So Victor went up to Trinity, and returned for the Christmas vacation on
the heels of an announcement that he had won a scholarship. He had
grown more manly and serious, and he smoked a tobacco which sorely tried
Miss Bracy's distinguished nose; but he kept the boyish laugh--the laugh
which always seemed to them to call invitingly from the door of his
soul, "Why don't you enter and read me? The house is clean and full of
goodwill--Come!" But though they never ceased trying, they could never
penetrate to those inner chambers. Sometimes--though they might be
talking of most trivial matters--the appeal would suddenly grow
pathetic, almost plangent, "What is this that shuts me off from you?
We sit together and love one another: why am I set apart?" Time was
when he had seemed to them consciously reticent, almost of set purpose;
but now it was they who, looking within the doorway, saw the dead woman
standing there with finger on lip.
He made no intimate friends at Cambridge; yet was popular and something
of a figure in his College, which had marked him down for high--perhaps
the highest--university honours, and was pleasantly astonished to find
him also a good cricketer. His good looks attracted men; they asked his
name, were told it, and exclaimed, "Bracy? Not the man Trinity is
running for Senior Wrangler?" With this double reputation he might have
won a host of friends, and his father and Miss Bracy would gladly have
welcomed one, in hope that such companionship might exorcise the ghost:
but he kept his way, liking and liked by men, yet aloof; with many
acquaintances, censorious of none, influenced by none; avoiding when he
disapproved, but not judging, and in no haste even to disapprove; easy
to approach, and almost eager for goodwill, yet in the end inaccessible.
His first Easter vacation he spent with a reading-party in Cumberland.
There he first tasted the "sacred fury" of the mountains and
mountain-climbing, and in Switzerland the next August it grew to be a
passion. He returned to it again and again, in Cumberland playing at
the game with half a dozen fellow-undergraduates whom he had bitten with
the mania; but in Switzerland during the Long vacations giving himself
over to a glut of it, with only a guide and porter for company--
sometimes alone, if he could ever be said to be alone. As in
mathematics so in his sport, the cold heights were the mistresses he
wooed; the peaks called to him, the rare atmosphere, the glittering
wastes. He neither scorned danger nor was daunted by it. Below in the
forests he would sing aloud, but the summits held him silent. As an old
pastor at Zermatt told Mr. Frank, he would come down from a mountain
"like Moses, with his face illumined."
He started on his third visit to Switzerland early in July: in the
second week in August Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank were to join him at
Chamounix, and thence the three would make a tour together. He started
in the highest spirits, and halted at the gate to wave his ice-axe
defiantly. . . .