Chapter XI: Good Resolutions

But no one, boy or man, could have gone through the experiences of that day without their having left some mark behind. It is impossible for a man to pass through the valley of the shadow of death yet meet no evil, and be directly afterwards altogether the same light-hearted, thoughtless being which he had been before. Man cannot go so near to God as they had gone without some of the glory--that glory which illumined the countenance of Moses--being left behind. It was impossible to prevent the scene itself from lingering in one's mind's eye. The falling snow, the darkening night, the happy company of travellers, the thoughts of the coming Christmas-tide which filled their hearts, the charms of home, the joy of once more seeing faces which they loved--who does not know how one's heart is full of such-like thoughts at Christmas-time? And then the sudden crash, the sudden passage into eternity, the sudden shifting of the characters--the same snow falling on how different a company--the same night shrouding how different a scene! The sight itself, the mere tangible, and actual, and visible surroundings, it was impossible to have forgotten; impossible to prevent haunting one's imagination, as do the ghosts of fiction or of history. But the thoughts inspired by those surroundings were far more powerful occupants of one's fevered brain. At least such was the case with Marmaduke Tregowan. True, he was predisposed to yield to their influence; he was already in that state of mind in which such thoughts take deepest root and retain their hold the longest.

The after adventures of the evening, the arrival at the hotel, the search for food, and the proceedings in the pantry, had for a time forced into the background his graver mood. But now, when they at last retired to rest, and were in their own bed-chamber, and the hour had come to woo nature's great restorer, sleep, such thoughts came back again, and he would not have dismissed them if he could. They were strange to him; thought of any kind was strange to him. He rattled on through life without ever pausing to consider what would be the result of any given act or any given line of action. It had never entered his philosophy to suppose that it was better, or wiser, or necessary in any sort of way; he had done a thing because he did it, or because he chose to do it, but he had never once reflected what would be the result of doing it, and what would be the consequences to him of its being done. One such reflection had already forced itself to-day upon his attention; he had been compelled to see too late the result of the line of conduct he had pursued these many days; he had not seen its coming--he was only conscious of its neighbourhood when it had come.

They three were in the room which they jointly had to occupy. Penharden without delay stripped off his things and tumbled into bed; he was too sore, too fatigued, too much out of temper to think of rendering thanks unto that Lord who within these last few hours had saved him from a hideous death. It never occurred to him--such was his weariness--that it was in any way advisable, or necessary, or the sort of thing he ought to do. Without a word to any one he put himself between the sheets, and almost as soon as he was between the sheets was fast asleep; and so, like a dumb animal, committed himself into the hands of God to bring him safely through another night, without thinking it necessary to recognise in any way the presence of that God, taking it for granted that He would watch over him if he asked Him to or not.

Duke and Lionel were not so hasty in their movements. Lionel threw himself into a chair beside the blazing fire, and Duke, leaning his elbow on the mantel-shelf, looked down upon the flaming coals. It was a pleasant room, and the light of the candles on the dressing-table was in harmony with the cheering fire. The wind still howled without, and it was not an uncomfortable thought to think what a contrast was afforded by the state of things outside to that which reigned within. It was very quiet save for the howling of the gale; Noel's measured breathing was distinctly audible in the silent room; neither Pollyon nor Duke seemed to be as yet in any mood for conversation.

The flames lit up Tregowan's face; it was strangely pale; the look which had been on it when he first had fully realised the extent of the catastrophe and the fate from which he had been saved possessed it now--the look of passionate intensity, of utter disregard of the presence of the world. Pollyon's handsome features were differently disposed; his was a face in which a certain quizzical humour was always to be found. It was not odd that his fellows found it difficult to understand him; they never could be certain whether or not he was in earnest, what would be the next thing he would say or do; they always stood, despite themselves, in a certain awe of him. He had not the best of tempers, and when out of temper had a tongue which, thick-skinned though boys in general are, cut them like a lash. He was undeniably clever, was singularly audacious, no respecter of persons, and seemed to take a pleasure in lowering the dignity of anybody who might be suspected of being in possession of such a quality. In his way an omnivorous devourer of books, he aspired to nothing so much as a perfect knowledge of the world, and to be above the passions which held sway in it; altogether somewhat out of the common reach of boys, and yet not so much out of it as to lay himself open to the charge of eccentricity.

