Wilfrid Cumbermede

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CHARLEY AT OXFORD.

I have no time in this selection and combination of the parts of my story which are more especially my history, to dwell upon that portion of it which refers to my own life at Oxford. I was so much of a student of books while there, and had so little to do with any of the men except Charley, that, save as it bore upon my intellect, Oxford had little special share in what life has made of me, and may in the press of other matter be left out. Had I time, however, to set forth what I know of my own development more particularly, I could not pass over the influence of external Oxford, the architecture and general surroundings of which I recognized as affecting me more than anything I had yet met, with the exception of the Swiss mountains, pine-woods, and rivers. It is, however, imperative to set forth the peculiar character of my relation to and intercourse with Charley, in order that what follows may be properly understood.

For no other reason than that my uncle had been there before me, I went to Corpus Christi, while Charley was at Exeter. It was some days before we met, for I had twice failed in my attempts to find him. At length, one afternoon, as I entered the quadrangle to make a third essay, there he was coming towards the gate with a companion.

When he caught sight of me, he advanced with a quick yet hesitating step--a step with a question in it: he was not quite sure of me. He was now approaching six feet in height, and of a graceful though not exactly dignified carriage. His complexion remained as pale and his eyes as blue as before. The pallor flushed and the blue sparkled as he made a few final and long strides towards me. The grasp of the hand he gave me was powerful, but broken into sudden almost quivering relaxations and compressions. I could not help fancying also that he was using some little effort to keep his eyes steady upon mine. Altogether, I was not quite satisfied with our first meeting, and had a strong impression that, if our friendship was to be resumed, it was about to begin a new course, not building itself exactly on the old foundations, but starting afresh. He looked almost on the way to become a man of the world. Perhaps, however, the companionship he was in had something to do with this, for he was so nervously responsive, that he would unconsciously take on, for the moment, any appearance characterizing those about him.

His companion was a little taller and stouter-built than he; with a bearing and gait of conscious importance, not so marked as to be at once offensive. The upper part of his face was fine, the nose remarkably so, while the lower part was decidedly coarse, the chin too large, and the mouth having little form, except in the first movement of utterance, when an unpleasant curl took possession of the upper lip, which I afterwards interpreted as a doubt disguising itself in a sneer. There was also in his manner a degree of self-assertion which favoured the same conclusion. His hands were very large, a pair of merely blanched plebeian fists, with thumbs much turned back--and altogether ungainly. He wore very tight gloves, and never shook hands when he could help it. His feet were scarcely so bad in form: still by no pretence could they be held to indicate breeding. His manner, where he wished to conciliate, was pleasing; but to me it was overbearing and unpleasant. He Was the only son of Sir Giles Brotherton of Moldwarp Hall. Charley and he did not belong to the same college, but, unlike as they were, they had somehow taken to each other. I presume it was the decision of his manner that attracted the wavering nature of Charley, who, with generally active impulses, was yet always in doubt when a moment requiring action arrived.

Charley, having spoken to me, turned and introduced me to his friend. Geoffrey Brotherton merely nodded.

'We were at school together in Switzerland,' said Charley.

'Yes,' said Geoffrey, in a half-interrogatory, half-assenting tone.

'Till I found your card in my box, I never heard of your coming,' said Charley.

'It was not my fault,' I answered. 'I did what I could to find out something about you, but all in vain.'

'Paternal precaution, I believe,' he said, with something that approached a grimace.

Now, although I had little special reason to love Mr Osborne, and knew him to be a tyrant, I knew also that my old Charley could not have thus coolly uttered a disrespectful word of him, and I had therefore a painful though at the same time an undefined conviction that some degree of moral degeneracy must have taken place before he could express himself as now. To many, such a remark will appear absurd, but I am confident that disrespect for the preceding generation, and especially for those in it nearest to ourselves, is a sure sign of relaxing dignity, and, in any extended manifestation, an equally sure symptom of national and political decadence. My reader knows, however, that there was much to be said in excuse of Charley.

