dr. Joseph
preach. Foley was really impressed by the good sense and vigour of
Sutton's master, but to Sutton himself he criticized what he thought a
want of beauty in the service.
And it was only once that Foley felt even for a moment the least
uncomfortable about the things he said to his friend--one evening when
he happened to run upstairs with some specious argument about the
Apostolic Succession, (for when an idea occurred to him he liked to make
use of it at once,) and going into the American's room, he found him on
his knees in prayer.
In that old place--for St. Mary's was not one of the more liberal
Colleges, but a sleepy, ancient, aristocratic society, very conservative
of its own beliefs and manners and prejudices--Eliaphet Sutton lived on
at first, unknown to almost everybody, and only noticed for the oddness
of his looks, as he went in and out to his lectures or solitary walks.
But after a while Foley's interest in him, and his own shy charm
of manner, gained him a more friendly welcome in the College, and
little by little he began to modify, it was remarked, the quaint
unconventionalities of his speech and ways.
A curious life it was, this Oxford life into which the inexperienced
American had chanced to drift! A community of young men, generously bred
and taught, living together so intimately in that mediaeval place, with
its own old usages and traditions and ways of thinking; shut out, as by
a high wall, from the world outside; aloof from the vulgar needs of
life; concerned, many of them, only with its theoretic problems,
interested more, perhaps, in the ancient Greeks than in contemporary
affairs--and, indeed, not unlike the Greeks in their care for the
clearness and beauty of the mind, the athletic strength of the
body--surely, Foley thought, the young Methodist could not have found so
delightful a place in all the world beside.
How much he was really influenced by it Foley could not tell; certainly
as the months went by he seemed to be more aware of the beauty of
Oxford; he would stop sometimes of his own accord to look through a blue
gateway or down a sunlit street, and once Foley saw him standing, a
quaint figure, under the University Church, and gazing up at the
spire--at the religious statues there, which seemed to be voyaging
through the windy sky and among its great white clouds. He started to
join him, but Sutton, seeing he was noticed, moved hastily away.
Then Foley remembered an evening when, coming out into the quadrangle,
he saw a figure he recognized as Sutton's standing at a barred gate
opening on the street. In front of the American, through that one small
opening in the great dark walls, was the gas-lit yellow of the street,
the noise of the passing crowd and traffic--for it was the evening of a
market day--but at his back the deep shadow and silence of the old
quadrangle.
"It's rather absurd to be locked up in this way," Foley said, joining
him; but Sutton replied after a moment, "Why, I was just thinking I
rather liked it! Of course it is absurd, but still--" He stopped, as he
so often stopped, in the middle of his sentence.
Other times there were when Sutton seemed curiously narrow and stubborn;
times when some of his dissenting acquaintances had just been to see
him--the elderly undergraduates, with bald heads and big moustaches,
whom Foley took to be pupils of Dr. Joseph's when he met them mounting
the stairs. One of these dissenting friends of the American's, a
friendly, awkward young man, named Abel, who was assistant tutor to Dr.
Joseph, and had come with him to Oxford when the college moved there
from Birmingham, seemed to have a special supervision over the
American. Abel had no very high idea of Oxford and Oxford people, and
once, when they met in Sutton's rooms, he and Foley argued a little
about the University.
Anyhow he envied Sutton, Abel said at last, turning, as he rose to go,
to the silent American; it wasn't everybody who had the luck to live in
such a place. But Sutton suddenly coloured, and answered, "You can't
blame me, Abel, Dr. Turnpenny wanted me...."
"I'm not blaming you, my friend, it's only envy," Abel replied
good-humouredly. He still lingered a moment, looking at the books, and
cross-questioning Sutton about his work, and how he spent his time.
Foley, who liked anything new, was interested by this intelligent,
tactless man, and wondered why Sutton should be so obviously glad when
at last the young dissenter went his way.