Julian Home Part 28

Learn something of the days they are forced to spend, that they may pander to the worst instincts of your degraded nature; days of squalor and drunkenness, disease and dirt; gin at morning, noon, and night; eating infection, horrible madness, and sudden death at the end. Can you ever hope for salvation and the light of G.o.d's presence, while the cry of the souls of which you have been _the murderer_--yes, do not disguise it, the _murderer_, the cruel, willing, pitiless murderer--is ringing upwards from the depths of h.e.l.l?"

"What do you mean by the murderer?" said Hazlet, with an attempt at misconception.

"I mean this, Hazlet; setting aside all considerations which affect your mere personal ruin--not mentioning the atrophy of spiritual life and the clinging sense of degradation which is involved in such a course as yours--I want you to see if you will be honest, that the fault is yet more deadly, because you involve _other_ souls and _other_ lives in your own destruction. Is it not a reminiscence sufficient to kill any man's hope, that but for his own brutality some who are now perhaps raving in the asylum might have been clasping their own children to their happy b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and wearing in unpolluted innocence the rose of matronly honour? Oh, Hazlet, I have heard you talk about missionary societies, and seen your name in subscription lists, but believe me you could not, by myriads of such conventional charities, cancel the direct and awful quota which you are now contributing to the aggregate of the world's misery and shame."

It took a great deal to abash a mind like Hazlet's. He said that he was going to be a clergyman, and that it was necessary for him to see something of life, or he would never acquire the requisite experience.

"Loathly experience!" said Julian with crus.h.i.+ng scorn. "And do you ever hope, Hazlet, by centuries of preaching such as yours, to repair one millionth part of the damage done by your bad pa.s.sions to a single fellow-creature? Such a hateful excuse is verily to carry the Urim with its oracular gems into the very sty of sensuality, and to debase your religion into 'a procuress to the lords of h.e.l.l.' I have done; but let me say, Hazlet, that your self-justification is, if possible, more repulsive than your sin."

He pushed back his chair from the fire, and turned away, as Hazlet, with some incoherent sentences about "no business of his," left the room, and slammed the door behind him.

What are words but weak motions of vibrating air? Julian's words pa.s.sed by the warped nature of Hazlet like the idle wind, and left no more trace upon him than the snow-flake when it has melted into the purpling sea. As the weeks went on, his ill-regulated pa.s.sions grew more and more free from the control of reason or manliness, and he sank downwards, downwards, downwards, into the most shameful abysses of an idle, and evil, and dissipated life.

And the germ of that ruin was planted by the hand of the clever, and gay, and handsome Vyvyan Bruce.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

DE VAYNE'S TEMPTATION.

"And felt how awful goodness is, and virtue In her own shape how lovely."

Milton's _Paradise Lost_.

Shall I confess it? Pitiable and melancholy as was Hazlet's course, I liked him so little as to feel for him far less than I otherwise should have done. His worst error never caused me half the pain of Kennedy's most venial fault. Must I then tell a sad tale of Kennedy too--my brave, bright, beautiful, light-hearted Kennedy, whom I always loved so well? May I not throw over the story of his college days the rosy colourings of romance and fancy, the warm suns.h.i.+ne of prosperity and hope? I wish I might. But I am writing of Camford--not of a divine Utopia or a sunken Atalantis.

Bruce, so far from being troubled by his own evil deeds, was proud of a success which supported a pet theory of his infidel opinions. He made no sort of secret of it, and laughed openly at the fool whom he had selected for his victim.

"But after all," said Brogten, who had plenty of common sense, "your triumph was very slight."

"How do you mean? I chose the most obtrusively religious man in Saint Werner's, and, in the course of a very short time, I had him, of his own will, roaring drunk."

"And what's the inference?"

"That what men call religion is half cant, half the accident of circ.u.mstances."

"Pardon me, you're out in your conclusion; it only shows that Hazlet was a hypocrite, or at the best a weak, vain, ignorant fellow. The very obtrusiveness and uncharitableness of his religion proved its unreality.

Now I could name dozens of men who would see you dead on the floor rather than do as you have taught Hazlet to do--men, in fact, with whom you simply _daren't_ try the experiment."

"_Daren't_! why not?"

"Why, simply because they breathe such a higher and better atmosphere than either you or I, that you would be abashed by their mere presence."

"Pooh! I don't believe it," said Bruce, with an uneasy laugh; "mention any such man."

"Well, Suton for instance, or Lord De Vayne."

"Suton is an unpleasant fellow, and I shouldn't choose to try him, because he's a bore. But I bet you what you like that I make De Vayne drunk before a month's over."

"Done! I bet you twenty pounds you don't."

