Chapter X

Oh let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet.

TENNYSON’S _Maud_.

Tim’s career at Eton, after it became more prosperous, offers nothing of much interest to the general public, his relations with the various good people who befriended him having nothing to do with this story, which is the history of his friendship for Carol, and for no one else. We must not suppose, however, that he had no other friends. He was not of the very successful type, but he made several very fast and true ones at this period of his life. His tutor was very fond of him, and more than one boy among his schoolfellows asked him to visit him in the holidays, which is the highest mark of esteem that young gentlemen at that age can confer. His father would have liked him to go, but Tim would accept none of these invitations, feeling how unlike the homes his friends described to him--abodes of mothers and sisters and ponies, and such good things--were to the lonely old manor-house, and not caring to invite their inspection of his own interior in return. Still he felt the kindness of the intention, and was as placidly contented as he could be in a place where Carol had been, and was not; for in spite of new ties and interests, above and below all other friendships or affections, his life-devotion held its undiminished sway. He corresponded regularly with Carol, according to his promise, telling him all the gossip of the old place, so interesting to those who have grown up in that queer nursery, so inscrutably dull to all besides. Many a detail of cricket or fives news was mastered by the indefatigable Tim, though he took but a slender concern in such matters on his own account, because he knew they would be of interest to Carol, who on his side declared our hero the best of correspondents, and supplied him in return with descriptions of Cambridge, or, if at Darley, with constant bulletins of the health of Bess.

‘Bess is renewing her youth,’ he would write; ‘there is not a rabbit but goes in fear for his life in all Stoke Ashton parish. Mrs. Quitchett seems to have borrowed the other old lady’s receipt, not for rabbit-hunting, but for looking young. In your absence, she hails me with pleasure, as some one to whom to talk of you.’

Or from Cambridge: ‘Do you want to know what I am about? I walk a great deal--to stretch my legs, which you may think do not require it--not to see the country, which a fellow here, who never said anything else good that I know of, said one could do by putting on a pair of high-heeled boots. I read a fairish amount, and play lots of tennis. Do you know what a bisque is? or that half thirty is not the same as fifteen? In the evenings I have taken violently to whist, and have once or twice ventured on more exciting games, but don’t feel inclined to become a professional gambler yet awhile. Next winter I think I shall keep a horse. It isn’t half a bad life, and there are lots of awfully jolly fellows; but I miss the old school more than I can say, and am still more than half inclined to blub when I think of it. What shall I do next half without Upper Club? I don’t believe playing for the University will at all console me.’

Not very deep perhaps, but frank, boyish, jolly letters, with a sensation as of fresh air blowing through them. I have a pile of them from which I could quote, all much in the same style. Years afterwards they were found, oh! how carefully preserved, and tied together in little bundles, with now only the date of their receipt, now some tender comment carefully affixed in Tim’s youthful scrawl. The neatness of their arrangement had something specially touching about it, tidiness not being as a general rule by any means a distinguishing characteristic of their recipient.

As may readily be imagined, Tim’s persistence in his intimacy with Carol did not tend to increase the comfort of his relations with his father. Mr. Ebbesley was not a man of many words; but neither was it difficult to see of what he disapproved, and in the present case, without parading his sentiments, he took no pains to conceal them. During the autumn and winter that followed the conversation recorded in the last chapter he confined himself to little sneers and sarcasms when Carol’s name happened to be mentioned in his presence, which Tim took care should be as seldom as possible. But the very carefulness of this avoidance was in itself a cause of constraint. How could the boy be at ease with his father when all his most sacred feelings clustered round an object of which he felt it better never to speak to him? To live in tacit defiance of an unexpressed desire of one’s nearest relative does not conduce to a comfortable state of things.

It was in the first Easter holidays after the August day when Fate, in the shape of Miss Markham Willis, had first crossed the path of the two friends, that, Carol having gone back to Cambridge before Tim’s return to Eton, the latter was one day diligently scribbling his budget of home news in the old manor library where he had lain asleep the day his father’s letter had come to Mrs. Quitchett. (What the news was I am not in a position to tell you, because, you see, though I can refer to every line Carol wrote to Tim, I have not the same advantage as regards Tim’s answers.) So immersed was he in his writing, and in the mental effort of omitting nothing Carol would like to be told, that he did not hear the door open, nor observe that any one had come in, till he was startled by a shadow falling on the paper, and looking up, was somewhat alarmed to find his father standing before him with an expression which was anything rather than amiable. Mr. Ebbesley had been vexed about something, and was in a mood for finding fault.

‘Always scribbling,’ he began; ‘it’s really a sin not to be out this lovely day.’

He was not as a rule keenly susceptible to the beauty of the weather, and his remark therefore rather surprised his son.

‘I was out all the morning,’ he said.

‘Where?’ asked his father.

