Julian Home Part 36

Late one night he was returning to his rooms from the foul haunts of squalid dissipation and living death, when the thought of his own intolerable condition pressed on him with a heavier than usual weight.

It was a very cloudy night, and he had long exceeded the usual college hours. The wind tossed about his clothes, and dashed in his face a keen impalpable sleet, while nothing dispelled the darkness except the occasional gleam of a lamp struggling fitfully with the driving mist.

Hazlet reached Saint Werner's wet and miserable; in returning he had lost his way, and wandered into the most disreputable and poverty-stricken streets, the very homes of thievery and dirt, where he seriously feared for his personal safety. By the time he got to the college gates he was drenched through and through, and while his body s.h.i.+vered with the cold air, the condition of his mind was agitated and terrified, and the sudden blaze of light that fell on him from the large college lamp, as the gates opened, dazzled his unaccustomed eyes.

Hastily running across the court to his own rooms, he groped his way-- giddy and c.r.a.pulous--giddy and c.r.a.pulous--up the dark and narrow stair-case, and after some fumbling with his key opened the door.

Lillyston, who was just going to bed after a long evening of hard work, heard his footstep on the stairs, and thought with sorrow that he had not mended his old bad ways. He heard him open the door, and then a long wild shriek, followed by the sound of some one falling, rang through the buildings.

In an instant, Lillyston had darted up-stairs, and the other men who "kept" on the stair-case, jumped out of bed hastily, thrust on their slippers, and also ran out to see what was the matter. As Lillyston reached the threshold of Hazlet's rooms, he stumbled against something, and stooping down found that it was the senseless body of Hazlet himself stretched at full length upon the floor.

He looked up, but saw nothing to explain the mystery; the rooms were in darkness, except that a dull, blue flame, flickering over the black and red relics of the fire, threw fantastic gleams across the furniture and ceiling, and gave an odd, wild appearance to the cap and gown that hung beside the door.

Lillyston was filled with surprise, and lit the candle on the table.

Lifting Hazlet on the sofa, he carefully looked at him to see if he was correct in his first surmise, that the unhappy man had swallowed poison, or committed suicide in some other way. But there was no trace of anything of the kind, and Hazlet merely appeared to have fainted and fallen suddenly.

Aided by Noel, one of those who had been alarmed by that piercing shriek, Lillyston took the proper means to revive Hazlet from his fainting fit, and put him to bed. He rapidly recovered his consciousness, but earnestly begged them not to press him on the subject of his alarm, respecting which he was unable or unwilling to give them any information.

The next morning he was very ill; excitement and anxiety brought on a brain fever, which kept him for many weary weeks in his sick-room, and from which he had not fully recovered until after a long stay at Ildown.

As he lost, in consequence of this attack, the whole of the ensuing term, he was obliged to degrade, as it is called, _i e_ to place his name on the list of the year below; and he did not return to Camford till the following October, where his somewhat insignificant individuality had been almost forgotten.

Let us antic.i.p.ate a little to throw light on what we have narrated.

When Hazlet _did_ come back to undergraduate life, he at once sought the alienated friends from whom he had been separated ever since the disastrous period of his acquaintances.h.i.+p with Bruce. He came back to them penitent and humble, with those convictions now existing in his mind in their reality and genuineness, which before he had only simulated so successfully as to deceive himself. I will not say that he did not continue ignorant and bigoted, but he was no longer conceited and malicious. I will not say that he never showed himself dogmatic and ill-informed, but he was no longer obtrusive and uncharitable. His life was better than his dogmas, and the sincerity of his good intentions counteracted and nullified the ill effects of a narrow and unwholesome creed. There were no farther inconsistencies in his conduct, and he showed firmly, yet modestly, the line he meant to follow, and the side he meant to take. As his conscience had become scrupulous, and his life irreproachable, it mattered comparatively little that his intellectual character was tainted with fanaticism and gloom.

