It was the end of Term, nearly two years after that interview in
Richmond Park which, as both Vane and Enid had then believed, was for
them the parting of the ways. Vane was sitting in a deep-seated, Russian
wicker-chair in his cosy study, and opposite him, in a similar chair,
was another man with whom he had been talking somewhat earnestly for
about an hour.
To-morrow would be Commemoration Day--"Commem," to use the
undergraduate's abbreviation. There would be meetings from far and wide
of people gathered together, not only from all over the kingdom, but
from the ends of the earth as well; men and women glorying, for their
own sakes and their sons', in the long traditions of the grand old
University, the dearly-loved Alma Mater, nursing-mother of their fathers
and fathers' fathers. Here a man who had been a tutor and then a Fellow,
and was now one of His Majesty's judges; there another, who walked with
sober mien in the leggings and tunic of a Bishop, and who, in his time,
had dodged the Proctor and his bull-dogs as nimbly as the most
irresponsible undergraduate of the moment--and so on through the whole
hierarchy of the University.
The Lists were just out. Vane had fulfilled the promise of his earlier
career and had taken a brilliant double-first. He had read for Classics
and History, but he had also taken up incidentally Mental Science and
Moral Philosophy, and he had scored a first in all. If it had then been
possible for him to have had a Treble-First, it would have been his. As
it was he had won the most brilliant degree of his year--and there he
was, sitting back in his chair, blowing cloud after cloud of smoke out
of his mouth, and every now and then taking a sip out of a big cup of
tea and looking with something more than admiration at the man opposite;
a man who had only achieved a first, and who, if he had been some other
kind of man, would have been very well contented with it.
It would not, however, have needed a particularly keen student of human
nature to discover that this was not the kind of man who could rest
contented with anything like a formal success; and, after all, even a
double-first, to say nothing of a single, although a great achievement
as the final triumph of an educational course, is still only the end of
the beginning. That done, the student, armed _cap-a-pie_ in his
intellectual armour, goes forth to face something infinitely sterner and
more pitiless than tutors or proctors, ay, even than Masters and
Chancellors themselves--the presiding genius of that infinitely greater
University called the World, where taking your degree means anything
that human fortune can give you, and where being plucked may mean
anything from a clerkship in an office to selling matches in the gutter.
"I _am_ sorry you missed your double, old man!" said Vane, continuing
the conversation after a pause that had lasted for two or three minutes.
"Still, at any rate, you've got your first, and, after all, a first in
Classics and a second in History is not to be sneezed at, and I don't
suppose it would have mattered a hang to you whether you had come out
anywhere or not."
As he said this there was a sudden contraction of his companion's jaw,
which resulted in the clean biting through of the vulcanite mouthpiece
of his pipe. He spat the pieces out into the fireplace, and said in a
perfectly smooth voice:
"I wonder what I did that for! I suppose that is one of the
circumstances in which people say that it does a man good to swear."
"I should certainly have sworn under the circumstances," said Vane, "or
at least, I should have said something that one would not say in the
presence of one's maiden aunt, but then, of course, you Ernshaw--you're
above all that sort of thing. You have your feelings so well under
control that you don't even need to swear to relieve them. However,
that's not quite the subject. What am I to do? Am I to go back to her,
repenting of the evil of my ways, ask her to pardon a passing madness,
and lay my academic honours at her feet--as God knows I would be only
too glad to do----"
"Wait a moment, Maxwell. Don't say anything more just now, and let me
think a bit. We have been over this subject a good many times already,
but now we have come to the crisis, to the cross-ways, in fact. You have
made me your confidant in this matter. The future of your life and hers
depends upon what you decide to do now, and, not only that, but there is
your father and her father and mother--the completion, that is to say,
of three other lives. It is very, very serious. It is more than serious,
it is solemn. Wait a moment, let me think."
