Chapter Thirty One.

Bruce in Trouble.

“Nuda nec arva placent, umbrasque negantia molles,
Nec dudum vetiti me laris augit amor.”
                        Milton.

Bruce, when expelled from Saint Werner’s, thought very little of his disgrace. It hardly ruffled the calm stream of his self-complacency, and, for some reasons, he was rather glad that it had happened. He did not like Camford; he had never taken to reading, and being thus debarred from all intellectual pleasures, he had grown thoroughly tired of late breakfasts, boating on the muddy Iscam, noisy wines, and interminable whist parties. Moreover, he had made far less sensation at Camford than he had expected. Somehow or other he had a dim consciousness that men saw through him; that his cleverness did not conceal his superficiality, nor his easy manners blind men’s eyes to his ungenerous and selfish heart. Even his late phase of popular scepticism was less successful at Camford than it would have been at places of less steady diligence and less sound acquirements. In fact, Bruce imagined that he was by no mean appreciated. The sphere was too narrow for him; he was quite sure that in the arena of London society and political life he was qualified to play a far more conspicuous part.

Nor did he believe that Sir Rollo Bruce would care for his expulsion any more than he did himself; he fancied that his father was quite above the middle-class prejudices of respect and reverence for pedantry and pedagogues, and was too much a man of the world to be disturbed by a slight contretemps like this. He wrote home a careless note to mention the fact that his Saint Werner’s career was ended, and attributed this result to a mere escapade at a wine-party, which had been distorted by rumour, and exaggerated by malice into a serious offence.

So when Vyvyan gaily entered his father’s house, he felt rather light-hearted than otherwise. He expected that very likely some party would be going on, and quite looked forward to an agreeable dance. When he arrived, however, Vyvyan House was quite silent; a dim light came from a single window, but that was all.

“Sir Rollo and my mother not at home, I suppose,” he said to the plushed and powdered footman.

“Yes, sir, they’re in the library.”

He entered; they were sitting on opposite sides of the fire, with a single lamp between them. They were not doing anything, and Lady Bruce appeared to have been crying; but neither of them took any notice of his entrance beyond turning their heads.

“How do you do?” he said, advancing gracefully; but not a little surprised at so silent and moody a greeting.

“How do you do?” was his father’s cold reply.

“Dear me—I quite expected to find a party going on, but you seem quite gloomy. Is anything the matter?”

“Matter, sir!” exclaimed Sir Rollo, starting up vehemently from his chair, and angrily pacing the room. “Matter! Upon my word, Vyvyan, your impudence is sublime.”

“You surprise me. What have I done?”

“Done!” retorted his father, with intense scorn. “You have been expelled from College; you have wasted your whole opportunities of education; you have thrown away the boundless sums which I have spent in your interest; you have lived the life of a puppy and a fool, and now you come back in the uttermost disgrace, with your name involved in I know not what infamy, and are as cool about it as if you returned to announce a triumph.”

Not deigning a word more, Sir Rollo turned indignantly on his heel and left Bruce as much astounded by so unexpected a reception as if he had suddenly trodden on a snake. He relapsed into uncommon sheepishness, and hardly knew how to address his mother, who sat sobbing in her armchair.

“My dear mother,” he said at last, “what can be the matter that I am met by such tornados as my welcome on returning?”

“Don’t ask me, Vyvyan. Your father is naturally angry at your expulsion, and you have grieved us both. But, dear Vyvyan, do not put on such an impertinent and indifferent manner; it annoys Sir Rollo exceedingly. Do submit yourself, my dear boy, and he will soon recover his usual suavity.”

“But I never saw him like this before.”

“No; these violent fits of temper have only come over him of late, and I am afraid that there must be some cause for them of which I am unaware.”

Bruce sat silent and unhappy. Expelled from college, and insulted, (as he called it), at home, he felt truly alone and miserable. He went up to his own room, supped there, and coming down next morning to the awkward meeting with his parents, spoke a few words of regret about his position. Sir Rollo barely listened to them, breakfasted in silence, and immediately afterwards set out for his office. He did not return till late in the evening, and continued for some time to spend the days in this manner, seeing next to nothing of his wife and son, but sternly forbidding any festivities or balls.

One morning he called Vyvyan into his study before starting. Bruce laid aside his novel, yawned, and followed.