As they were, then, Duke and Lionel, drinking in, as it might be, the warm comfort of the fire, the most casual observer could not have failed to have been struck by the fact how different were the types of human nature they presented. Duke was of a former age, of the days when pride of birth held sway, when pride of family was allowed by universal consent to place a man emphatically and distinctly above his fellows, when the claims of long descent were all in all in the eyes of man--of the days which shall never come again. Marmaduke Tregowan, boy though he was, was, in the older sense, to the backbone aristocratic; while Pollyon, with him it was all the other way. He was the product of these modern times; taken generally--that is to say, when his temper was unruffled--the incarnation of shrewdness and keen practical common-sense. Duke was but saved from the charge of priggishness by his thorough fondness for boyish sports and pastimes, by his true and honourable nature, by his instinctive creed--_sans peur et sans reproche_. Lionel, truth to tell, but escaped the charge of habitual impudence by the very skin of his teeth, and was only too apt upon occasion to mistake vulgarity for humour. But now, he as well as Duke was in his graver mood; and between those two, so utterly unlike in character, had grown up the nearest approach to friendship which either of them had ever known. Perpetually at loggerheads, perpetually at different points of the compass in matters of opinion, yet, as though by instinct, each saw what in the other's character was good, each leaned, paradoxical though it might seem, to what in the other he professed to scorn; each perceived, though dimly perhaps, the characteristics which the other had and he himself had not, and was conscious that those were characteristics not altogether to be despised.

Lionel spoke first, with the quizzical look about his mouth and in his eyes which he never wholly lost.

"What a delightful day it's been!" he said. "Delightful! the sort of day one would like every first day of the holidays to be, beginning so agreeably and winding up so pleasantly!"

Duke was silent; he only looked into the fire with that strange passion in his eyes, and held his peace, so Lionel for a time was silent too. But soon he spoke again.

"Looks promising for a merry Christmas. Lucky these aren't the days of omens, or it would be a long pile against a farthing that holidays which have begun so well would go on getting better to the end; and yet the eloquent Penharden don't seem to be affected much." And he glanced round at Noel sleeping soundly.

"There was a fellow in my carriage," said Duke, changing the subject suddenly, "who was going home; he'd been away from them five years; he said his people would be looking at the clock to see how far he was from home."

"Well," interrogated Lionel, for Duke had stopped, "did they go on looking?"

"He wanted to be friendly, and I shut him up. He was merry as a grig. When the smash came he was thrown into my arms; he lay there until we were taken out; I could move neither myself nor him. I asked him how he did. He was dead. I suppose he had gone home."

There was a ring of passion in the speaker's voice very pitiful to hear, as though the tension of his heart approached almost to breaking, and no relief could anywhere be found--as though the well-springs of happiness were dried, and he was acquainted only with the waters of bitterness--as though all the world were dark, and he had lost all hope in it. Its tone struck Pollyon's ear more even than his words. With a quick movement, he looked no longer at the flames, but looked at Duke instead; it was curious to observe the expression of his countenance as he saw what was in Tregowan's.

"Well, he is dead. I guess they've given up looking at the clock by now, and found out all about it. It's well, upon the whole, that we're not lying there beside him. Was he a decent sort of fellow?"

"Yes, very--very decent. I shut him up because I should have shut up any one."

"Ah! so I should say from what I saw of you," remarked Pollyon drily: "you were in a shutting-up mood just then; you sometimes are. It looks uncommonly as though on this occasion you had managed to shut the fellow up for ever; he won't be chummily inclined again."

"He will not, and I feel as though I had had a hand in killing him, as though I had sent him to his death." Duke never altered his position, but spoke in the same clear ringing tones which marked his passion, while they at the same time evidenced its strength.

"Pooh! stuff and nonsense! all my eye and Ikey Moses! You're not such an idiot as that. You'd as much to do with it as I had, and I'll let you know how much that was when you care to make inquiries."

"Pollyon," said Duke suddenly, turning all the passion of his gaze upon the other, "do you believe in God?"

The question was such a sudden one, that Lionel, not easily found wanting, was at a loss; for some moments he never flinched before Tregowan's glance, but met him eye to eye. Duke waited his reply, which was not quick in coming. Pollyon twisted himself round upon his chair, tilted it back, thrust his legs well out in front of him, his hands into his trouser pockets, and looked steadily into the fire; then he said, speaking in his own peculiarly deliberate fashion--

"Tregowan, I don't think that the question's exactly fair. I don't know that--I don't know that you've any right to inquire into the state of my belief; it may be just to gratify a whim--whims being in your line; or to pump me, which you'd find it hard to do; or just to mention it around that you'd inquired."

"I ask it for no such reason; I ask it because I want to know." And Duke still kept his eyes upon Pollyon's face.

"Oh, you ask it because you want to know. That's very kind of you; this is a new and flattering development of interest in my affairs." As he said this, Lionel turned his head again and attentively scanned Tregowan's countenance; then, returning to gaze upon the fire, "Yes, I do believe there is a God. I do more than that--I know there is a God just as certainly as God knows me." Turning once again to Duke, he asked, with unusual gravity, "Tregowan, you don't mean to say that you have ever had any doubt upon the matter?"