‘Oh! up above Beech Farm, in the Court woods,’ and Tim blushed a little as he spoke. The fact was he had been making one of his pilgrimages to the sacred spot where his dinner with the squirrel had been interrupted so many years before.

‘In the Court woods,’ repeated Mr. Ebbesley crossly; ‘really I’m ashamed of you. Not content with dangling eternally about after that turnip-eating young embryo squire the whole time he’s here, you must needs make yourself ridiculous by hanging about his house and grounds like a sentimental girl when he’s away.’

‘You shan’t call Carol names,’ Tim answered hotly, the faint blood in his cheeks suddenly crimsoning them all over; ‘he’s the best and---- There, I beg your pardon; I know I oughtn’t to speak so to you, but I couldn’t help it. Say what you like about me, but please don’t sneer at him.’

‘I am sure he would be delighted if he knew what a champion he had in you; don’t you see that the fellow doesn’t want you? You _must_ bore him.’

‘You’ve no right to say he doesn’t want me,’ the boy flashed out again; ‘it’s not true; and--and--I think he’s the best judge of whether he wants me or not.’

He was quivering all over, but his father took no more notice of this outbreak than of the former one.

‘I’ve no doubt,’ he went on, motioning slightly towards the unfinished letter, ‘that it’s to him you’ve been writing all this trash. It seems to me that you waste a good deal of your time and my paper in supplying pipe-lighters for unknown undergraduates.’

‘What is it you want me to do?’ asked Tim hopelessly.

‘You know quite well what my wishes are: that I disapprove of violent intimacies and long letter-writing. Why can’t you be friends with this very commonplace young man as other people are friends, without all this foolish fuss? I don’t want you to waste all your time in writing sentimental letters; it is enervating; and Heaven knows you don’t require _that_.’

Tim stood white and uncertain, biting his pen. ‘You want me to give Carol up,’ he said.

‘That is so like you,’ said Mr. Ebbesley; ‘you make such a tragedy of everything; who talks of giving up? I only ask you for once to show a little common sense, and not eternally to go on being a baby. Why can you never be like other boys about anything, I wonder?’

Tim wondered that too; he also wondered whether it would be worth while to try and make his father understand that his letters were not ‘sentimental,’ as he called them. For a minute he half felt inclined to ask him to read the one on the table between them, but he recollected all sorts of little simple sayings and phrases that he would not for the world submit to the sarcastic perusal of his father’s double eyeglass. _He_ knew perfectly well that to continue on terms of cool acquaintance with Carol, always guarding every word and action for fear it was too intimate, and not writing to him after promising to do so, was simply impossible; but he knew too that it was hopeless to make his father see this as he saw it. No. What he meant him to do was simply to give up his friend, and he felt a dull feeling of anger and defiance at what he considered his disingenuous way of putting himself more or less in the right by all this talk about ‘common sense’ and ‘ordinary friendship.’ He determined to call things by their right names, and since his father did not like his speaking of what he required of him as ‘giving up Carol,’ he would do it again.

‘I am sorry I cannot obey you,’ he said slowly; ‘I think one should never give up a friend unless for his own good.’

‘Oh! in that case you think you should?’ inquired his father, with an ironical appearance of interest.

‘Yes; if one loved a person truly, one would do anything for him; even give him up,’ answered Tim quite simply.

Mr. Ebbesley fairly lost patience. ‘Don’t you know I could _make_ you do this if I chose?’ he said almost fiercely; perhaps the words ‘if one loved a person truly’ had galled his wound a little. But he relapsed into his manner of carefully assumed indifference to add, ‘I prefer, however, to leave you free to find out that I am right by experience; I have warned you, and you will not be warned; you know my wishes, but since you refuse to be guided by them you shall please yourself.’ And he turned and left the room.

Tim stood with the unfinished letter in his hand staring blankly after him. Why was the only thing his father had ever asked of him the only thing he could not do? He sank back into his chair and covered his face with the letter. ‘Oh! Carol,’ he moaned, ‘will you cast me off some day after this?’