“Pray, sir, do you intend to spend all your time in reading novels?” said Sir Rollo.

“There’s nothing else for me to do that I see.”

“Very well. If you suppose that you are going to spend your days in idleness, you are mistaken. I give you a week to choose some occupation that will not involve me in further outlay.”

Bruce took out his embroidered pocket-handkerchief, redolent with scent, and blew his nose affectedly. On doing so, an unopened envelope dropped on the floor, out of his pocket; picking it up, he glanced at it, tore it across, and flung it into the fire. Sir Rollo immediately picked up the pieces with the tongs and opened it.

“I see that this is a bill, and I shall proceed to look at it.”

“Yes, if you like,” said Bruce, in an indifferent tone—“it’s from a dun.”

It was a tailor’s bill which had been sent after him, and it amounted to 150 pounds.

“And you suppose,” said his father, “that I am going to pay these debts for you?”

“I suppose so, certainly—some day. Let the dogs wait.”

Sir Rollo seemed on the point of a great burst of wrath; his lips positively quivered and his eye flashed with passion. He seemed, however, to control himself,—darted at his son a look of wrath and scorn, and left the room. A note that evening informed Lady Bruce that business detained him from home, and that he might not return for some days.

A week after Bruce received a letter with foreign post-marks, to the following effect:—

Dear Vyvyan—By the time you receive this, I shall be on the Continent, far beyond the reach of the law.

“I have been living for the last ten years on the money I embezzled from the company whose affairs I managed. The fraud cannot fail of being detected almost immediately.

“I feel acutely the position in which I am forced to leave your mother. I do not pity you in the least. I gave you the amplest opportunity to save yourself from this ruin, if you had not been a fool. You cared for nothing and for nobody but yourself. You never worked hard, though you knew it to be my wish; you assumed an air of spurious independence, and affected the fine gentleman. Your conceit and idleness will be their own punishment. You have made your own bed; now you will have to lie in it.

“Rollo Bruce.”

The truth was soon known to the world. Numberless executions were put into Vyvyan House. Every available fragment of property was seized by Sir Rollo’s creditors; and as Lady Bruce’s private fortune had long been spent, she and her son were left all but penniless. The gay and gilded friends of their summer hours were the first to desert them, and Sir Rollo’s wickedness had created such a gust of indignation, that few came forward to lend his family the slightest assistance.

When Bruce found himself in this most distressing position—when he sat with his mother in shame and retirement in obscure lodgings, which had been taken for them by one of their former servants, and with no immediate means of livelihood—then first the folly of his past career revealed itself to his mind in its full proportions. Lady Bruce’s health was dreadfully affected by the mental anguish through which she had passed, and it became a positive necessity that Bruce should work with his head or hands to earn their daily bread.

He found no difficulty in procuring a temporary post in a lawyer’s office as a clerk. The drudgery was terrible. Daily, from nine in the morning to six in the evening, he found himself chained to the desk, and obliged to go through the dullest and most mechanical routine, the only respite being half an hour in the middle of the day, which he spent in dining at an eating-house. Nursed on the lap of luxury, habituated to the choicest viands, and accustomed to find every whim fulfilled, this kind of life was intolerable to him. The steaming recesses of a squalid eating-house gave him a sensation of loathing and sickness, and the want of exercise made him look haggard and wan. In vain he appealed to men who had called themselves his father’s friends; he found to his cost that the son of a detected swindler has no friends, and more especially if his own life have been tainted with suspicion or dishonour. Poor Bruce was driven to the very verge of despair.

He applied for a situation in a bank, but he was informed that it could not be granted him unless he could obtain a certificate of good character from his college, which, of course, was out of the question. He tried writing for the press, but his shallow intellectual resources soon ran dry. The pittance he could thus earn did not remunerate him for the toil and wasted health, and even this pittance was too often cruelly held back. He made applications in answer to all sorts of advertisements, but one after another the replies were unfavourable, until his whole heart died within him. No intelligence could be obtained of his father’s hiding-place, and before a year had elapsed since Sir Rollo’s bankruptcy and felony had been made known, Lady Bruce died at her son’s lodgings, worn out with misery and shame.