His friend sauntered away, and we went on talking. My heart longed to rest with his for a moment on the past.

'I had a dreary time of it after you left, Charley,' I said.

'Not so dreary as I had, Wilfrid, I am certain. You had at least the mountains to comfort you. Anywhere is better than at home, with a meal of Bible oil and vinegar twice a day for certain, and a wine-glassful of it now and then in between. Damnation's better than a spoony heaven. To be away from home is heaven enough for me.'

'But your mother, Charley!' I ventured to say.

'My mother is an angel. I could almost be good for her sake. But I never could, I never can get near her. My father reads every letter she writes before it comes to me--I know that by the style of it; and I'm equally certain he reads every letter of mine before it reaches her.'

'Is your sister at home?'

'No. She's at school at Clapham--being sand-papered into a saint, I suppose.'

His mouth twitched and quivered. He was not pleased with himself for talking as he did.

'Your father means it for the best,' I said.

'I know that. He means his best. If I thought it was the best, I should cut my throat and have done with it.'

'But, Charley, couldn't we do something to find out, after all?'

'Find out what, Wilfrid?'

'The best thing, you know; what we are here for.'

'I'm sick of it all, Wilfrid. I've tried till I am sick of it. If you should find out anything, you can let me know. I am busy trying not to think. I find that quite enough. If I were to think, I should go mad.'

'Oh, Charley! I can't bear to hear you talk like that,' I exclaimed; but there was a glitter in his eye which I did not like, and which made me anxious to change the subject.--'Don't you like being here?' I asked, in sore want of something to say.

'Yes, well enough,' he replied. 'But I don't see what's to come of it, for I can't work. Even if my father were a millionnaire, I couldn't go on living on him. The sooner that is over, the better!'

He was looking down, and gnawing at that tremulous upper lip. I felt miserable.

'I wish we were at the same college, Charley!' I said.

'It's better as it is,' he rejoined. 'I should do you no good. You go in for reading, I suppose?'

'Well, I do. I mean my uncle to have the worth of his money.'

Charley looked no less miserable than I felt. I saw that his conscience was speaking, and I knew he was the last in the world to succeed in excusing himself. But I understood him better than he understood himself, and believed that his idleness arose from the old unrest, the weariness of that never satisfied questioning which the least attempt at thought was sure to awaken. Once invaded by a question, Charley must answer it, or fail and fall into a stupor. Not an ode of Horace could he read without finding himself plunged into metaphysics. Enamoured of repose above all things, he was from every side stung to inquiry which seldom indeed afforded what seemed solution. Hence, in part at least, it came that he had begun to study not merely how to avoid awakening the Sphinx, but by what opiates to keep her stretched supine with her lovely woman face betwixt her fierce lion-paws. This also, no doubt, had a share in his becoming the associate of Geoffrey Brotherton, from whose company, if he had been at peace with himself, he would have recoiled upon the slightest acquaintance. I am at some loss to imagine what could have made Geoffrey take such a liking to Charley; but I presume it was the confiding air characterizing all Charley's behaviour that chiefly pleased him. He seemed to look upon him with something of the tenderness a coarse man may show for a delicate Italian greyhound, fitted to be petted by a lady.

That same evening Charley came to my rooms. His manner was constrained, and yet suggested a whole tide of pent-up friendship which, but for some undeclared barrier, would have broken out and overflowed our intercourse. After this one evening, however, it was some time before I saw him again. When I called upon him next he was not at home, nor did he come to see me. Again I sought him, but with like failure. After a third attempt I desisted, not a little hurt, I confess, but not in the least inclined to quarrel with him. I gave myself the more diligently to my work.

