Chapter Twenty.

Bruce the Tempter.

“Oui autrefois; mais nous avons changé tout cela.”—Molière.

Bruce was disgusted with his second class 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 class, 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 class;” 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. Associating habitually with men who were his inferiors in ability, and whose tastes were lower than his own, the vacuity of mind and lassitude of body, which at times crept over him, were the natural assistants 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 associates 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 gods 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.”

“I won’t take the bet,” said Brogten, “because I believe you’ll succeed.”

“I’ll t–t–take it for the fun,” said Fitzurse.

“Done, then!” said Bruce.

So Bruce, pour passer le temps, deliberately undertook the corruption of a human soul. That soul might have been low enough already; for Hazlet was, as we have seen, mean-hearted and malicious, and in him, although unknown to himself, the garb of the Pharisee but concealed the breast of the hypocrite. But yet Hazlet was free, and if Bruce had not undertaken the devil’s work, might have been free to his life’s end, from all gross forms of transgression—from all the more flagrant and open delinquencies that lay waste the inner sanctities of a fallen human soul.

He was an easy subject for Bruce’s machinations, and those machinations were conceived and carried on with consummate and characteristic cleverness. Bruce did not spread his net in the sight of the bird, but set to work with wariness and caution. He determined to try the arts of fascination, not of force. The thought of the desperate wickedness involved in his attempt either never crossed his mind, or, if it did, was rejected as the feeble suggestion of an over-scrupulous conscience. Bruce pretended at least to fancy that the basis of all men’s characters was identical, and that, as they only differed in external manifestations, it made very little difference whether Hazlet became “fast” or continued “slow.” “Fast” and “slow” were the mild euphemisms with which Bruce expressed the slight distinction between a vicious and a virtuous life.

At hall—the grand place for rencontres—he managed to get a seat next to his victim, and began at once to treat him with that appearance of easy and well-bred familiarity which he had learnt in London circles. He threw a gentle expression of interest into his face and voice, he listened with deference to Hazlet’s remarks, he addressed several questions to him, thanked him politely for all his information, and then adroitly introduced some delicate compliments on the agreeableness of Hazlet’s society. His bait took completely; Hazlet, whom most men snubbed, was quite flustered with gratified vanity at the condescending notice of so unexceptionable a man of fashion as the handsome and noted Vyvyan Bruce. “At last,” thought Hazlet, “men are beginning to appreciate my intellectual powers.”

After continuing this process for some days, until Hazlet was unalterably convinced that he must be a vastly agreeable and attractive person, Bruce asked him to come to breakfast, and invited Brogten and Fitzurse to meet him. He calculated justly that Hazlet, accustomed only to the very quiet neighbourhood of a country village, would be duly impressed with the presence and acquaintance of a live lord; and he instructed both his guests in the manner in which they should treat the subject of their experiment. Hazlet thought he had never enjoyed a breakfast party so much. There was a delicious spice of worldliness in the topics of conversation which was quite refreshing to him, accustomed as he was to the somewhat droning moralisms of his “congenial friends.” Nothing which could deeply shock his prejudices was ever alluded to, but the discussions which were introduced came to him with all the charm of novelty and awakened curiosity.

Hazlet never could endure being a silent or inactive listener while a conversation was going forward. No matter how complete his ignorance of the subject, he generally managed to hazard some remarks. Bruce talked a good deal about actors and theatres, and Hazlet had never seen a theatre in his life. He did not like, however, to confess this fact, and, after a little hesitation, began to talk as if he were an habitué. The dramatic criticisms, which he occasionally saw in the papers, furnished him with just materials enough to amuse Bruce and the others at his assumption of “savoir vivre,” and to furnish a laugh at his expense the moment he was gone; but of this he was blissfully unconscious, and he rather plumed himself on his knowledge of the world. He had yet to learn the lesson that consistency alone can secure respect. He had indeed ventured at first to remark, “Don’t you think the stage a little—just a little—objectionable?”

“Objectionable,” said Bruce, with a bland smile; “oh, my dear fellow, what can you mean? Why, the stage is a mirror of the world, and to show virtue her own image is one of its main objects.”

“Yes,” said Hazlet, “I am inclined to think so. I should like to see a theatre, I confess.”

He had let slip unintentionally the implied admission that he had never been to a theatre; but when Fitzurse asked in astonishment, “What, have you never been to a theatre?” he merely replied, “Well, I can hardly say I have; at least not for a long time.”

“Oh, then we must all run down to London some night very soon,” said Bruce, “and we’ll go together to the Regent.”

“But I’ve no friend in London, except—except a clergyman or two, who perhaps might object, you know.”