This climax of the young man’s misfortunes awoke at last the long dormant sympathy in his favour. An effort was made by his few remaining and unalienated friends to provide for him the means of emigration, which seemed the only course likely to give him once more a fair start in life. But to pay his passage, and provide him with the means of settling in New Zealand required a considerable sum, and Bruce had to suffer for weeks the agonies of hope deferred. And when he glanced over his past life, he found nothing to help him. He could not look back with any comfort; the past was haunted by the phantoms of regret. His violent and wilful infancy, his proud, passionate boyhood, his wandering and wicked youth, afforded him few green spots whereon the eye of retrospect could rest with calm. As the wayworn traveller who on some bright day sat down by the fringed bank of clear fountain or silver lake, and while he leant to look into its waters, was suddenly dazzled into madness by the flashing upwards upon him, from the unknown depths, of some startling image; so Bruce, as he rested by the dusty wayside of life, and gazed into the dark abysses of recollection, was startled and horrified, with a more fearful nympholepsy, by the crowding images and sullen glare of unforgotten and half-forgotten sins.

But in dwelling on his past life, Bruce bethought him that he might still find friends at school; and not long after his mother’s funeral, he determined to call on his old masters, and get such pecuniary aid as he could from them and his schoolboy friends. To come to such a resolution was the very bitterness of humiliation; but Bruce was now all eagerness to escape from England, and recommence a new life in other lands.

He took a third class ticket to Harton, and when he arrived there, was so overcome with shame that he well-nigh determined to return by the next train, and leave the town unvisited, at whatever cost; but on inquiry he found that the next train would not start for some hours, and meanwhile he fully expected to be seen and recognised by those whom he had known before. And yet it was not easy, in that stooping figure, with the pale cheek and dimmed eye, to recognise the bright and audacious Vyvyan Bruce, who had been captain of Harton barely three years before. Poverty, ruin, disappointment, confinement, guilt, and sorrow had done their work with marvellous quickness.

Nerving himself to the effort, he turned his face towards Harton, and walked slowly up the hill. The reminiscences which the walk recalled were not happy—rather, far from happy. It was not because formerly when he was a flattered, and rich, and handsome, and popular Harton boy, all the prospects of his life had looked as bright as now they seemed full of gloom; it was not that then both his parents were living, and now one was dead, the other disgraced; it was not that then he was full of health and vigour, and now was feeble and wearied; it was not that then he seemed to have many friends, and now he hardly knew of one; no, it was none of these things that affected him most deeply as he caught sight of the well-known chapel, and strolled up the familiar hill; but it was the thought, the bitter thought, the cursed thought that there, as at Camford, the voice of his brother’s blood was crying against htm from the ground.

By the time he reached the school buildings, it happened to be just one o’clock, and from the various school-rooms, the boys were pouring out in gay and noisy throngs. The faces were new to him for the most part, and at first he began to fancy that he should recognise no one. But at last he observed a boy looking hard at him, who at length came up and shook him warmly by the hand.

“How do you do, Bruce? Ah, I see you don’t remember me; true, I was only in the Shell when you left, but you ought at least to remember your old fags.”

The change of countenance between fifteen and eighteen is however very great, and it was not without an effort that Bruce recalled in the tall strong fellow who was talking to him his quondam fag, little Walter Thornley, now in his turn captain of the eleven, and Head of the school, whose admiration of Bruce we have already recorded in the first chapter of this eventful history.

“Where are you off to now?” said Thornley.

“To the Doctor’s.”

“Well, you’ll come and see me afterwards?”

Bruce promised and then walked to see the Doctor, and his old tutor. To both he opened his piteous tale, and both of them gave him the most generous and liberal assistance; they promised also to procure him such other aid as might lie in their power. A little lighter in heart, he went to pay his visit to Thornley, whom he found occupying his old rooms. As Bruce recrossed the familiar threshold, the contrasts of past and present were almost too much for him, and he found it difficult to restrain his tears. He stayed but a short time, and then returned to London to his poor and lonely lodgings.

Walter Thornley heard his story from the tutor, and besides getting a large subscription for him among his own friends, wrote to ask if Julian could procure for the emigrant any assistance in Camford. Julian received the letter about the middle of the October term in his third year, and it ran thus:—

“Dear Home—Beyond knowing by rumour that I am head of the school, you will, I suppose, hardly remember a boy who was so low in the school as I was when you were monitor. But though you will perhaps have forgotten me, I have not forgotten you, or the many kinds acts I experienced from you and Lillyston when I was a little new fellow. Remembering these, I am emboldened to write, and ask if you or any of the old Hartonians are willing to assist poor Bruce to settle in New Zealand, now that he has no chance of succeeding well in England? I am sure that you personally will be glad of any opportunity to help an old school-fellow in his distress and difficulty, for report tells me that Julian Home is as kind-hearted and generous as he was when he won the Newry scholarship at Harton.—Believe me to be, my dear Home, yours very truly,—Walter Thornley.”