And now Oxford began to do me harm. I saw so much idleness, and so much wrong of all kinds about me, that I began to consider myself a fine exception. Because I did my poor duty--no better than any honest lad must do it--I became conceited; and the manner in which Charley's new friend treated me not only increased the fault, but aided in the development of certain other stems from the same root of self-partiality. He never saluted me with other than what I regarded as a supercilious nod of the head. When I met him in company with Charley, and the latter stopped to speak to me, he would walk on without the least change of step. The indignation which this conduct aroused drove me to think as I had never thought before concerning my social position. I found it impossible to define. As I pondered, however, a certainty dawned upon me, rather than was arrived at by me, that there was some secret connected with my descent, upon which bore the history of the watch I carried, and of the sword I had lost. On the mere possibility of something, utterly forgetful that, if the secret existed at all, it might be of a very different nature from my hopes, I began to build castles innumerable. Perceiving, of course, that one of a decayed yeoman family could stand no social comparison with the heir to a rich baronetcy, I fell back upon absurd imaginings; and what with the self-satisfaction of doing my duty, what with the vanity of my baby manhood, and what with the mystery I chose to believe in and interpret according to my desires, I was fast sliding into a moral condition contemptible indeed.

But still my heart was true to Charley. When, after late hours of hard reading, I retired at last to my bed, and allowed my thoughts to wander where they would, seldom was there a night on which they did not turn as of themselves towards the memory of our past happiness. I vowed, although Charley had forsaken me, to keep his chamber in my heart ever empty, and closed against the entrance of another. If ever he pleased to return, he should find he had been waited for. I believe there was much of self-pity, and of self-approval as well, mingling with my regard for him; but the constancy was there notwithstanding, and I regarded the love I thus cherished for Charley as the chief saving element in my condition at the time.

One night--I cannot now recall with certainty the time or season--I only know it was night, and I was reading alone in my room--a knock came to the door, and Charley entered. I sprang from my seat and bounded to meet him.

'At last, Charley!' I exclaimed.

But he almost pushed me aside, left me to shut the door he had opened, sat down in a chair by the fire, and began gnawing the head of his cane. I resumed my seat, moved the lamp so that I could see him, and waited for him to speak. Then first I saw that his face was unnaturally pale and worn, almost even haggard. His eyes were weary, and his whole manner as of one haunted by an evil presence of which he is ever aware.

'You are an enviable fellow, Wilfrid,' he said at length, with something between a groan and a laugh.

'Why do you say that, Charley?' I returned. 'Why am I enviable?'

'Because you can work. I hate the very sight of a book. I am afraid I shall be plucked. I see nothing else for it. And what will the old man say? I have grace enough left to be sorry for him. But he will take it out in sour looks and silences.'

'There's time enough yet. I wish you were not so far ahead of me: we might have worked together.'

'I can't work, I tell you. I hate it. It will console my father, I hope, to find his prophecies concerning me come true. I've heard him abuse me to my mother.'

'I wish you wouldn't talk so of your father, Charley. It's not like you. I can't bear to hear it.'

'It's not like what I used to be, Wilfrid. But there's none of that left. What do you take me for--honestly now?'

He hung his head low, his eyes fixed on the hearth-rug, not on the fire, and kept gnawing at the head of his cane.

'I don't like some of your companions,' I said. 'To be sure I don't know much of them.'

'The less you know, the better! If there be a devil, that fellow. Brotherton will hand me over to him--bodily, before long.'

'Why don't you give him up?' said I.

'It's no use trying. He's got such a hold of me. Never let a man you don't know to the marrow pay even a toll-gate for you, Wilfrid.'

'I am in no danger, Charley. Such people don't take to me,' I said, self-righteously. 'But it can't be too late to break with him. I know my uncle would--I could manage a five-pound note now, I think.'

'My dear boy, if I had borrowed--. But I have let him pay for me again and again, and I don't know how to rid the obligation. But it don't signify. It's too late anyhow.'

'What have you done, Charley? Nothing very wrong, I trust.'

The lost look deepened.

'It's all over, Wilfrid,' he said. 'But it don't matter. I can take to the river when I please.'