It would be hard to say whether father or son suffered more keenly after this interview. Tim, to be sure, had carried his point, but his laurels were dear bought, and some victories, as we know, are almost more disastrous than defeats; and then Mr. Ebbesley had the pleasant certainty that he was right, which was his consolation in many of the hard knocks of life. He sincerely believed himself actuated by none but the very highest motives, and, moreover, considered that he had displayed remarkable temper and moderation under very trying circumstances. None the less he had been defied and bested, refused what he had almost stooped to ask, and had flat disobedience and revolt opposed to his expressed wishes. He had imprudently risked a trial of strength with Carol, and been thrown. Not only had he less hold on his son’s affections, but actually less power over his actions than this youth who cared, he was convinced, so little for either one or the other. He felt sore and injured, and Tim supremely miserable, for some time; days during which they met and lived together as usual, and tried with very poor success to behave as though nothing had happened. Tim continued to write to Carol, but he did so henceforth in his room, and carried his letters to the post himself, not from a desire to conceal the fact from his father, but only to avoid a recurrence of the painful scene in the library; and indeed it had no successors. Mr. Ebbesley had delivered himself of his views, and thereafter the grave was not more silent; the subject of Carol was no more mentioned between him and his son. And Tim wrote no word of what had happened to Carol. In the first place, he would have died a thousand deaths sooner than say a word that could distress him, and in the second, he was far too proud to let even his best friend into the secret of his disagreement with his father. His letters flowed on in their usual channel, and if they were a little lacking in spirit, their recipient was by no means an observant critic, and least of all just then, being, as we shall see, much preoccupied with affairs of his own.

For, if Tim’s letters were unchanged, Carol’s certainly were not. There crept into them about this time a quite new and strange tone, which did not pass unnoticed by his young correspondent. It would be difficult to describe exactly what it was; but chance remarks scattered up and down, together with a certain abstract and speculative turn of sentence quite foreign to the young man’s usual style, would have indicated pretty clearly to any one but a baby what was the matter with the writer. ‘I feel,’ he wrote, ‘that I am approaching a turning-point in my life, which will make me either very happy or very miserable; and I feel too that it is for life.’ And elsewhere he congratulated Tim on being ‘still of an age when he was not likely to know what it was to care more for one person than for all the rest of the world,’ at which his friend smiled a little sadly, thinking that he did. There are no notes on these letters in Tim’s handwriting, only the date; probably they puzzled the boy not a little.

That Carol was not quite himself seemed pretty clear; then it dawned upon him that his state of mind indicated strong affection for some one, and almost simultaneously he arrived at the chilling conviction that that some one was certainly not himself. He hardly knew how to reply to these strange unfamiliar letters; no doubt he thought he was expected to make some sign of sympathy or interest, but with the vague and fragmentary knowledge he possessed, he felt it impossible to do so. In one way he was undoubtedly the gainer by this mystery. At no previous time had Carol ever written, not only so regularly, but so often; hardly a week passed without his hearing from him, and usually at some length. Still he felt uneasily that something was wrong; and when at the end of the Cambridge May term his friend wrote that he was coming down to Eton for a day or two, he was glad not only with the joy of meeting again, but almost more so at the opportunity thus afforded to him of judging if his voice, look, or manner were in keeping with the strangeness of his epistolary style. And yet he half feared to see in him the probable confirmation of his suspicions of something being wrong.

When Carol did come, his behaviour was even stranger than his writing. Instead of launching himself out on to the pavement over the closed door of his fly the moment it drew up in front of tutor’s, and sending a flying glance up the house-front for any friends who might be on the look-out, as was his usual custom, followed by a tremendous shout if his eye caught a familiar face, Tim, who was watching from his window, was amazed to see him sit meekly while the driver descended from his box and opened the door, and then inquire what he owed him, as though he had just taken the drive from Slough Station to Eton for the first time in his life. And having paid the man, who had driven him any time these seven years, and was too much astonished even to overcharge him, he walked into the house without once looking up. Tim sat down and stared. What did it all mean? Nor had he less cause to wonder when Carol came up to visit him; he greeted him with more than ordinary cordiality, and then laughed a little, and then seemed to forget his existence, becoming absorbed in a minute inspection of everything in the room, as if he had never seen it before.

‘Holker isn’t going to play in the next match,’ began Tim, producing the cricket shop he had been carefully storing himself with for Carol’s arrival. ‘He missed three catches on Tuesday, and as all his chance was for his fielding, Jones has told Tuttiett he’ll try him. They say Holker’s furious, and swears if he don’t get his eleven, it’ll be because Jones hates him, and will be sure to spite him if he can.’

‘Who’s Jones?’ inquired Carol dreamily.

Now Jones had been in his own eleven, and they had played together in all the matches only one short year before, not to mention that they had been, as Tim knew, in close correspondence ever since, the ex-captain giving his successor the benefit of his greater experience in all matters relating to the government of the cricket world.

‘Who’s Jones!’ echoed Tim in such unfeigned surprise that Carol pulled himself together, laughed again, and said he wasn’t thinking.

They talked about the eleven for a little, but it was obvious that the old boy’s heart was not as heretofore in the talk, and presently he wandered to the window, and began pitilessly pulling to pieces one of Tim’s best fancy geraniums. Tim’s flower-box was his especial pride and glory; he loved and tended his flowers as no other boy in the house did, and it is on record that on one occasion, when he was watering them, and some of the water had gone on the head of the big boy in the room below, who happened to be talking out of the window to a friend, that hero, having come up breathing vengeance, had been so struck with the beauty of the little garden that he had sat down to talk about it, the wooden spoon he had brought with him lying idly in his lap. Ordinarily, Carol would not for the world have injured one of these treasures, as much from dislike of giving pain as from his own feeling towards them, the result of Miss Kate’s early training. Tim could stand it no longer.