Julian had almost forgotten the very existence of Thornley when this letter recalled him to his mind; but it was one of the pleasures of Julian’s life constantly to receive letters of this kind from former school-fellows, thanking him for past kindnesses of which he was wholly unconscious from the simple and natural manner in which they had been done. It need hardly be said that he at once complied with the request which the letter contained, and that, (next to De Vayne’s), his own was the largest contribution towards the handsome sum which the Hartonians and other Saint Werner’s men cheerfully subscribed to assist their former comrade in his hour of need.

To avoid all unnecessary wounding of Bruce’s feelings, the money thus collected was transmitted to the Doctor to be placed at Bruce’s disposal. It completed the sum requisite for his outfit, and there was no longer any obstacle in the way of his immediate departure from England. He at once booked his passage by an emigrant ship, and sailed from England. The day after his departure, Julian received from him the following letter:—

“Dear Julian—Although you are one of those who would ‘do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame,’ I am not ignorant of the debt of gratitude which I owe to you for providing me with the means of recovering my fortunes, and beginning life afresh in another hemisphere.

“Our lots in life, since at Harton we ran a neck and neck race, have been widely different, and while the happy months have been rolling for you on silver wheels, and the happy hours speeding by you with white feet, to me Time has been:—

“‘A maniac scattering dust,
And Life a Fury slinging flame.’

“How much I have gone through in the last year—the accumulated agony of remorse, bereavement, and ruin—no human soul can tell. No wonder my bark was wrecked after such mad and careless navigation; but, thank God, the blow of the tempest that staggered and shattered it, and drove it on the reefs, has not sunk it utterly, and now, like a waif or stray, it is being carried to be refitted across a thousand leagues of sea.

“I am not the Bruce you knew, but a wiser, sadder, and better man. I have not yet lost all hope. The old book of my life was so smutched and begrimed—torn, dogs-eared, and scrawled over—that it was scarcely worth while to turn over a new leaf. I have rather began a new volume altogether, and trust, by God’s blessing, that when ‘Finis’ comes to be written in it, some few of the pages will bear re-perusal.

“‘De Vayne!’ how that name haunts me; how full it is of horror—De Vayne and Hazlet; and yet I hear that both have contributed to my help. It gives me new life to know that human hearts can be so full of forgiveness and of love.

“Starting almost for another world—without fortune, without friends, with nothing but head and heart, the wreck of what I was—I sometimes feel so sad that I could wish myself out of the world altogether. Forgive me, then, for once more bringing before you a name which you can only connect with the most unpleasant and sombre thoughts, and pray for me that my efforts, (this time they are genuine and sincere), to improve my life, my talents, and my fortune, may be crowned with success.

“We sail in an hour or sooner, for I hear them weighing anchor now. Good-bye. Accept my warmest thanks for all your kindnesses, and my wishes, (ah! that they were worthier!) for your happiness in life, and believe me, my dear Julian, your sincere and grateful friend—

“Vyvyan Bruce.

“P S—I am positively alone; not one soul is here even to bid me good-bye. Eheu! jam serus vitam ingemo relictam!”

Julian read the letter many times; he was touched by its delicate and eloquent sorrow—its fine and chastened thoughtfulness. He was no longer in a mood to work, but closed his books, and watched the faces in the fire. One thought filled him with joy and thankfulness; it was the thought that, though of his friends and acquaintances so many had gone wrong, yet God was leading them back again, by rough and thorny roads it might be, but still by sure roads to the right path once more. Hazlet, Bruce, Brogten—above all, his friend and brother Kennedy—were returning to the fold they had deserted, were learning that for him who has sinned and suffered, REPENTANCE IS THE WORK OF LIFE. And as these thoughts floated through Julian’s mind, the words of an old prayer came back upon his lips—“That it may please Thee to strengthen such as do stand; and to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up them that fall; and finally, to beat down Satan under our feet.”