As soon as the warm weather came we went to the mountains, and when we
returned in the autumn I had put aside one crutch, and felt at times
that I was soon to banish the other. The boys had gone to college, and
Belfield was desolate to me. Georgy was visiting cousins in New York. I
had not seen her since that evening in June when she came to see me, nor
was I to see her again for years. In November my mother and I went to
Jamaica, for I had so outgrown my strength that fresh and alarming
symptoms seemed to threaten me with more fatal ills than being merely
crippled for life. But their only effect was to banish us for two years
from all the familiar old scenes. We were never to go back to Belfield
again and find our home there. Youth and passionate emotion and the
thought of marriage had vanished now from my mother: she had, it
sometimes seemed to me, no other wish than that I should be restored to
health. I fancy she almost hated the memory of that brief time when the
words of Mr. Floyd made her color deepen, her lip tremble and the glad
impulsive tears start to her eyes.
I accepted her willing service and her exclusive love. I needed both,
God knows, in those days of weakness and pain. After a time I began to
mend: then I grew robust and strong. My lameness diminished, and was
comparatively cured, since I could dispense with crutch or stick.
Whether youth or the fine air of those beautiful tropical uplands
wrought the miracle, who shall say? Now, although I have the old limp,
which I shall carry with me to the grave, my misfortune has ceased to be
such to me: it is hard to feel that I was ever justified in regarding it
as a calamity to becloud my life. And my little daughter said to me the
other day, "I am so glad, papa, that you are lame, for I am sure to
catch you up, even if the boys run away from me."
All the more striking characteristics of my nature were changed by my
accident. I had suffered much in body and in mind, and had been refined
by the torture to a point which made me effeminate, since an almost
painful capacity for sympathy, an overwhelming dread of inflicting
suffering, and a somewhat morbid self-depreciation are qualities
scarcely masculine. My early ambition had been for a hard place in the
world, where the world's work would force me to give hard knocks before
I reached success. But now I shrank from the jostle and bustle and harsh
competitions of real life; and as both my mother and Mr. Floyd wished
nothing so much as that I should be guarded from all effort and fatigue
at this epoch, everything conspired to unfit me for an active career,
and to make me a mere looker-on--not a worker, but a musing,
disappointed spectator.
But when I was about eighteen I returned and entered the junior year at
college with Jack Holt and Harry Dart. I had felt some pride in keeping
up with them, and had enjoyed the advantage in Jamaica of the society of
an Oxford graduate who was coaching the two sons of a wealthy planter to
fit them to enter an English university. I read with him, and was well
able to pass my examination.
What it was for me to resume my old familiar intercourse with Holt and
Dart I could never write down here. My two years in the tropics had not
been joyless--indeed, considering all things, they had been singularly
happy years--still, I had felt like a child shut out from the sunshiny
place where his mates are playing. I had become patient, contemplative
and resigned, and in study and in studious observation of Nature in her
rarest beauty and most mighty and invincible development I had almost
forgotten the deliciousness of a selfish and individual hope, the
pleasures of happy and careless youth.
But as soon as I entered college I became sufficiently absorbed in the
actual. Neither Holt nor Dart had changed in the slightest degree,
except that Jack wore trim English whiskers and looked quite
middle-aged, and Harry was engaged in nursing the incipient down of a
moustache, and was the tallest, handsomest, cleverest fellow in his
class. Jack had always been the closest of students, and his old
diligence had not abated here: he kept up with the rest by dint of solid
hard work. Harry flung scholarship to the winds of course, but made a
special career for himself which won him more admiration from everybody
except the faculty than any amount of legitimate industry. He was a
fluent and ready debater; he wrote for the college journal; his high
animal spirits brought everybody about him, and his mind seemed ever
eager and poised for flight: he was ready in wit; decried trifling
subjects, yet would dispute for two hours over an absurdity; was
dexterous and unanswerable in his syllogisms; would advance the crudest
and most untenable theory, defend it, reducing the arguments of his
opponents to meaningless folly, conquer apparently by both wit and
reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it
into senseless atoms, and dismiss it as unworthy of a thought. In short,
among us lads, busy with books and full of admiration of our own
cleverness, he was delightful; and among other ostentatious pedantries
such as prevail at college his passed unrebuked. When he tried his wits
with Mr. Floyd, that gentleman implored him for God's sake to hold his
tongue and to consult Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_, book 2, chapter 4,
and discover the opinion of sensible men concerning youthful intellects
like his own.