Disgusting that the young, and pure-hearted, and amiable De Vayne should be made the b.u.t.t of the machinations of such men as Bruce and Brogten!

But so it was. So it was; I could not invent facts like these. They never could float across my imagination, or if they did, I should reject them as the monstrous chimeras of a heated brain. I can conceive a man's private wickedness,--the wickedness which he confines within his own heart, and only brings to bear upon others so far as is demanded by his own fancied interests; I can imagine, too, an open and willing partners.h.i.+p in villainy, where hand joins in hand, and face answereth to face. But that any knowing the plague of their own hearts, should deliberately endeavour to lead others into sin, coolly and deliberately, without even the blinding mist of pa.s.sion to hide the path which they are treading,--this, if I had not known that it was so, I could not have conceived. The murderer who, atom by atom, continues the slow poisoning of a peris.h.i.+ng body for many months, and dies amid the yell of a people's execration,--in sober earnest, before G.o.d, I believe he is less guilty than he who, drop by drop, pours into the soul of another the curdling venom of moral pollution, than he who feeds into full-sized fury the dormant monsters of another's evil heart. Surely the devil must welcome a human tempter with open arms.

Of course Bruce had to proceed with Lord De Vayne in a manner totally different from that which he had applied to Jedediah Hazlet. He felt himself that the task was far more difficult and delicate, especially as it was by no means easy to get access to De Vayne's company at all.

Julian, Lillyston, Kennedy, and a few others, formed the circle of his only friends, and although he was constantly with _them_, he was rarely to be found in other society. But this was a difficulty which a man with so large an acquaintance as Bruce could easily surmount, and for the rest he trusted to the conviction which he had adopted, that there was no such thing as sincere G.o.dliness, and that men only differed in proportion to the weakness or intensity of the temptations which happened to a.s.sail them.

So Bruce managed, without any apparent manoeuvring, to see more of De Vayne at various men's rooms, and he generally made a point of sitting next to him when he could. He had naturally a most insinuating address and a suppleness of manner which enabled him to adapt himself with facility to the tastes and temperaments of the men among whom he was thrown. There were few who could make themselves more pleasant and plausible when it suited them than Vyvyan Bruce.

De Vayne soon got over the shrinking with which he had at first regarded him, and no longer shunned the acquaintance of which he seemed desirous.

It was not until this stage that Bruce made any serious attempt to take some steps towards winning his wager. He asked De Vayne to a dessert, and took care that the wines should be of an insidious strength. But the young n.o.bleman's abstemiousness wholly defeated and baffled him, as he rarely took more than a single gla.s.s.

"You pa.s.s the wine, De Vayne; don't do that."

"Thank you, I've had enough."

"Come, come; allow me," said Bruce, filling his gla.s.s for him.

De Vayne drank it out of politeness, and Bruce repeated the same process soon after.

"Come, De Vayne, no heel-taps," he said playfully, as he filled his gla.s.s for him.

"Thank you, I'd really rather not have any more."

"Why, you must have been lending your ears to--

"'Those budge doctors of the Stoic fur, Praising the lean and sallow abstinence;'

"You take nothing. I shall abuse my wine-merchant."

"You certainly seem as anxious as Comus that I should drink, Bruce,"

said De Vayne, smiling; "but really I _mean_ that I wish for no more."

Bruce saw that he had overstepped the bounds of politeness, and also made a mistake by going a little too far. He pressed De Vayne no longer, and the conversation pa.s.sed to other subjects.

"Anything in the papers to-day?" asked Brogten.

"Yes, another case of wife-beating and wife-murder. What a dreadful increase of those crimes there has been lately," said De Vayne.

"Another proof," said Bruce, "of the gross absurdity of the marriage-theory."

De Vayne opened his eyes wide in astonishment. Knowing very little of Bruce, he was not aware that this was a very favourite style of remark with him,--indeed, a not uncommon style with other clever young undergraduates. He delighted to startle men by something new, and dazzle them with a semblance of insight and reasoning. "The gross absurdity of the marriage-theory," thought De Vayne to himself; "I wonder what on earth he can mean?" Fancying he must have misheard, he said nothing; but Bruce, disappointed that his remark had fallen flat, (for the others were too much used to the kind of thing to take any notice of it), continued--

"How curious it is that the _whole_ of the arguments should be against marriage, and yet that it should continue to be an inst.i.tution. You never find a person to defend it."

"'_At quis vituperavit_?' as the man remarked, on hearing of a defence of Hercules," said De Vayne. "I should have thought that marriage, like the Bible, 'needed no apology.'"

"My dear fellow, it surely is an absurdity on the face of it? See how badly it succeeds."