"Your conduct last night, sir."
"I was wandering in the fields, sir."
"Wandering in the fields!" In the Dean's formal and regular mind such a
proceeding was wholly unintelligible; fancy a sensible member of a
college wandering in the fields on a wet stormy night past twelve
o'clock! "Really, Mr Kennedy, you must excuse us, but we can hardy
accept so fantastic an explanation; we can hardly believe that you had
no ulterior designs."
Kennedy was bothered and fretful; he was not thinking of Deans or
Seniors just then; his thoughts were reverting to his father's
implacable anger, and to Julian's forbidding him to hope for the love of
Violet Home. Weary of the talking, and careless of explaining anything
to them, and with a short return of his old contempt, he wished to cut
short the discussion, and merely said--
"I can't help what you accept or what you believe."
The Seniors had a little discussion among themselves, in which the
opinion of Mr Norton appeared to be over-borne by the majority of
votes, and then the Senior Dean said shortly--
"Mr Kennedy, we have come to the decision that it is undesirable for
you to remain at Saint Werner's at present, until you have mended your
ways, and taken a different view of the duties and responsibilities of
college life. You are rusticated for a year. You must leave
to-morrow."
Kennedy bowed and left the room. He, too, had been coming to a
decision, and one that rendered all minor ones a matter of no
consequence to him. During all the wet, and feverish, and sleepless
night he had been determining what to do, and the event of this morning
confirmed him still further. He was rusticated for a year; where could
he go? Not to his father and his home, where every eye would look on
him as a disgraced and characterless man; not to any of his relations or
friends, who would regard him perhaps as a shame and burden;--no, there
was but one home for him, and that was the long home, undisturbed
beneath the covering of the grave.
The burden and mystery of life lay heavily on him--its lasting
calamities and vanishing joys, its trials and disappointments. He would
try whether, in a new state of life, the same distorted individuality
was a necessary possession. Would it be necessary there also to live
two lives in one, to have a soul, within whose precincts curse wrestled
with blessing, good with evil, and life with death? As life went with
him then, he would rather escape from it even into annihilation; he
groaned under it, and in spite of all he had heard or read, he had no
fear whatever of the after-death. If he had _any_ feeling about _that_,
it was a feeling of curiosity alone. He could not wholly condemn
himself: he felt that however much evil might have mastered him good was
the truest and most distinctive element of his being. He loved it even
when he abandoned it, and yielded himself to sin. He could not believe
that for these frailties, he would be driven into an existence of
unmitigated pain.
He had no fear, no shadow of fear of the state of death, for he forgot
that he would carry himself, his unchanged being--Conscience, Habit and
Memory--into the other world. What he dreaded was the spasm of dying--
the convulsion that was to snap the thousand silver strings in the harp
of life. This he shuddered at, but he consoled himself that it would be
over in a moment.
He took no food that day, but wrote to his father, to Eva, to Julian,
Violet, and De Vayne. He told them his purpose, and prayed their
forgiveness for all the wrongs he had done them. And then there seemed
no more to do. With weak unsteady steps he paced his room, and looked
at the old Swiss chamois-gun above the door. He took it down and
handled it. It was a coarse clumsy weapon, and he could not trust it to
effect his purpose. Shunning observation, he walked by back streets and
passages until he came to a gunsmith's shop, where he bought a large
pistol, under pretence of wanting it for the purposes of travel.
He carried it home himself, but instead of returning straight to his
rooms, he was tempted to stroll for a last time about the grounds. The
delightful softness of the darkening air on that spring evening, and the
cheerful gleam of lamps leaping up here and there between the trees, and
flickering on the quiet river, enticed him up the glorious old entwined
avenue into the shadow of the great oaks beyond, until he found himself
leaning between the weeping willows over the bridge of Merham Hall,
looking on the still grey poetic towers, and the three motionless
reposing swans, and the gloaming of the west. And so, still thinking,
thinking, thinking, he slowly wandered home.
As he had determined to commit suicide that night, it mattered little to
him at what hour it was done, and opening the first book on the table,
he tried to kill time until it grew later and darker. The book happened
to be a Bible, and conscious how much it jarred with his present frame
of mind, and his guilty purpose, he threw it down again; _but not until
his eye had caught the words_:--
"AND HE SAW THE ANGEL OF THE LORD STANDING IN THE WAY."
The verse haunted him against his will, till he half shuddered at the
dim light which the moon made, as it struggled through the curtains only
partially drawn, into the quaint old room. He would delay no longer,
and loaded the pistol with a dreadful charge, which should not fail of
carrying death.
Some fancy seized him to put out the lights, and then with a violent
throbbing at the heart, and a wild prayer for God's mercy at that
terrible hour, he took the pistol in his hand.
At that very instant,--when there was hardly the motion of a hair's
breadth between him and fate,--what was it that startled his attention,
and caused his hand to drop, and fixed him there with open mouth and
wild gaze, and caused him to shiver like the leaves of the acacia in a
summer wind?
Right before him,--half hidden by the window curtains, and half drawing
them back,--clear and distinct he saw the spirit of his dead mother with
uplifted finger and sad reproachful eyes fixed upon her son. The
countenance so sorrowfully beautiful, the long bright gleaming of the
white robe, the tresses floating down over the shoulders like a golden
veil, for one instant he saw them, not dim and shadowy like the fading
outlines of a dream, but with all the marked full character of living
vision.
"Oh mother, mother!" he whispered, as he stretched out his hands, and
sank trembling upon his knees, and bowed his head; but as he raised his
head again, there was nothing there; only the glimmer of lamps about the
court, and the pale moonlight streaming through the curtains, partly
drawn, into the quaint old room.
Unable to trust himself with the murderous weapon in his hand even for a
moment, yet swept from his evil purpose by the violent reflux of new and
better thoughts, he fired the pistol into the air. The barrel,
enormously overloaded, burst in the discharge, and uttering a cry, he
fell fainting, with his right hand shattered, to the ground.
His cry and the loud report of the explosion raised the alarm, and as
the men rushed up and forced open the door of his room, they found him
weltering in his blood upon the floor.