"When all the blandishments from life are gone,
The coward slinks to death;--the brave live on!"
Of all the sicknesses that can happen to the human soul, the deadliest
and the most incurable is the feeling of despair--and this was the
malady which now infected every vein of Kennedy's moral and intellectual
life.
Could he but have conquered his pride so far as to take but one person
into his confidence, all might have been well. But Violet--could he
ever tell Violet of sins which her noble heart must render so
inconceivable as almost to make it impossible for her to sympathise with
one who committed them? And Eva; could he ever wound the tender
affection of his sweet sister, by revealing to her the disgrace of the
brother whom, from her childhood, she had idolised? He sometimes
thought that he would confess to Julian or Lillyston; but his courage
failed him when the time came, and he fed on his own heart in solitude,
avoiding the society of men.
The sore burden of a self-reproaching spirit wore him down. He had
fallen so often now, and swerved so often from the path of temperance,
rectitude, and honour, that he began to regard himself as a hopeless
reprobate--as one who had been weighed and found wanting--tested of God,
and deliberately set aside.
And so step by step the devil thrust him into desperation, and strove
thereby to clinch the hopelessness of his estate. With wild fierce
passion, Kennedy flung himself into sins he had never known before;
angrily he laid waste the beauty and glory of the vineyard whose hedge
had been broken down; a little entrance to the sanctuary had been opened
to evil thoughts, and they, when once admitted, soon flung back wider
and wider the golden gates, till the revelling band of worse
wickednesses rushed in and defiled the altar, and trampled on the virgin
floors, and defaced the cedarn walls with images of idolatry and
picturings of sin. Because he had sunk into the slough of despond, he
would be heedless of the mud that gathered on his garments. Was he not
ruined already? Could anything much worse befall him than had befallen
him already? No; he would sin on now and take his fill.
It was a short period of his life; but in no other period did he suffer
so much, or shake more fatally the foundations of all future happiness.
It was emphatically a sin against his own soul, and as such it affected
his very look. Those blue laughing eyes were clouded over, and the
bloom died away from his cheeks, and the ingenuous beauty from his
countenance, as the light of the Shechinah grew pale and dim in the
inmost sanctuary. Kennedy was not mastered by impulse, but driven by
despair.
Nor did he take any precaution to shield himself from punishment--the
punishment of outward circumstance and natural consequence--as his moral
abasement proceeded. His acquaintances shunned him, his friends dropped
away from him, and the guiltiness of the present received a tinge of
deeper horror from the gloom of the future.
All that could be done, Julian did. He warned, he expostulated, he
reminded of purer and happier--of pure and happy days. But he did not
know the bitter fountain of despondency whence flowed those naphthaline
streams of passion. At last he said--
"Kennedy, I have not often spoken to you of my dear sister; it is time
to speak of her now. Your conduct proves to me that you do not and
cannot love her."
Kennedy listened in silence; his face bowed down upon his hands. "You
_could_ not go on as you are doing if you loved her, for love allows no
meaner, no unhallowed fires to pollute her vestal flame. Your love must
be a pretence--a thing of the past. It was only possible, Kennedy, when
you were worthier than now you are."
He groaned deeply, but still said nothing.
"Kennedy," continued Julian, "I have loved you as a friend, as a
brother; I love you still most earnestly, and you must not be too much
pained at what I say; but I have come to a determination which I must
tell you, and by which I must abide. Your engagement with Violet must
cease."
"Does SHE say so?" he asked in a hollow voice.
"No, she does not know, Kennedy, what I know of you; but she will trust
my deep affection, and know that I act solely for her good. The blow
may almost kill her, but better that she should die than that her life
should be ever connected--oh, that you should have driven me to say it--
with one so stained as yours!"
"Aye!" said Kennedy bitterly, "stab hard, for the knife is in your hand.
Fling dust on those who are down already--it is the world's way. I see
through it all, Julian Home; you would gladly get rid of me, that Violet
may wear a coronet. No comparison between a penniless and ruined
undergraduate, and a handsome, rich young viscount."
"Unjust! ungenerous!" answered Julian, with indignation; "you have
poisoned your own true heart, Kennedy, or you would not utter the lie
which you must disbelieve. Edward Kennedy, I will not attempt to rebut
your unworthy suspicions; you know neither my character nor Violet's, or
you would not have dared to utter them. No--it is clearer to me than
ever that you are no fit suitor for my sister. Passion and weakness
have dragged you very low. I trust and pray that you may recover
yourself again."