'But then you know you might happen to go right through the river, Charley.'

'I know what you mean,' he said, with a defiant sound like nothing I had ever heard.

'Charley!' I cried, 'I can't bear to hear you. You can't have changed so much already as not to trust me. I will do all I can to help you. What have you done?'

'Oh, nothing!' he rejoined, and tried to laugh: it was a dreadful failure. 'But I can't bear to think of that mother of mine! I wish I could tell you all; but I can't. How Brotherton would laugh at me now! I can't be made quite like other people, Wilfrid! You would never have been such a fool.'

'You are more delicately made than most people, Charley--"touched to finer issues," as Shakspere says.'

'Who told you that?'

'I think a great deal about you. That is all you have left me.'

'I've been a brute, Wilfrid. But you'll forgive me, I know.'

'With all my heart, if you'll only put it in my power to serve you. Come, trust me, Charley, and tell me all about it. I shall not betray you.'

'I'm not afraid of that,' he answered, and sunk into silence once more.

I look to myself presumptuous and priggish in the memory. But I did mean truly by him. I began to question him, and by slow degrees, in broken hints, and in jets of reply, drew from him the facts. When at length he saw that I understood, he burst into tears, hid his face in his hands, and rocked himself to and fro.

'Charley! Charley! don't give in like that,' I cried. 'Be as sorry as you like; but don't go on as if there was no help. Who has not failed and been forgiven--in one way if not in another?'

'Who is there to forgive me? My father would not. And if he would, what difference would it make? I have done it all the same.'

'But God, Charley--' I suggested, hesitating.

'What of him? If he should choose to pass a thing by and say nothing about it, that doesn't undo it. It's all nonsense. God himself can't make it that I didn't do what I did do.'

But with what truthful yet reticent words can I convey the facts of Charley's case? I am perfectly aware it would be to expose both myself and him to the laughter of men of low development who behave as if no more self-possession were demanded of a man than of one of the lower animals. Such might perhaps feel a certain involuntary movement of pitifulness at the fate of a woman first awaking to the consciousness that she can no more hold up her head amongst her kind: but that a youth should experience a similar sense of degradation and loss, they would regard as a degree of silliness and effeminacy below contempt, if not beyond belief. But there is a sense of personal purity belonging to the man as well as to the woman; and although I dare not say that in the most refined of masculine natures it asserts itself with the awful majesty with which it makes its presence known in the heart of a woman, the man in whom it speaks with most authority is to be found amongst the worthiest; and to a youth like Charley the result of actual offence against it might be utter ruin. In his case, however, it was not merely a consciousness of personal defilement which followed; for, whether his companions had so schemed it or not, he supposed himself more than ordinarily guilty.

'I suppose I must marry the girl,' said poor Charley with a groan.

Happily I saw at once that there might be two sides to the question, and that it was desirable to know more ere I ventured a definite reply.

I had grown up, thanks to many things, with a most real although vague adoration of women; but I was not so ignorant as to be unable to fancy it possible that Charley had been the victim. Therefore, after having managed to comfort him a little, and taken him home to his rooms, I set about endeavouring to get further information.

I will not linger over the affair--as unpleasant to myself as it can be to any of my readers. It had to be mentioned, however, not merely as explaining how I got hold of Charley again, but as affording a clue to his character, and so to his history. Not even yet can I think without a gush of anger and shame of my visit to Brotherton. With what stammering confusion I succeeded at last in making him understand the nature of the information I wanted, I will not attempt to describe; nor the roar of laughter which at length burst bellowing--not from himself only, but from three or four companions as well to whom he turned and communicated the joke. The fire of jests, and proposals, and interpretations of motive which I had then to endure, seems yet to scorch my very brain at the mere recollection. From their manner and speech, I was almost convinced that they had laid a trap for Charley, whom they regarded as a simpleton, to enjoy his consequent confusion. With what I managed to find out elsewhere, I was at length satisfied, and happily succeeded in convincing Charley, that he had been the butt of his companions, and that he was far the more injured person in any possible aspect of the affair.

