This wrangling was very unprofitable, and Lillyston gladly dropped it, not however without feeling somewhat puzzled at the air which Brogten a.s.sumed.

That night Kennedy was sitting miserably in his room alone; he had refused all invitations, and had asked n.o.body to take tea with him. He was just making tea for himself, when Brogten came to see him.

"May I stay to tea?" he asked, in mock humility.

"If you like," said Kennedy.

He stayed to tea, and talked about all kinds of subjects rather than the one which was prominent in the thoughts of both. He told Kennedy old Harton stories, and asked him about Marlby; he turned the subject to Home, and really interested Kennedy by telling him what kind of a boy Julian had been, and what inseparable friends he had always been with Lillyston, and how admirably he had recited on speech-day, and how stainless his whole life had been, and how vice and temptation seemed to skulk away at his very look.

"You are reconciled to him, then," said Kennedy in surprise.

"Oh, yes. At heart, I always respected him. He wasn't a fellow to take the worst view of one's character, you know, or to make nasty innuendoes--" He stopped, and eyed Kennedy as a parrot eyes a finger put into his cage, which he _could_ peck if he would. "He wasn't, you know, a kind of fellow who would force you to leave the table by sneering at you in hall--" He still continued to eye Kennedy, but in vain, for Kennedy kept his moody glance on the table and was silent, and would not look at him or speak to him. Brogten could not help being struck with his appearance as he sat there motionless,--the n.o.ble and perfectly formed head, the well-cut features, the cheek a little pale now, so boyishly smooth and round, the latent powers of fire and sarcasm and strength in the bright eye and beautiful lip. It was a base source of triumph that made Brogten exult in the knowledge that this youth was in his power; that he held for a time at least the strings of his happiness or misery; that at any time by a word in any public place he could bring on his fine features that hue of shame; that for his own purposes he could at any time ruin his reputation, and put an end to his popularity.

Not that he intended to do so. He had the power, but unless provoked, he did not wish or mean to use it. It was far more luxurious to keep it to himself, and use it as occasion might serve. Everybody's secret is n.o.body's secret, and it was enough for Brogten to enjoy privately the triumph he had longed for, and which accident had put into his hands.

"Come, come, Kennedy," he said, "this is nonsense; we understand each other. I saw you coolly read over the whole examination-paper, you know, which wasn't the most honourable thing in the world to do--"

He paused and half relented as he saw a solitary tear on Kennedy's cheek, which was indignantly brushed away almost as soon as it had started.

"Come," he said, "cheer up, man. I'm not going to tell of you; neither Grayson nor any of the men shall know it, and at present not a soul has a suspicion of such a thing except ourselves. Come--I've had my triumph over you, for your sharp words in hall last term, before all the men, and that's all I wanted. Don't let's be enemies any longer.

Good-night."

But Kennedy sat there pa.s.sively, and when Brogten had gone away whistling "The Rat-catcher's Daughter," he leant his head upon his hand, and his thoughts wandered away to Violet Home.

O holy, enn.o.bling, purifying love! He felt that if he had known Violet before, he should not now have been in Brogten's power. He fancied that the secret had oozed out; he fancied that men eyed him sometimes with strange glances; he pictured to himself the degradation he should feel if Julian, or De Vayne, or Lillyston ever knew of what weakness he was capable. This one error rode like a night-mare on his breast.

But none of his gloomy presentiments on the score of detection were fulfilled. Except to Bruce, and that under pledge of secrecy, Brogten never betrayed what he knew, and the only immediate way in which he exercised the influence which his knowledge gave him, was by claiming with Kennedy a tone of familiarity, and asking him to card parties, suppers, and idle riots of all kinds, in which Bruce and Fitzurse were frequent visitors.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

BRUCE THE TEMPTER.

"Oui autrefois; mais nous avons change tout cela."--Moliere.

Bruce was disgusted with his second cla.s.s in the Saint Werner's May examination. He had quite flattered himself that he could not fail to be among the somewhat large number who annually obtained the pleasant and easy distinction of a first. He had not been nearly so idle as men supposed, although he had managed to waste a large amount of time; and if he could have foreseen that his name would only appear in the Second cla.s.s, he would have endeavoured to be lower still, so as to make it appear that he had not condescended to give a thought to the subject.

As it was, he hoped that if he got a first, men would remark, "Clever fellow that Bruce! Never opened a book, and yet got a first cla.s.s;"

whereas now he knew that the general judgment would be, "Bruce can't be half such a swell as one fancied. He's only taken a second."

His vanity was wounded, and he determined to throw up reading altogether. "What good would it do him to grind? His father was rolling in money, and of course he should cut a very good figure in London when he had left Camford, which was a mere place for crammers and crammed, etcetera."