I appeared to poor enough advantage at first, and was almost afraid to
speak in the curious and motley society which thronged our rooms. The
quick wit, the ready epigram and squib, the oppressive and multitudinous
puns in every language,--all served to stun and confuse me, fixed as I
was in grave and quiet habits of mind and thought. It was amazing to me
at first with what ease many of the boys had acquired clear ideas upon
every question of the day, and with what brilliancy they could advance
them, while I was tongue-tied from modesty or reserve. Presently,
however, I discovered that these promising young gentlemen were not so
wondrous wise after all. I dismissed my fears, felt less fastidious
about the emphatic utterance of a thoughtless opinion, and soon was as
loud-tongued as any in my demand that the world should be made over at
once to suit men of our calibre. At first they were all very tender and
patient with me, but when I grew a trifle bolder my little gravities
became the target for everybody's wit, and I dare say I was much
improved by having my mannerisms and elegancies knocked rudely off from
me.
Every boy is fortunate who carries the oldest and best associations of
his life into his university career; and Harry and I were supremely
lucky in always having Jack Holt with us in the old way, and being able
in a world of transient delusions and attractions of absorbing charm to
fall back upon something real--an influence which could not be
overturned by our eagerness for fashion and novelty, and which, if
forgotten for a moment, reasserted itself with vital force to atone for
such a base neglect. Not that Jack claimed anything from us: perhaps his
power over us was commensurate with the modesty and dignity of his
character. His regard was a necessary note in the harmony of our
well-being: his disapprobation was a voice which cried "Shame!" to us,
although he never uttered a reproach. I felt all this as well as Harry,
but he, of course, undisciplined and untrained, possessed more ardor and
a more decided temperament than I: his aberrations were wider; and, as
the pendulum must always swing back to the right as far as it bounded to
the left, he came in his repentance as much closer to his cousin than
did I as his deviations had exceeded mine. No wonder Jack loved him--not
with impetuosity, for Jack was never impetuous: all his feelings were
deep, calm, patient, tender, unconquerable by time or chance. The two
felt that mutual attraction which opposites and counterparts possess.
Harry was the most popular man in his class. Nature had done everything
for him, and lavished those gifts of which she is usually most sparing.
He had a good mind and genial wit; a relish for every form of enjoyment;
a perfect form, the glorious beauty of a Greek god, with crisp golden
curls, brilliant deep-set eyes of blue, noble and chiselled features;
frank manners which none could resist; spirits which nothing could
depress; an impetuous temper, but passing like a flash the moment it was
spent. Jack, on the other hand, had no beauty, and was regarded by those
whom he did not care for as a dull fellow. He was a little slow, and had
slight appreciation of wit except to admire every evidence of it in
Harry. He had certain settled objects in life, and spent none of his
forces on the pleasant distractions which the rest of us sought on the
way. He had been born with a sort of reposeful energy, which had always
impressed me with the conviction that no ordinary situation was enough
for him; and at college there was something disproportionate in his
position among light-hearted boys, so that I never wondered that he
found our aims trivial. He possessed to the full that force of character
by which a man masters himself, always keeps himself in check, and in
times of risk and extremity of peril can suffice unto his own needs and
courageously resist sorrow, misfortune and disappointment.
But while Harry, full of lawless and uncontrollable impulses, had a
stormy and untried future before him, in which he was to be obliged to
work hard for all his successes, Jack's seemed a dazzling vista of
prosperity and ease. He was already engaged to the girl he loved; he was
the only son of a man whose wealth was enormous; and while the rest of
us were to be hungrily gazing into the world's windows with our cold
hands in our empty pockets, he was calmly to take the prettiest girl we
knew by the hand and lead her away into a fairyland whose glories we
might only guess at. But he took all his prospects very quietly: not
even for the sake of love did he neglect his work. He rarely spoke of
Georgy, and I knew that it would never be his fault to illuminate with
too bright a glare the sweet mysteries of the love that must lie between
them. I saw him sometimes writing to her with her picture before him.
"What do you suppose he writes about?" Harry used to ask me on such
occasions. "She cares little enough about fine sentiments, even if he
were given to that sort of thing; and I can't believe that he is very
ostentatious in declaring his passion. I don't think she will ever pass
that criticism upon his epistles that some old party did upon a pudding:
'Too many plums and not enough suet.' I confess I cannot guess how he
contrives to fill his six regulation pages."
"I don't see that it concerns us, at all events."
"Very true. But she would show me his letters if I asked her to. I
wonder how Jack likes a certain ease she has in other men's society?
What claws are to a cat, what the sting is to the bee, what its poison
is to the upas tree, coquetry is to Georgy Lenox. I wish him joy of
her, but wash my hands of the engagement."
He spoke with some heat, which was his wont in every allusion to Jack's
love-affair. But I knew that Harry had a dozen flirtations on hand, and
the fatalest effect of the false is its power of destroying our delicate
and just perception of the true.