Chapter Twelve.

A Gust of the Soul.

“Once more will the wronger, at this last of all.
Dare to say ‘I did wrong,’ rising in his fall?”
Browning.

The story of Brogten’s practical joke, and the circumstances which made it so unusually disgraceful, spread with lightning-like rapidity through Saint Werner’s College; and when he swaggered into hall with his usual self-confident air, he was surprised to find himself met with cold and even with frowning looks. Snatches of conversation which went on around him soon showed him the reason of the general disapprobation; and when he learnt how violently the current of popular opinion was beginning to set against him, and how unfavourable a view was taken of his conduct, he began seriously to regret that he had given the reins to his malice.

“I shouldn’t wonder now if Home were to lose the Clerkland; he was sure of it before this morning,” said one.

“What a cursed shame!” echoed another. “I never in my life heard a more blackguard trick. That fellow Brogten has lost the Hartonians the scholarship; lucky if he hasn’t lost it to Saint Werner’s too. Perhaps that Benedict man will get it.”

“I say, Kennedy,” said a third, “if I were you or Lillyston, or any other of Home’s particular friends, I’d duck Brogten.”

“Let’s wait till we see whether Home does lose the scholarship first,” said Lillyston. “If he does, Brogten deserves anything; but I have strong hopes yet.”

“I know Home,” said Kennedy, “and he would never forgive such an interference, or I declare I should be inclined to do it.”

“I should like to see you do it,” thundered Brogten, from a farther end of the table.

“I have just given my reasons for not seeing fit to do it,” said Kennedy, with a curl of the lip. “By the bye, Mr Brogten,” he continued sarcastically, “I hope that you don’t, after this, expect to be paid any of the bets you have made against Home’s getting the Clerkland?”

“There’s my betting-book,” replied Brogten, flinging it at Kennedy, whom it struck in the face, and who took no further notice of the insult than to pick up the book, and throw it into the great brazier, full of glowing charcoal, which stands in the centre of Saint Werner’s hall.

“Don’t do that, confound you!” cried Brogten, springing up. “Do you think there are no bets in it but those about the Clerkland?”

“Keep your missiles to yourself, then,” said Kennedy, while Brogten burnt his fingers in the vain attempt to rescue his book.

“I hope you’ve at least hedged, or behaved as judiciously in the case of your other bets as in those about the Clerkland,” suggested one of his sporting friends.

This last sneer and insinuation was too much, and it galled the proud man to the quick to hear the laugh of scorn which followed it. He turned round, seized his cap, and flinging at Kennedy a look of intense and concentrated hatred, left the hall, and rushed up to his rooms.

To do Brogten justice, he had never intended for a moment to affect Julian’s chance of ultimate success, when he enjoyed the mean satisfaction of screwing up his door. He had regarded him with indeed dislike, which received a tinge of deeper intensity from the envy, and even admiration, with which it was largely mingled. But although he had calculated that his trick might be more telling and offensive if done at this particular opportunity, and although he had quite sufficient grudge against his former school-fellow to wish him a deep annoyance, yet he would never have dreamed of wilfully thwarting his most cherished aims, or materially affecting his prospects and position. So vile a malice would have been intolerable to any one, and the thought of it was thoroughly intolerable to Brogten, in whom all gleams of honourable feeling were by no means extinguished, however dormant they might seem. It had never entered into his thoughts to anticipate the violent consequences which his act had produced; and when told of Julian’s passion and suffering, he had felt such real remorse that he had even half intended to wait for him as he went to hall, and there, (in a quasi-public manner, since some men were sure to be standing about on the hall steps), to endure the mortification of expressing his regret to the man whom he had chosen to treat as his enemy. But when he found himself cut and jeered at—when he was even met by the suggestion that he had intended basely to serve his own pecuniary interests at Julian’s expense—a method of swindling which he had never for one instant contemplated—all his softer and better feelings vanished at once, and created a brutal hardness in his heart, which now once more he was striving in solitude to mollify or remove.