Vane leant back in his chair, dropped his pipe quietly on the floor, and
waited. He knew that Mark Ernshaw, his chum at Eton and his friend at
Balliol--this tall, sparely-built man, with dark hair, high, somewhat
narrow forehead, and big, deep-set, brown eyes, delicate features, and
the somewhat too finely-moulded chin which, taken together, showed him
to the eye that sees to be the enthusiast as well as the man of
intellect, perhaps of genius--was not thinking in the ordinary meaning
of the word. He was praying, and when he saw that this was so he folded
his hands over his eyes, and for nearly ten minutes there was absolute
silence, Vane was thinking and his friend was praying. Perhaps, in
another sense, Vane was praying too, for the strong religious bias which
he had inherited from his father had, since the great crisis of his life
had been passed, and during his close intimacy with Mark Ernshaw, grown
stronger than ever.
He had told him everything. They had gone over the whole of the dismal
history again and again. They had thrashed out the problem in all its
bearings, now arguing with and now against each other, and here was the
last day. To-morrow in the Theatre they would receive the formal
acknowledgment which would crown their academic careers. Vane's
self-imposed probation would then be over, the crisis would be passed,
and his life's course fixed for good and all.
"Well, old man," said Vane, at length, "have you settled it? Upon my
word I feel almost like a man under sentence of death waiting for a
reprieve. But, after all, why should I? I haven't touched a drop of
alcohol for over a year. I needn't say anything about the work I have
done, for you know as much about that as I do myself. I am as sane and
healthy as any man of my age need want to be. Of course, as I have told
you, it was mutually agreed between us, or rather, between her parents
and my father, that we should not meet or correspond until after I had
taken my degree. I've kept the bargain both ways. I haven't written to
her or had a word from her all the time. And now, what is the future to
be? Shall I take up the threads of the old life and marry and live
happily ever afterwards, as they say in the story-books--or shall I----?
No, I don't think I could do that. Don't you think I've shown strength
of mind enough to counteract the weakness of that one night? For the
sake of all you've ever loved, old man, don't look so serious. You're
not going to tell me that it really is all over, and that I shall have
to give her up after all?"
"Yes, you must," said Ernshaw. "If you have any faith worthy of the name
in God or man, it is your duty, not only as a man but as a Christian, to
say good-bye to her as man to woman. It is your duty, and you must."
"No, by God, I can't!" cried Maxwell, springing to his feet and facing
him with clenched teeth, set features, and hands gripped up into fists
as though he were facing an enemy rather than a friend.
Ernshaw rose slowly from his seat. His face seemed to Vane to be
transfigured. He looked him straight in the eyes, and said, in a voice
only a little above a whisper, and yet thrilling with an intense
emotion:
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain! You have
asked for my advice and my guidance, Maxwell. I have given them to you,
but not before I have sought for advice and counsel from an infinitely
higher Source. I believe I have had my answer. As I have had it so I
have given it to you. I have spent a good many hours thinking over this
problem of yours--and a harder problem few men have ever had to
solve--but my fixed and settled conviction is that during this last
conversation of yours with Miss Raleigh you bore yourself like a man;
you did your duty; you put your hand to the plough. You are not going to
look back now, are you?"
Vane dropped back into his seat and folded his hands over his eyes
again, and said with a note of weariness in his voice:
"Well, yes, old man, I suppose you're right, and yet, Ernshaw, it's very
hard, so hard that it seems almost impossible. They're coming up to
'Commem' to-morrow--I was obliged to ask them, you know. I should only
have to hold out my hand and feel hers in it and say that--well, that
I'd thought better of it, and everything would be just as it was before.
We could begin again just as if _that_ had never happened.
"You know it's all I've thought about, all I've worked for, ever since
we came back from India together. Honestly, old man, she really is--of
course, with the exception of the Governor--everything there is in the
world for me now. If I have to give her up, what else is there? You know
what I was going to do. Now that I've got my degree I should have a
splendid opening in the Foreign Office. The way would be absolutely
clear before me--a mere matter of brains and interest--and I know I've
got the interest--and I should be an Ambassador, perhaps a Prime
Minister some day, and she would be my wife--and yet without her it
wouldn't be worth anything to me. Ernshaw, isn't it a bit too much to
ask a man on the threshold of his real life to give up all that for the
sake of an idea--well, a scientific conviction if you like."
"Strait is the Gate, and Narrow is the Way!" exclaimed Ernshaw. He
seemed to tower above him as he stood over his chair; Vane looked up and
saw that his eyes were glowing and his features set. His lips and voice
trembled as he spoke. His whole being seemed irradiated by the light of
an almost divine enthusiasm.