I would not be mistaken to mean that he found his penitence easy, or that he was, like Saint Paul, transformed as it were by a lightning flash--"a fusile Christian." I say, there were--after his two sicknesses and long suffering, and experiences bitter as wormwood--there were, I say, no more _outward_ inconsistencies in his life; but I do not say that _within_ there were no fierce, fearful struggles, so wearisome at times that it almost seemed better to yield than to feel the continued anguish of such mighty temptations. All this the man must always go through who has warmed in his bosom the viper whose poisoned fang has sent infection into his blood. But through G.o.d's grace Hazlet was victorious: and as, when the civilisation of some infant colony is advancing on the confines of a desert, the wild beasts retire before it, until they become rare, and their howling is only heard in the lonely night, and then even that sign of their fury is but a strange occurrence, until it is heard no more; so in Hazlet, the many-headed monsters, which breed in the slime of a fallen human heart, were one by one slain or driven backwards by watchfulness, and shame, and prayer.

Julian and Lillyston had never shunned his society, either when he breathed the odour of sanct.i.ty, or when he sank into the slough of wretchlessness. Both of them were sufficiently conscious of the heart's weakness to prevent them from the cold and melancholy presumption which leads weak and sinful men to desert and denounce those whom the good spirits have not yet deserted, and whom the good G.o.d has not finally condemned. As long as he sought their society, they were always open to his company, however distasteful; and the advice they gave him was tendered in simple good-will--not as though from the haughty vantage-ground of a superior excellence. Even when Hazlet was at the worst--when to be seen with him, after the publicity of his vices, involved something like a slur on a man's fair name--even in these his worst days neither Julian nor Lillyston would have refused, had he so desired it, to walk with him under the lime-tree avenue, or up and down the cloisters of Warwick's Court.

But they naturally met him more often when his manner of life was changed for the better, and were both glad to see that he had found the jewel which adversity possessed. It happened that he was with them one evening when the conversation turned on supernatural appearances, the possibility of which was maintained by Julian and Owen, while Lillyston in his genial way was pooh-poohing them altogether. Hazlet alone sat silent, but at last he said--

"I have never yet mentioned to any living soul what once happened to me, but I will do so now. Lillyston, you remember the night when I aroused you with a scream?"

"Well!" said Lillyston.

"That night I was returning in all the bitterness of remorse from places where, but for G.o.d's blessing, I might have perished utterly"--and Hazlet shuddered--"when from out of the storm and darkness I reached my room door. You know that a beam ran right across my ceiling. When I threw open the door to enter, I saw on that beam as clearly as I now see you--no, _more clearly, far_ more clearly than I now see you, for your presence makes no special impression on me, and this was burnt into my very brain--I saw there written in letters of fire--

"'AND THIS IS h.e.l.l.'

"Struck dumb with horror, I stared at it; there could be no doubt about it, the letters burned and glared and reddened before my very eyes, and seemed to wave like the northern lights, and bicker into angrier flame as I looked at them. They fascinated me as I stood there dumb and stupefied, when suddenly I saw the dark and ma.s.sive form of a hand, over which hung the skirt of a black robe, moving slowly away from the last letter. What more I _might_ have seen I cannot tell;--it was then that I fell and fainted, and my shriek startled all the men on the stair-case."

Hazlet told his story with such deep solemnity, and such hollow pauses of emotion, that the listeners sat silent for a while.

"But yet," said Lillyston, "if you come to a.n.a.lyse this, it resolves itself into nothing. You were confessedly agitated, and almost hysterical that night; your body was unstrung; you were wet through, and it was doubtless the sudden pa.s.sage from the darkness outside to the dim and uncertain glimmer of your own room, which acted so powerfully on your excited imagination, as to project your inward thoughts into a shape which you mistook for an external appearance. I remember noticing the aspect of your rooms myself that evening; the mysterious shadows, and the mingled effects of dull red firelight with black objects, together with the rustle of the red curtain in front of your window which you had left open, and the weird waving of your black gown in the draught, made such an impression even on me merely in consequence of the alarm your shriek had excited, that I could have fancied _anything_ myself, if I wasn't pretty strong-headed, and rather prosaic. As it was, I did half fancy an unknown Presence in the room."