And he succeeded so far that, while brooding savagely over the venomous shafts of sarcasm and ridicule with which Kennedy had wounded him, he gradually softened his feelings towards Julian, by transferring them in tenfold virulence against Julian’s nearest friend. Home and he had been school-fellows after all, and Julian had never done him any wrong; on the contrary, he liked the boy; he remembered distinctly how the first seeds of ill-will against him had been sown, by the reserve with which Julian, as a school-fellow, had received his advances. Without being rude and uncivil, he had yet managed to hold aloof from him, and as Brogten was in some repute at Harton, when Home came, and was moreover an Hartonian of much longer standing, his sensitive pride had been stung by the fact that the “new fellow,” whose pleasant face and manners had attracted his notice, did not at once and gratefully embrace his proffered friendship. Circumstances had tended to widen the breach between them, but secretly he liked Home still, and would have gladly been his friend. “And, after all,” he thought, “Home has never once retaliated any injury which I have undoubtedly done him; he has never done me any harm. Even in the affair at the boats, he only did what was quite justifiable, and I was far more in the wrong than he was when I struck him. And now they all say I shall have prevented him from getting this confounded Clerkland. And I know how he longed for it, and how much all his hopes and wishes were fixed upon it. Upon my word, when I come to think of it, it was a very blackguard thing of me to do, and I wish I had been at the bottom of the sea before I did it. I think—yes—I think I’ll go and see Home, and ask his pardon; yes, upon my word I need his forgiveness, and would give a good deal to get it. He’s a grand fellow after all. I wish he’d take me as a friend. I should be infinitely better for it; and I will be better, too.” And as he thus reasoned with himself, Brogten began to yearn for better things, and for Julian’s friendship as a means of helping him to higher aims; and he remembered the lines—

“I would we were boys as of old,
In the field, by the fold;
His outrage. God’s patience, man’s scorn,
Were so easily borne.”

So his thoughts ran on, but when it occurred to him that no such humiliation on his part would perhaps go very far to mend the general disgust with which he had been greeted, he began to waver again. “What business had they to assume that I meant the worst? I may be a bad fellow, but,” (and a mental oath followed), “I’m not a black-leg after all. That fellow Kennedy—curse him!—I’ll be even with him yet. I swear that he shall rue it. I’ll be a very fiend in the vengeance I take—curse him, curse him!” And stamping his heel furiously on the floor, he swallowed some raw brandy, and began to pace up and down his room.

The conflict of his thoughts lasted, almost without intermission, till evening. Finally, however, his heart softened towards Julian, as he ran over in his mind all the circumstances of the day. Cheating his conscience with the fancy that he was conquering his feelings of revenge and hate, while he was only displacing them with others of a deeper dye, he at last determined to go up at once to Julian’s room, ask his pardon openly, honestly, and unreservedly, confess his past unworthy malice, and obtain, if possible, at least, Julian’s forgiveness, perhaps even his friendship, in return for so great a victory over himself.

It was a victory over himself, and no slight one. For at least five years he had been nursing into dislike an inward feeling of respect for his enemy, and now to humble himself so completely before him, required a struggle of which he had hardly supposed himself capable, and of which he was secretly a little proud. It inspired him with better hopes for the future, and gave him a pledge of combating successfully other vicious propensities which had gained an ascendency over him.

Hesitatingly he went up to Julian’s rooms; he saw the broken door, and it made him waver. All was silence inside, but still he hoped that Julian was in, because he felt sure that he should never persuade his natural pride to consent to such a sacrifice again. But yet, what should he say? He had been thinking of a thousand set forms of apology, but they all vanished, as, with beating heart, he knocked, a little loudly, at the door.

Julian, too, had been brooding on the events of the day, and fanning every now and then into fierce bursts of flame the dying embers of his morning’s indignation. He took the worst view, and had every reason to take the worst view, of Brogten’s intentions. He had received at his hands many wrongs, and an incivility as unvarying as it was undeserved. Of course he could not tell that this rudeness was but the cover of a real desire for cordiality between them, and now he fully believed that Brogten had intentionally, deliberately, and with malice prepense, formed a deep laid scheme to dash from his lips the cup of happiness as he was in the very act of tasting it. The success which had seemed in his very grasp would have removed the poverty, which had been one of the severest trials, not to himself only, but to those whom he most dearly loved; it was the thing—the one thing—of which he had thought, and for which he had prayed. “And now it was wrenched from him,” so he thought, “by this mean and dastardly villain.”

He had determined to horse-whip Brogten, at all hazards, though he knew that Brogten was far stronger than himself. De Vayne’s manoeuvre had disconcerted his intention, for he could not carry it out in cold blood; but even now he felt by no means sure that he was right to take passively an insult which, if unresented, might, he thought, be repeated, some other time, and which, if frequently repeated would render college life wholly intolerable. All this was floating through his mind, when there came a loud—he took it for an insolent—knock at the door, and his enemy stood before him.

His enemy stood before him, humbled and remorseful, with the words of apology on his lips, and his heart full of such emotions as might have enabled Julian to convert him from an enemy into a lasting and grateful friend. But when he saw him, in one instant furious, unreasoning, headlong anger had again seized Julian’s mind—the more easily because he had already yielded to it once. Without stopping to hear a word—without catching the gentler tone of Brogten’s rough voice—without noticing his downcast expression of countenance—Julian sprang up, assumed that Brogten had come to ridicule or even insult him, glared at him, clenched his teeth, and then seizing De Vayne’s riding-whip, laid it without mercy about Brogten’s shoulders.