"Maxwell, will you be one of the few that find it, or one of the many
that miss it, and take the other way? As a good Christian, as the son of
a Christian man, you know where _that_ one leads to.
"After all, Maxwell," he continued, more quietly, "the trials of life
are like lessons in school. You needed this experience or you would not
have got it. In every fight you must win or lose. In this one you can
and must be the victor. I think, nay, I know, that I am pointing out to
you the way to victory, the way to final triumph over all the evils that
have forced you to a choice between following your own most worthy
inclinations, and what you now think an intolerable misery and an
impossible sacrifice."
He held out his hand as he spoke. Vane did not know it at the time, but
in reality it was a hand held out to save a drowning man. It was a
moment in which the fate of two lives was to be decided for right or
wrong, for good or ill, and for all time--perhaps, even for more than
Time. Vane gripped Ernshaw's hand, and, as the two grips closed, he
looked straight into the deep-brown eyes, and said:
"Ernshaw, that will do. By some means you have made me feel to-night
just as I did that day when I was talking with her the last time. Yes,
you are right. You have shewn me the right way, and, God helping me,
I'll take it. I suppose if she doesn't marry me she'll marry Garthorne;
but still, I see she mustn't marry me. They are coming down for 'Commem'
to-morrow. I shall see her then, and I'll tell her that I have decided
that there must be an end of everything except friendship between us.
Yes, that is the only way after all--and, now, one other word, old man."
"And that is?" said Ernshaw, smiling, almost laughing, in the sheer joy
of his great triumph, as he so honestly believed it to be, over the
Powers of Evil.
"Well, it's this," said Vane, "my own life is settled now. I can't marry
Enid and, of course, I'll marry no one else. I shall do as you have
often advised me to do--take Orders and do the work that God puts
nearest to my hand. I know that the governor will agree with me when I
put it to him in that way. But then there's some one else."
"Your sister, you mean," said Ernshaw.
"My half----"
"Your sister, I said," Ernshaw interrupted, quickly. "Well, what about
her?"
"It's this way," continued Vane, somewhat awkwardly, "you see--of
course, as you say, she is my sister in a way, but she has absolutely
refused everything that the governor and I have offered her. We even
asked her to come and live with us, we offered, in short, to acknowledge
her as one of the family."
"And what did she say to that?"
"She simply refused. She said that she had not made her life, but that
she was ready to take it as it is. She said that she wasn't responsible
for the world as it's made, she'd never owed anyone a shilling since
she left her mother--and mine--and she never intended to. We tried
everything with her, really we did, and, of course, the governor did a
great deal more than I did, but it wasn't a bit of use. It's a horrible
business altogether, isn't it?"
"On the contrary, it is anything but that," replied Ernshaw, slowly and
deliberately as though he were considering each word as he uttered it.
"Maxwell, you have just decided to take Orders. I made up my mind to do
that long ago. We are both of us fairly well off. I have eight or nine
hundred a year of my own, and I daresay you have more, so we can go and
do our work without troubling about the loaves and fishes."
"Yes," replied Vane, "certainly, but that's not quite answering my
question, old fellow:--I mean about Carol."
"Quite so," he replied, "because I am going to ask you another. Do you
think you know me and like me well enough to have me for a
brother-in-law?"
"Good Heavens, you don't mean _that_, Ernshaw, do you?"
"I do," he said, "that is if she likes me well enough. Of course, I
haven't seen her yet, and she might refuse me; but from all that you've
told me about her, I'm half in love with her already, and--well, we
needn't say anything more about that just now. Take me up to Town with
you after Commem., introduce me to her and leave the rest to me and her.
If ever a girl was made for the wife of such a man as I hope to be some
day, that girl, Maxwell, is your sister."
"But, Ernshaw, that is impossible. It may be only your good nature that
prompted you to say this, or it may be that, without intention, I have
somehow led you to look upon her as part of my destiny; but you forget,
or perhaps, I have not told you that we have lost her utterly for the
time being at least, she disappeared quite suddenly. My father and I
have made every effort to trace her, but without the slightest success."
"Then try again," replied Ernshaw, "and I will help in the search. At
any rate, when we do find her, as I am sure we shall some day, if she
will have me, I will ask her to be my wife."