"Yes, but you say _inward_ thoughts," replied Hazlet eagerly. "Now these _weren't_ my inward thoughts; on the contrary they flashed on me like a revelation, and the strange word, 'And,' (for I read distinctly, '_And_ this is--') was to me like an awful copula connecting time and eternity for ever. I had always thought of quite another, quite a different h.e.l.l; but this showed me for the first time that the state of sinfulness is _the_ h.e.l.l of sin. It was only the other day that I came across those lines of Milton--oh, how true they are--

"Which way I fly is h.e.l.l, _myself am h.e.l.l_, And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still gaping to devour me opens wide, To which the h.e.l.l I suffer seems a heaven."

"It was the truth conveyed in those lines which I then first discovered, and discovered, it seems to me, from without. I know very very little-- I am shamefully ignorant, but I do think that the vision of that night taught me more than a thousand volumes of scholastic theology. And let me say too," he continued humbly, "that by it I was plucked like a brand from the burning; by it my conversion was brought about."

None of the others were in a mood to criticise the phraseology of Hazlet's religious convictions, and he clearly desired that the subject of his own immediate experiences, as being one full of awfulness for him, might be dropped.

"Apropos of your argument, I care very little, Hugh," said Julian, "whether you make supernatural appearances objective or subjective. I mean I don't care whether you regard the appearance as a mere deception of the eye, wrought by the disordered workings of the brain, or as the actual presence of a supernatural phenomenon. The result, the effect, the _reality_ of the appearance is just the same in either case.

Whether the end is produced by an illusion of the senses, or an appeal to them, the end _is_ produced, and the senses _are_ impressed by something which is not in the ordinary course of human events, just as powerfully as if the ghost had flesh and blood, or the voice were a veritable pulsation of articulated air. The only thing that annoys me is a contemptuous and supercilious denial of the _facts_."

"I hold with you, Julian," said Owen. "Take for instance the innumerable recorded instances where intimation has been given of a friend's or relative's death by the simultaneous appearance of his image to some one far absent, and unconscious even of his illness. There are four ways of treating such stories--the first is to deny their truth, which is, to say the least, not only grossly uncharitable, but an absurd and impertinent caprice adopted in order to reject unpleasant evidence; the second is to account for them by an optical delusion, accidentally synchronising with the event, which seems to me a most monstrous ignoring of the law of chances; a third is to account for them by the existence of some exquisite faculty, (existing in different degrees of intensity, and in some people not existing at all), whereby physical impressions are invisibly conveyed by some mysterious sympathy of organisation a faculty of which it seems to me there are the most abundant traces, however much it may be sneered and jeered at by those shallow philosophers who believe nothing but what they can grasp with both hands: and a fourth is to suppose that spirits can, of their own will, or by superior permission, make themselves sometimes visible to human eyes."

"Or," said Julian, "so affect the senses _as to produce the impression_ that they are present to human eyes."

"And to show you, Lillyston," said Owen, "how little I fear any natural explanations, and how much I think them beside the point, I'll tell you what happened to me only the other night, and which yet does not make me at all inclined to rationalise Hazlet's story. I had just put out the candle in my bedroom, when over my head I saw a handwriting on the wall in characters of light. I started out of bed, and for a moment fancied that I could read the words, and that somebody had been playing me a trick with phosphorus. But the next minute, I saw how it was; the moonlight was s.h.i.+ning in through the little muslin folds of the lower blind, and as the folds were very symmetrical, the chequered reflection on the wall looked exactly like a series of words."

"Well, now, that would have made a capital ghost story," said Lillyston, "if you had been a little more imaginative and nervous. And still more if the illusion had only been partially optical, and partly the result of excited feelings."

"It matters nothing to me," said Hazlet, rising, "whether the characters I saw were written by the finger of a man's hand, or limned by spirits on the sensorium of the brain. All I know is that--thank G.o.d--_they were there_."

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

JULIAN AND KENNEDY.

"But there where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live, or bear no life; The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!