So Bruce became more and more confirmed as a trifler and an idler, and he suffered that terrible ennui, which dogs the shadow of wasted time.

a.s.sociating habitually with men who were his inferiors in ability, and whose tastes were lower than his own, the vacuity of mind and la.s.situde of body, which at times crept over him, were the natural a.s.sistants of every temptation to extravagance, frivolity, and sin.

An accidental conversation gave a mischievous turn to his idle propensities. Coming into hall one evening, he found himself seated next to Suton, and observing from the goose on the table, and the audit ale which was circling in the loving cup that it was a feast, he turned to his neighbour, and asked:--

"Is it a saint's-day to-day?"

"Yes," said Suton, "and the most memorable of them all--All Saints'

Day."

"Oh, really," said Bruce with an expression of half contemptuous interest, "then I suppose chapel's at a quarter past six, and we shall have one of those long winded choral services."

"Don't you like them?"

"Like them? I should think not! Since one's forced to do a certain amount of chapels, the shorter they are the better."

"Of course, if you regard it in the light of 'doing' so many chapels, you won't find it pleasant."

"Do you mean to tell me now," said Bruce, turning round and looking full at Suton, "that you regard chapels as anything but an unmitigated nuisance?"

"Most certainly I do mean to tell you so, if you ask me."

"Ah! I see--a Sim!" said Bruce, with the slightest possible shrug of the shoulders.

"I don't know what you mean by a 'Sim,' Mr Bruce," said Suton, slightly colouring; "but whether a Sim or not, I at least expect to be treated as a gentleman."

"Oh, I beg pardon," said Bruce; "but I couldn't help recognising the usual style of--"

"Of cant, I suppose you would say. Thank you. You must find it a cold faith to disbelieve in all sincerity."

"Well, I don't know. At any rate, I don't believe that all your saints put together were really a bit better than their neighbours; so I can't get up an annual enthusiasm in their honour. All men are really alike at the bottom."

"Nero's belief," said Owen, who had overheard the conversation.

"It doesn't matter whether it was Nero's or Neri's or Neander's,"

answered Bruce; "experience proves it to be true."

Suton had finished dinner, and as he did not relish Bruce's off-hand and patronising manner, he left the discussion in Owen's hand. But between Owen and Bruce there was an implacable dissimilarity, and neither of them cared to pursue the subject.

Bruce, who went to wine with D'Acres, repeated there the subject of the conversation, and found that most of his audience affected to agree with him. In fact, he had himself set the fashion of a semi-professed infidelity; and amid his most intimate a.s.sociates there were many to adopt with readiness a theory which saved them from the trouble and expense of a scrupulous conscience. With Bruce this infidelity was rather the decay of faith than the growth of positive disbelief. He had dipped with a kind of wilful curiosity into Strauss's Life of Jesus, and other books of a similar description, together with such portions of current literature as were most clever in sneering at Christianity, or most undisguised in rejecting it.

Such reading--harmless, or even desirable, as it might have been to a strong mind sincere in its search for truth, and furnished with that calm capacity for impartial thought which is the best antidote against error--was fatal to one whose superficial knowledge and irregular life gave him already a powerful bias towards getting rid of everything which stood in the way of his tendencies and pursuits. Bruce was not in earnest in the desire for knowledge and wisdom: he grasped with avidity at a popular objection, or a sceptical argument, without desiring to understand or master the principles which rendered them nugatory; and he was ignorant and untaught enough to fancy that the very foundations of religion were shaken if he could attack the authenticity of some Jewish miracle, or impugn the genuineness of some Old Testament book.

When all belief was shaken down in his shallow and somewhat feeble understanding, the structure of his moral convictions was but a baseless fabric. Error in itself is not fatal to the inner sense of right; but Bruce's error was not honest doubt, it was wilful self-deception, blindness of heart, first deliberately induced, then penally permitted.

In Bruce's character there was not only the _error in intellectu_, but also the _pertinacia in voluntate_. All sense of honour, all delicacy of principle, all perception of sin and righteousness, all the landmarks of right and wrong, were obliterated in the muddy inundation of flippant irreverence and ignorant disbelief.

"For when we in our viciousness grow hard, O, misery on't! the wise G.o.ds seal our eyes: In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut To our confusion."

"I'm sometimes half inclined to agree with what you were saying about would-be saints," said Brogten, as they left D'Acres' wine-party.

"What fun it would be to try the experiment of a saint's peccability on some living subject," said Bruce.

"Rather! Suppose you try on that fellow Hazlet?"

"Oh, you mean the lank party who snuffles the responses with such oleaginous sanctimony. Well, I bet you 2 to 1 in ponies that I have him roaring drunk before a month's over."