"No," said Duke, with the same passion in his speech, "I don't know that I have ever doubted it. I supposed there was; I never thought of it at all. I have always been taught there was. The mother has talked to me of God; I've listened to what the Doctor's had to say. But what of that? That is nothing. I have never understood what was meant by God before."

"Duke, I ain't cut out to be a preacher; it isn't in my line, you know. The dad, he's a parson, and I'm not, and I'm not going to be; but I'm a queer stick, as all you fellows know, and I'm real sorry to hear you say you have no knowledge of God. It's no question of preacher. Preacher! it's just a question of two and two make four, and that's the fact of it. Suppose you'd gone under with those other fellows in that train; you'd have been in Queer Street then, old man."

"I know it; I'm in Queer Street now. I'm in that state of mind that I almost wish I had gone under. I almost wish that I were dead. Do you know that they've expelled me?"

"Expelled you? they? who? The Doctor? You don't mean to say that he's expelled you?" And this time Lionel bestirred himself so much as to get up from his seat and stand by Marmaduke.

"I do! I do! He told me so this morning. I'm never to return to Dorrincourt. He has packed me off, he has given me up as a hopelessly bad case; and as I am going home with such a tale to tell, this comes to me, and the man I have wantonly insulted falls into my arms."

"And meets God face to face. Perhaps it was the best of goings home to him. I made a joke of it just now, but I never thought it was a joke; it's a way I have, which goes no farther than my tongue. But, Duke, old man, joke or no joke, it might be the best thing that ever happened to you in all your days."

"What do you mean?" asked Marmaduke.

"Exactly what I say, and nothing else. I don't know that Shakespeare's in your line, but when he wrote that 'there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,' I've heard my father say that no one ever wrote a truer word; and just as much--it's the dad who's speaking; don't suppose it's me--there is a tide in the life of every one, which, taken at the flood, leads on to good or evil, a sort of half-way house in the life of every one to which all paths converge. There's one of Penharden's words for you, my boy--but from which only two lead out again, and they the paths of good and evil. Now it's just upon the cards that that's the very house to which you've come, the very place in which God has appointed to meet you face to face, and in which you shall choose whether your road shall be for good or if for evil."

This was a new phase of Pollyon's character, and one which Tregowan, despite the highly wrought state of excitement in which his nerves were in, recognised was new. It had never occurred to him for an instant--it had perhaps never occurred to any other of his school-intimates--that Lionel was religiously inclined. It would have astonished his friends at Dorrincourt considerably had they heard the speech he had this instant made. It was probably only the state of semi-frenzy which Marmaduke was in, coupled with his own adventures of the evening, which caused him to lay bare his breast to his friend. There is nothing so infectious as confidences; once begin to confide in another, and ere long that other will confide in you.

But the truth is--and you may look as black as you like at what you may call preaching--but what is the use of our trying to get on together if we are not to know all that is in each other's hearts? Half confidence is no confidence at all. The truth is, the sense of shame which prevents any one, boy, man, woman, or any one, from speaking of the most important subject which can be spoken of, is the most shameful shame it is possible to feel. What is God, that you should be ashamed of Him? or the knowledge of the Lord, that you should put it behind your backs? Coward! It is a word which cuts you like a knife, a name which who would care to own? Yet what word or set of words could possibly express the deeper depth of cowardly degradation to which he must have sunk who is ashamed of God, the Maker and Preserver of us all?

The two lads stood face to face, Duke wondering at the new light which was in Pollyon's countenance, this new revelation of his comrade's character. Lionel, seemingly so seldom earnest, was as seldom heated. Now his excitement mastered him. He stood with his right hand extended in front of him, and the index-finger of his left hand pointing to Tregowan's face. His excitement fanned the other's higher.

"Suppose it is," said Marmaduke, "how am I to know it, and what am I to do?"

"What are you to do? Never mind about your knowing it. It isn't to be supposed that God will write it down in black and white that the time has come for you to turn to Him. You turn, and then the time has come. Duke, you're not a mule. Don't you listen to the twaddle which some fellows talk to you. I wish you could hear the dad; he puts it plain enough. But don't you believe that to live for God means to live for misery, or that to live for Him means that you must be a snob, or a sneak, or a cad, or a prig--that's just what it doesn't mean. I ain't a book, and I can't reel it off as though I were; but I know well enough that if you want to have any sort of comfort here or anywhere, it's God you'll have to live for; and if you want to be the thoroughgoing sort of brick which every decent fellow wants to be, you'll have to lead the life which God would have you lead. Look at the dad! There's a man for you! He don't know it, but it's a fact that I do believe that he's the very best brick that ever was. And why? Because he's always living for the Lord! Don't you bother about knowing it; it's what you've got to do that ought to trouble you."