Patience, thou young and rose-lipped cherubim!

Aye there, look grim as h.e.l.l!"

Oth.e.l.lo, Act 4, scene 2.

Saint Werner's clock, with "its male and female voice," has just told the university that it is nine o'clock.

A little crowd of Saint Wernerians is standing before the chapel door, and even the gra.s.s of the lawn in front of it is hardly sacred to-day from common feet. The throng composed of undergraduates, dons, bedmakers, and gyps, is broken into knots of people, who are chatting together according to their several kinds; but they are so quiet and expectant that the very pigeons hardly notice them, but flutter about and coo and peck up the scattered bread-crumbs, just as if n.o.body was there. If you look attentively round the court, you will see, too, that many of the windows are open, and you may detect faces half concealed among the window curtains. Clearly everybody is on the look out for something, though it is yet vacation time, and only a small section of the men are up.

The door opens, and out sail the Seniors, more than ever conscious of pride and power; they stream away in silk gowns, carrying on their faces the smile of knowledge even into their isolation, where no one can see it. For some reason or other they always meet in chapel, or, for all I know, it may be in the ante-chapel, to elect the Saint Werner's scholars.

And now the much talked of, much thought of, anxiously expected list, which is to make so many happy or miserable, is to be announced. On that little bit of paper, which the chapel-clerk holds in his hands as he stands on the chapel steps, are the names which everybody has been longing to conjecture. He comes out and reads. There are nine scholars.h.i.+ps vacant, of which five will be given to the Third-year men, and four to Julian's year.

The five Third-year men are read first, and as each name is announced, off darts some messenger from the crowd to carry the happy intelligence to some expectant senior soph. The heads of listeners lean farther and farther out of the window, for the clerk speaks so loud as to make his voice heard right across the court; and the wires of the telegraph are instantly put into requisition to flash the news to many homes, which it will fill either with rejoicing or with sorrow.

And now for the four Second-year scholars, who have gained the honour of a scholars.h.i.+p their first time of trial, and whose success excites a still keener interest. They are read out in the accidental order of the first entering of their names in the college books.

Silence! the Second-year scholars are--DUDLEY CHARLES OWEN, (for the names are always read out at full length, Christian names and all); JULIAN HOME; ALBERT HENRY SUTON; and it is a very astonis.h.i.+ng fact, but the fourth is Hugh James Lillyston.

Who would have believed it? Everybody expected Owen and Home to get scholars.h.i.+ps their first time, and Suton was considered fairly safe of one; but that Kennedy should _not_ have got one, and that Lillyston should, were facts perfectly amazing to all who heard them. Saint Werner's was full of surprise. But after all they might have expected it; Kennedy had been grossly idle, and Lillyston, who had been exceedingly industrious, was not only well-grounded at Harton in cla.s.sics, but had recently developed a real and promising proficiency in mathematics; and it was this knowledge, joined to great good fortune in the examination, which had won for him the much-envied success.

But not Kennedy?

No. This result was enough most seriously to damp the intense delight which Julian otherwise felt in his own success, and that of his three friends.

Julian, half-expecting that he would be successful, had come up with Owen early in the day, and received the news from the porter as he entered the college. Kennedy and Lillyston were not yet arrived, and Julian went to meet the coach from Roysley, hoping to see one of them at least for he was almost as anxious to break the disappointment gently to Kennedy, as he was to be the first to bear to his oldest school friend the surprising and delightful news of his success.

They were _both_ in the coach, and Julian was quite puzzled how to meet them. His vexation and delight alternated so rapidly as he looked from one to the other, that he felt exceedingly awkward, and would very much have preferred seeing either of them alone. Lillyston was incredulous; he insisted that there must be some mistake, until he actually saw the list with his own eyes. It was quite by accident, and not with any view of being sworn in as a scholar the next morning, that he had returned to Saint Werner's on that day at all. Kennedy bore the bitter, but not unexpected disappointment with silent stoicism, and showed an unaffected joy at the happy result which had crowned the honest exertions of his best-loved friends.