“Why not?”
“Because, since we came in, not one word has been said about any human subject but cricket, cricket, cricket; it’s been the same for the last two months; and as I haven’t been playing this morning—”
“Well, no one wants you to talk,” interrupted Brogten, one of the eleven, Julian’s especial foe. “I say, Bruce, did you see—”
“I was only going to add,” said Julian, with perfect good-humour, heedless of the interruption, “that I couldn’t discuss a game I didn’t see.”
“Nobody asked you, sir, she said,” retorted Brogten rudely; “if it had been some sentimental humbug, I dare say you’d have mooned about it long enough.”
“Better, at any rate, than some of your low stories, Brogten,” said Lillyston, firing up on his friend’s behalf.
“I don’t know. I like something manly.”
“Vice and manliness being identical, then, according to your notions?” said Lillyston.
Brogten muttered an angry reply, in which the only audible words were “confound” and “milksops.”
“Well spoken, advocate of sin and shame;
Known by thy bleating, Ignorance thy name,”
thought Julian; but he did not condescend to make any further answer.
“I hate that kind of fellow,” said Brogten, loud enough for the friends to hear, as they rose from the table; “fellows who think themselves everybody’s superiors, and walk with their noses in the air.”
“I wonder that you will still be talking, Brogten; nobody marks you,” said Lillyston, treating with the profoundest indifference a stupid calumny. But poisoned arrows like these quivered long and rankled painfully in Julian’s heart.
Yet no sensible boy would have given Julian’s reputation in exchange for that of Bruce; for in all except the mean and coarse minority, Julian excited either affection or esteem, and he had the rare inestimable treasure of some real and noble-hearted friends; while Bruce was too vain, too shallow, and too fickle to inspire any higher feeling than a mere transient admiration.
Latterly it had become known to the boys that Julian was going up to Saint Werner’s as a sizar, and being ignorant of the reasons which decided him, they had been much surprised. But the little clique of his enemies made this an additional subject of annoyance, and there were not wanting those who had the amazing bad taste to repeat to him some of their speeches. There are some who seem to think that a man must rather enjoy hearing all the low tittle-tattle of envious backbiters.
“I knew he must be some tailor’s son or other,” remarked Brogten.
“I say, Bruce, we shall have to cut him at Saint Werner’s,” observed an exquisite young exclusive.
Such things—the mere lispings of malicious folly—Julian could not help hearing; and they galled him so much that he determined to have a talk on the subject with his tutor, who was a Saint Werner’s man. It was his tutor’s custom to devote the hour before lock-up on every half-holiday to seeing any of his pupils who cared to come and visit him; but as on the rich summer evenings few were to be tempted from the joyous sounds of the cricket-field, Julian found him sitting alone in his study, reading.
“Ha, Julian!” he exclaimed, rising at once, with a frank and cordial greeting. “Here’s a triumph! A boy actually enticed from bats and balls to pay me a visit!”
Julian smiled. “The fact is, sir,” he said, “I’ve come to ask you about something. But am I disturbing you? If so, I’ll go and ‘pursue vagrant pieces of leather again,’ as Mr. Stokes says when he wants to dismiss us to cricket.”
“Not in the least. I rather enjoy being disturbed during this hour. But what do you say to a turn in the open air? One can talk so much better walking than sitting down on opposite sides of a fireplace with no fire in it.”
Julian readily assented, and Mr. Carden took his arm as they bent their way down to the cricket-field. There they stopped involuntarily for a time, to gaze at the house match which was going on, and the master entered with the utmost vivacity into the keen yet harmless “chaff” which was being interchanged between the partisans of the rival houses.
“What a charming place this field is,” he said, “on a summer evening, while the sunset lets fall upon it the last innocuous arrows of its golden sheaf. When I am wearied to death with work or vexation—which, alas! is too often—I always run down here, and it gives me a fresh lease of life.”
Julian smiled at his tutor’s metaphorical style of speech, which he knew was in him the natural expressions of a glowing and poetic heart, that saw no reason to be ashamed of its own warm feelings and changeful fancies; and Mr. Carden, wrapped in the scene before him, and the sensations it excited, murmured to himself some of his favourite lines—
“Alas that one
Should use the days of summer but to live,
And breathe but as the needful element
The strange superfluous glory of the air
Nor rather stand in awe apart, beside
The untouched time, and murmuring o’er and o’er
In awe and wonder, ‘These are summer days!’ ”
“Shall we stroll across the fields, sir, before lock-up?” said Julian, as a triumphant shout proclaimed that the game was over, and the Parkites had defeated the Grovians.
“Yes, do. By the bye, what was it that you had to ask me about?”
“Oh, sir, I don’t think I’ve told you before; but I’m going up to Saint Werner’s as a sub-sizar.”
Mr. Carden looked surprised. “Indeed! Is that necessary?”
“Yes, sir; it’s a choice between that and not going at all. And what I wanted to ask you was, whether it will subject me to much annoyance or contempt; because, if so—”
“Contempt, my dear fellow!” said Mr. Carden quickly. “Yes,” he added, after a pause, “the contempt of the contemptible—certainly of no one else.”
“But do you think that any Harton fellows will cut me?”
“Unquestionably not; at least, if any of them do, it will be such a proof of their own absolute worthlessness, that you will be well rid of such acquaintances.”
Julian seemed but little reassured by this summary way of viewing the matter.
“But I hope,” he said, “that no one, (even if they don’t cut me), will regard my society as a matter of mere tolerance, or try an air of condescension.”
“Look here, Julian,” said the master; “a sub-sizar means merely a poor scholar, for whom the college has set apart certain means of assistance. From this body have come some of the most distinguished men whom Saint Werner’s has ever produced; and many of the Fellows, (indeed quite a disproportionate number), began their college career in this manner. Now tell me—should you care the snap of a finger for the opinion or the acquaintance of a man who could be such an ineffable fool as to drop intercourse with you because you are merely less rich than he? Don’t you remember those grand old words, Julian—
“Lives there for honest poverty,
Who hangs his head and a’ that?
The coward slave we pass him by,
And dare be poor for a’ that.”
“And yet, sir, half the distinctions of modern society rest upon accidents of this kind.”
“True, true! quite true; but what is the use of education if it does not teach us to look on man as