"It is what troubles me," said Duke; and leaving his place beside the mantel-shelf, he began pacing up and down. Either the noise he made in walking or the sound of their voices roused Penharden in the bed. He became restless all at once, opened his eyes by degrees, and finally sat up and looked about him.

"What are you fellows doing there?" he asked, in sleepy tones.

"We're talking," replied Pollyon shortly. Apparently satisfied, Noel dropped back again, and fell into that most blissful of states which is neither sleeping nor waking.

Lionel watched Tregowan as restlessly he passed from side to side. There was an odd look upon his face. The excitement, which was with him so great a novelty, faded gradually, and the old, queer, quizzical, half-earnest, half-humorous look came back instead.

"Old man," he said, "there's one thing you can do, and nothing better could be done, and that is--try a prayer. That young beggar there," pointing to Penharden, "he tumbled into bed, and never thought to pray. That's not the sort of thing for you. His time will come when he will long with all his might to speak with God, and will find that, from want of use, his power of speech has gone."

He stopped. Duke still continued his feverish pacing. Lionel watched him in silence for a time, and then said, as if casually, "Well, I guess I'm going to bed." Duke still said nothing, and without paying any attention to his silence, Pollyon turned himself about and proceeded to undress. The proceeding was by no means a lengthy one. In two or three minutes at the most he had very closely approached a state of nature. All the time neither of them spoke a word. Lionel was whistling a tune very gently beneath his breath, while Duke still paced up and down. Probably there were in their minds thoughts which were of such a kind that neither at that moment could resolve them into speech. At last Lionel was in his shirt. For a few moments he warmed himself before the fire, and then, still without a word, turned, and going to the bed, dropped down beside it on his knees. Marmaduke never seemed to heed him, but none the less his steps were less vociferous, and there was silence while Pollyon prayed.

Having risen from his knees, Lionel proceeded to survey the bed. With peculiar generosity, Penharden had so placed himself that not only did he occupy the middle of the bed, but a good portion of one side as well.

"Thank you, thank you, my dear!" observed Pollyon, as he perceived the state of things. "This is unusually kind of you. If this were not a remarkable occasion, I should have uncommon pleasure in teaching you that there is such a thing as dividing a bed into equal portions, and for that purpose should pitch you head-foremost to the floor; but under the circumstances I don't mind letting you enjoy yourself for once." So saying he scrambled in beside his sleepy friend. "Good-night, Tregowan," he exclaimed, as he settled his head upon the pillow. So Duke was left to enjoy in solitude his own reflections.

Still for some minutes he continued moving up and down, with that "death-or-glory" look, as the boys were wont to call it, in his eyes, and on his brow, and everywhere. Many a troubled thought was passing through his mind, many an embittering reflection. How the past rose up before him! How the ghosts of memory came sweeping on him with a strength it was vain to strive to stem, filling his soul with bitterness! What had he not left undone which he should do? what had he done which were not better left undone? And the answer was not of a sort to comfort him.

Poor Duke! It was his evil hour then, and it was well for him that he had found a counsellor, however crude a one; well for him that he was in a mood to listen to his counsels. Not long had Pollyon lain down when the desire within his breast to bring the matter to the Lord grew more than he could bear, and beside the bed, on the very spot where Lionel had knelt, he fell into an agony of prayer. An agony of prayer! Well might it be said of him that he wrestled with the Lord--it was his Peniel! How long he stayed upon his knees he never knew, nor the words he used could he at any time recall to mind. He was not certain even if he used any words at all, or whether the prayer was not an inarticulate throwing of himself upon the mercy of the Lord.

But when he rose at last, he rose up comforted, strong and easier in mind; and although the night was already far advanced, and the day was comparatively close at hand, he sat himself down beside the fire, and resolved within himself that the future should be unlike the past, and that this crisis in his life should be to him indeed the tide of which Pollyon spoke, which, taken at the flood, led unto God; the half-way house, in leaving which he would depart for ever from the path of evil, and cleave unto the path of good!

But alas! for good resolutions! Alas! for the road of which they form the pavement! Marmaduke Tregowan had more than one battle yet to win before he arrived at a perfect knowledge of the love and loveliness of God. Yet what of that? The more battles that you win the greater conqueror you are. To resolve for good is at least so much gained. Good resolutions at least can do no harm, even should we be so unfortunate as to lack the necessary strength to act up to our resolves.