A sudden rush of tears came to his eyes as he turned away to leave his
earliest and best-loved college friend. But Kennedy stopped him, and
said wildly--
"Stop, Julian Home, you shall hear me speak. I can hardly believe that
you do this of your own responsibility--without Violet's--nay, nay, I
must not call her so--without your sister's consent. And if this be so,
hear me. Tell her that I scorn the heart which would thus fling away
its plighted love: tell her that she has committed a great sin in thus
rejecting me: tell her that _she_ is now responsible for all my
future,--that whatever errors I may fall into, whatever sins I may
commit, whatever disgrace or ruin I may incur, _she_ is the author of
them. Tell her that if I ever live to do ungenerous acts, or ever yield
to bursts of foolish passion, the acts are hers, not mine; _she_ will
have caused them; my life lies at her feet. Tell her this before it is
too late. What? you still wish to hurry away? Go, then." He almost
pushed Julian out, and banged the door after him.
Amazed at this paroxysm of wrath and madness, Julian went down-stairs
with a slow step and a heavy, heavy heart; above all, he dreaded the
necessity of breaking to Violet the heart-rending intelligence of his
decision, and the circumstances which caused it. He trembled to do it,
for he knew not how crushing the weight might prove. At last he
determined to write to his mother, and to beg her to bear for him the
pain of telling that which her womanly tact and maternal sympathy might
make less overwhelming to be borne.
But Kennedy, after Julian's words, rushed out of his rooms, and it was
night. He left the college, and wandered into the fields--he knew not
whither, nor with what intent.
His brain was on fire. The last gleam that lent brightness to his life
had been extinguished; the friend whom he loved best had cast him off;
his name was sullied; his love rejected. It was not _thought_ which
kept him in a tumult, but only a physical consciousness of dreadful,
irremediable calamity; and but for the wind which blew so coldly and
savagely in his face, and the rain that soaked his clothes and cooled
the fever of his forehead, he feared that he might go mad.
He did not return to the college till long past midnight; and the old
porter, as he got out of bed to open the gate, could not help saying to
him in a tone of reproach--
"Oh, Mr Kennedy, sir--excuse me, sir--but these are bad ways."
The words were lost upon him: he went up to his room, and threw himself,
without taking off his clothes, upon his bed. No sleep came to him, and
in the morning--damp, weary, and feverish as he had been--his look was
inexpressibly pitiable and haggard.
The imperious demands of health forced him to take some notice of his
condition; and he was about to put on clean clothes, and take some warm
tea about ten in the morning, when the Master's servant came to tell him
that the Seniority desired his presence.
He at once knew that it must be for his irregularity of the previous
night, which, in the agitation of other thoughts, had not occurred to
him before. He remembered, too, that the Senior Dean had only recently
threatened him that, in consequence of his late misdoings, the next
offence would be visited with summary and final punishment.
Kennedy received rather hard treatment at the hand of the Senior Dean,
who was a very worthy and excellent man, but so firm and punctilious
that he could neither conceive nor tolerate the existence of beings less
precise in their nature than himself. Kind and well-intentioned, he was
utterly unfit for the guidance of young men, because he was totally
deficient in those invaluable qualities--sympathy and tact. He had
early taken a dislike to Kennedy, in consequence of some very harmless
frivolities of his freshman's year. Kennedy, in his frolicsome and
happy moods, had, in ways, childish, perhaps, but completely harmless,
offended the sensitive dignity of the college official, and these
trivial eccentricities the Dean regarded as heinous faults--the symptoms
of a reckless and irreverent character. There was one particular
transaction which gave him more than usual offence, in which Kennedy,
hearing a very absurd story at a don's party, while the Dean was
present, parodied it with such exquisite humour and such complete
command of countenance, that all the other men, in spite of the official
presence, had indecorously broken into fits of laughter. It is a great
pity when rulers and teachers take such terrible fright at little
outbreaks of mere animal and boyish spirits.
The Dean was inclined therefore from the first to take the most serious
view of Kennedy's proceedings, even when they were not as questionable
as recently they had been. Instead of trying to enter into a young
man's feelings and temptations with consideration and forbearance, the
Dean regarded them from a moral watchtower of unapproachable altitude,
and hence to him the errors which he was sometimes obliged to punish
were not regarded as human failings, but as monstrous and inexplicable
phenomena. He could not in the least understand Kennedy; he only looked
at him as a wild, and objectionable, and irregular young man; while
Kennedy reciprocated his pity by a hardly-concealed contempt.
So, as Kennedy took cap and gown, and walked across the court to the
combination-room, he became pretty well aware that a very heavy sentence
was hanging over his head. He cared little for it; nothing that Saint
Werner's or its authorities could do, would wound him half so deeply as
what he was already suffering, or cause the iron to rankle more
painfully in his soul. He felt as a man who is in a dream.
He stood before them with a look of utter vacancy and listlessness, the
result partly of physical weariness, partly of complete indifference.
He was aware that the Dean, undisturbed this time, was haranguing him to
his heart's content, but he had very little notion of what he was
saying. At last his ear caught the question--
"Have you any explanation to offer of your conduct, Mr Kennedy?"