“Oh, never mind the clergymen,” said Bruce; “you shall all come and stay with me at Vyvyan House.”

Here was a triumph!—to go to the celebrated Vyvyan House, and that in company with a lord, and to be a partaker of Bruce’s hospitality! Of course it would be very rude and wrong to refuse so eligible an invitation. How pleasant it would be to remark casually at hall-time, “I’m just going to run down for the Sunday to Vyvyan House with Bruce and Lord Fitzurse!”

“Let me see,” said Bruce, “to-day’s Monday; supposing you come to wine with me on Thursday, and then we’ll see if we can’t manage to get to London from Saturday to Monday.”

“Thursday—I’m afraid I’ve an engagement on Thursday to—”

“To what?” asked Bruce.

The more Hazlet coloured and hung back, the more Bruce, in his agreeable way, pressed to know, till at last Hazlet, unable to escape such genial importunity, reluctantly confessed that it was to a prayer-meeting in a friend’s rooms.

“Oh,” said Bruce, with the least little laugh, “tea and hassocks, eh?” He said no more, but the little, scornful laugh, and the few scornful words had done their work more effectually than a volume of ridicule. It need not be added that Hazlet came, not to the prayer-meeting, but to the wine-party. Cards were introduced in the evening, and one of the players was Kennedy. Kennedy played often now, but he certainly did feel a qualm of intense and irrepressible disgust as, with great surprise, he found himself vis à vis with the spectacled visage of Jedediah Hazlet.

“But how shall I get my exeat to go to London?” said Hazlet.

“Oh, say a particular friend has invited you to spend the Sunday with him. Say you want to hear Starfish preach.”

Mr Norton, Hazlet’s tutor, who did not expect him to fall into mischief, and thought that very likely Mr Starfish’s eloquence might be the operating attraction, granted him the exeat without any difficulty, and on Saturday Hazlet was reclining in a first-class carriage, with Bruce, Brogten, and Fitzurse, on his way to Vyvyan House. A change was observable in his dress. Bruce had hinted to him that his usual garb might look a little formal and odd at a theatre, and had persuaded him to come to his own egregious Camford tailor, Mr Fitfop, who, as a particular favour to his customer Bruce, produced with suspicious celerity the cut-away coat and mauve-coloured pegtops, in which unwonted splendour Hazlet was now arrayed. It was a pity that his ears were so obturated with vanity as not to have heard the shrieks of half-stifled laughter created by his first public appearance in this fashionable guise, which only required to be completed by the death’s-head pin with which Bruce presented him, (and which therefore he was obliged to wear), to make it perfect.

The sumptuous and voluptuous richness of all the appointments in Vyvyan House introduced Hazlet to a new world. Sir Rollo and Lady Bruce were not in town, so that the four young men had the house entirely to themselves, and Bruce ordered about the servants with royal energy. Soon after their arrival they sat down to a choice dinner, and Bruce took care, although the champagne had been abundant at dinner, to pass pretty freely, at dessert, the best claret and amontillado of his father’s cellars. Hazlet was not slow to follow the example which the others set him; he helped himself plentifully to everything, and after dinner, lolling in an easy attitude, copied from Fitzurse, he even ventured to exhibit his very recently acquired accomplishment of smoking a weed. Very soon he imagined that he had quite made an impression on the most fashionable members of the Saint Werner’s world.

They went to the Regent, and between the acts, Bruce, who knew everything, introduced them behind the scenes. Hazlet, rather amazed at his own boldness, but in reality entirely ignorant which way to turn, necessarily followed his guides, and, exultant with the influence of mellow wine, imitated the others, and tried to look and feel at home. Within a month of Bruce’s manipulation this excellent and gifted young man, this truly gracious light in the youthful band of confessors, was seated, talking to a fascinating young danseuse who wore a gossamer dress, behind the scenes of a petty London theatre. Bruce looked on with a smile, and hummed to himself—

“Jene Tänzerinn
Fliegt, mit leichtem Sinn
Und noch leichtern Kleide
Durch den Saal der Freude
Wie ein Zephyr bin, etcetera.”

The head of Jedediah Hazlet was somewhat confused, when, after the play and an oyster supper in the cider cellars, it sank deep into the reposeful down of a spare chamber in the gay Sir Rollo Bruce’s London house.

The next morning was Sunday. They none of them got up till twelve to a languid breakfast, and then read novels. Hazlet, who was rather shocked at this, did indeed faintly suggest going to church. “Oh yes,” said Bruce, looking up with a smile from his Balzac, “we’ll do that, or some other equally harmless amusement.” The dinner hour, however, coincided with the time of evening service, so that it was impossible to go then, and finally they spent the evening in what they all agreed to call “a perfectly quiet game at cards.”