During the first few blows, Brogten was disarmed by intense surprise. Of all receptions, this was the only one which it had never occurred to him to contemplate. He had imagined Julian bitter, sarcastic, cold; he had prepared himself for a torrent of passionate and overwhelming invective; he had thought how to behave if Julian remained silent, or rejected with simple contempt his stammered apology; but to be horse-whipped by one so much weaker than himself—by one whom he remembered to have pitied and patronised when he came to Harton, a delicate rosy-cheeked boy—this he had certainly never thought of. Julian had almost expended his rage in half a dozen wild blows before Brogten was startled from his surprise into a consciousness of his position.

But when he did realise it all the demon took possession of his heart. He seized Julian by the collar, wrenched the whip out of his hand, and raised the silver knob at the end of the handle. What fearful hurt Julian might have received from so heavy a weapon in so powerful a hand, or how far Brogten’s fury might have transported him, none can tell; but at that very moment he heard a step on the stairs, which arrested his violence, and the moment after Lillyston entered.

“What!” said Lillyston indignantly, as he caught the almost diabolical expression of Brogten’s face. “Not content with doing your best to ruin Home, you are using personal violence to one not so strong as yourself. Come, sir, you have felt what I can do before. Drop that whip, or take the consequences.”

“Stop, Hugh,” said Julian sullenly; “I horse-whipped him first.”

“You!” said Lillyston.

“Yes,” answered Brogten slowly, while his voice shook with passion; “yes, he did horse-whip me, and I took it. Note that, you Lillyston, and don’t think I’m afraid of you. And as for you, Home, listen to me. I came here solely to tell you that though I screwed you in, I never dreamt that such results would follow. I never dreamt—so help me, God!—of doing more than causing you ten minutes’ annoyance; and now, when I was told how it had hindered you in the examination, I was heartily sorry and ashamed of what I had done, and,”—he began to speak lower and faster, as the remembrance of a better mood came over him—“and I came here, Home, to ask your forgiveness. Yes; I to beg pardon of you, and humbly and honestly too. And now you see how you have received me. Yes,” he continued fiercely; “no word between us from henceforth. You have horse-whipped me, sir, and I, who never took a blow from man yet without returning it, have taken your horse-whipping. Take your whip,” he said, flinging it to the end of the room; “and after that never dare to say that all accounts are not squared between us.”

Lillyston made room for him to pass. With a lowering countenance he turned from them, and they continued silent till they had heard his last heavy footfall as he went down the echoing stairs.

Lillyston sat on the sofa, and Julian kept his eyes fixed on the floor. There seemed nothing to talk about, so Lillyston merely said, “Good-night, Julian. I came to advise you to go to bed early, and so get a good night’s rest, that you may be yourself to-morrow. You have not been yourself to-day. Good-night.”

But a worse evil had happened to Julian that day than hindrance in his career of ambition and hope. He had lost a golden opportunity for an act of Christian forgiveness which might have had the noblest influence on the life of an erring human soul. He had lost a golden opportunity of doing lasting good, and that, too, to one who hated him. Alas, it is too seldom that we have power in life to raise up them that fall! Julian felt bitterly, he felt even with poignancy, Brogten’s closing words; but it was too late now to offer the forgiveness which would have been invaluable to his persecutor, and would have had a healing effect on his own troubled thoughts so short a time before. All this gave deeper vexation to Julian’s heart as he went moodily to bed.

And Brogten? He sat sullenly over his fire till the last spark died from its ashes, and his lamp flickered out, and he shivered with cold. “It is of no use to conquer myself,” he thought; “it is of no use to do better or be better if this comes of it. Horse-whipped, and by him!” But, as he had said, he no longer grieved over Julian’s injury. That was wiped off by the horse-whipping, and he had now made himself understand that his inward respect for Home was deeper than the long superficial quarrel that had existed between them. It was against Kennedy that the current of his anger now swept this ever-growing temptation for revenge. His craving, often yielded to, became terrible in its virulence, and from this day forward there was in Brogten’s character a marked change for the worse. He ever watched for his opportunity, certain that it would come in time; and this encouragement of one bad passion opened the floodgates for a hundred more. And so on this evening he went on selling himself more and more completely to the devil, till the anger within him burned with a red heat, and as he went to bed the last words he muttered to himself were, “That fellow Kennedy shall rue it; curse him, he shall rue it to his dying day.”