I shall never forget the look or the sigh of relief which proved that at last his mind had opened to the facts of the case.

'Wilfrid,' he said, 'you have saved me. We shall never be parted more. See if I am ever false to you again!'

And yet it never was as it had been. I am sure of that now. Henceforth, however, he entirely avoided his former companions. Our old friendship was renewed. Our old talks arose again, And now that he was not alone in them, the perplexities under which he had broken down when left to encounter them by himself were not so overwhelming as to render him helpless. We read a good deal together, and Charley helped me much in the finer affairs of the classics, for his perceptions were as delicate as his feelings. He would brood over an Horatian phrase as Keats would brood over a sweet pea or a violet; the very tone in which he would repeat it would waft me from it an aroma unperceived before. When it was his turn to come to my rooms, I would watch for his arrival almost as a lover for his mistress.

For two years more our friendship grew; in which time Charley had recovered habits of diligence. I presume he said nothing at home of the renewal of his intimacy with me: I shrunk from questioning him. As if he had been an angel who who had hurt his wing and was compelled to sojourn with me for a time, I feared to bring the least shadow over his face, and indeed fell into a restless observance of his moods. I remember we read Comus together. How his face would glow at the impassioned praises of virtue! and how the glow would die into a grey sadness at the recollection of the near past! I could read his face like a book.

At length the time arrived when we had to part, he to study for the Bar, I to remain at Oxford another year, still looking forward to a literary life.

When I commenced writing my story, I fancied myself so far removed from it that I could regard it as the story of another, capable of being viewed on all sides, and conjectured and speculated upon. And so I found it as long as the regions of childhood and youth detained me. But as I approach the middle scenes, I begin to fear the revival of the old torture; that, from the dispassionate reviewer, I may become once again the suffering actor. Long ago I read a strange story of a man condemned at periods unforeseen to act again, and yet again, in absolute verisimilitude each of the scenes of his former life: I have a feeling as if I too might glide from the present into the past without a sign to warn me of the coming transition.

One word more ere I pass to the middle events, those for the sake of which the beginning is and the end shall be recorded. It is this--that I am under endless obligations to Charley for opening my eyes at this time to my overweening estimate of myself. Not that he spoke--Charley could never have reproved even a child. But I could tell almost any sudden feeling that passed through him. His face betrayed it. What he felt about me I saw at once. From the signs of his mind, I often recognized the character of what was in my own; and thus seeing myself through him, I gathered reason to be ashamed; while the refinement of his criticism, the quickness of his perception, and the novelty and force of his remarks, convinced me that I could not for a moment compare with him in mental gifts. The upper hand of influence I had over him I attribute to the greater freedom of my training, and the enlarged ideas which had led my uncle to avoid enthralling me to his notions. He believed the truth could afford to wait until I was capable of seeing it for myself; and that the best embodiments of truth are but bonds and fetters to him who cannot accept them as such. When I could not agree with him, he would say with one of his fine smiles, 'We'll drop it, then, Willie. I don't believe you have caught my meaning. If I am right, you will see it some day, and there's no hurry.' How could it be but Charlie and I should be different, seeing we had fared so differently! But, alas! my knowledge of his character is chiefly the result of after-thought.

I do not mean this manuscript to be read until after my death; and even then--although partly from habit, partly that I dare not trust myself to any other form of utterance, I write as if for publication--even then, I say, only by one. I am about to write what I should not die in peace if I thought she would never know; but which I dare not seek to tell her now for the risk of being misunderstood. I thank God for that blessed invention, Death, which of itself must set many things right, and gives a man a chance of justifying himself where he would not have been heard while alive. Lest my manuscript should fall into other hands, I have taken care that not a single name in it should contain even a side-look or hint at the true one; but she will be able to understand the real person in every case.

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