‘Carol,’ he said, laying a timid hand on the strong arm that was working havoc among his pelargoniums, ‘please forgive me for being curious, but isn’t there something up? You don’t seem like yourself; and your letters have been so rum lately. Is anything wrong? Can I do anything? Won’t you tell me what’s the matter?’

Carol turned and looked at him; then he took his hand and said gently--

‘By Jove, Tim, what a clever little soul you are! fancy your noticing like that. Shall I tell you? After all, I’d sooner tell you than any one; you’ve always been the best and truest friend a fellow ever had, though there’s so much difference in our ages.’

Tim was gratified. ‘You’ve always been so good to me, Carol,’ he said, ‘and I don’t care much for many people.’

‘Can you keep a secret?’ asked his friend; ‘for it _is_ a secret at present.’

The tortures of the Inquisition, Tim protested, should not draw a word from him, when Carol had bid him be silent; and then out it all came.

‘Why shouldn’t he tell him? He might think it odd of him to do so, but tell some one he must, and the fact was, to cut a long story short, he was in love. He remembered Miss Markham Willis--Violet?’ (Yes, Tim remembered her, and with her a whole train of old apprehensions.) ‘Well, she was the girl he was in love with, and she was the loveliest girl in all England, and the kindest to her little brothers and sisters, and, in fact, the most peerless in all the relations of life; and he knew every one would say they were too young, but he knew what love was, and he saw now that he had loved her ever since they first met, and he should never feel the same for any one else, and Tim wasn’t to say a word about it.’

Standing there opposite to him, holding his hands, his honest blue eyes wet with emotion, and his voice that Tim had heard always firm, and sometimes loud, trembling as he made the confession of his young love, there was something beautiful and touching in the great strong boy; he seemed to have lost all his masterfulness, and to be quite meek and uncertain of himself for the first time in his life. And Tim, part frightened, and part regretful, and part gratified at having been selected as confidant on so important an occasion, promised silence,--would have promised anything, in fact, that Carol had demanded,--and Carol, the floodgates of his silence being burst at last, and the tide of his feelings finding free vent, went on and said much more.

Violet and her mother had been staying at Cambridge for the May week with some Head of a college who was their kinsman, and Carol had been bound, in common politeness, to do the honours of his University to his country neighbours; so that was how matters had come to a crisis with him, and the conviction had been borne in upon him in the intervals of boat-races, flower-shows, and dancing that for him there was and would always be but one woman in the world.

‘And does she--does she--?’ inquired Tim discreetly.

‘Ah! there’s where it is,’ cried the other; ‘I think, I really think she likes me, but I didn’t dare speak; it seemed as if it couldn’t be possible such a girl should really care for me.’

‘Not care for _you_!’ exclaimed Tim almost angrily, and then he stopped, much embarrassed.

‘Oh, you are such a staunch little friend!’ said Carol; ‘you think much too well of me, don’t you know.’

But for all that he was cheered by his friend’s enthusiasm; and the mere fact of having unburthened himself to patient and sympathetic ears sent him off more nearly restored to his normal frame of mind, to discuss the new choices with Jones, quite like a sane mortal.

So Carol and Violet fell in love; for it was not many weeks after this that he found the courage he had lacked at Cambridge, and his modest ‘thinking she liked him’ was converted into triumphant certainty. They were absurdly young of course. Violet was only seventeen and Carol not yet twenty when they first discovered they were made for one another, and mutually imparted this intelligence, as, I am told, is the manner of young people. Of course, too, the old people, as is _their_ manner, scouted the notion, and said, ‘Nonsense; boy and girl; too young to think of such things.’ But the tendency of boys and girls being to get their way in matters of this sort, in spite of much more severe elders than Mr. and Mrs. Markham Willis, or the dear old Darleys, a compromise was at last effected. In two years, when Carol left the University, if he and Violet were still of the same mind the thing should be; but in the meanwhile they were not to be considered engaged, and not to correspond,--a very wise decision, as it seems to me, and one that reflected credit on all concerned. So these two were to wait, as so many others have done, and as they could well afford to do at their age, having life before them, and youth, and good looks, and high spirits to cheer them through their waiting.

Tim was installed as prime confidant, and to him Carol told or wrote all his hopes and fears. When the compromise was extracted from the old people, he came radiant to the manor-house, and finding Tim alone in the garden, poured out all his golden dream to him.

‘Two years were quite a short time to wait; many people had to wait half their lives. He would serve for Violet as long as Jacob had for Rachel, if need were; and wasn’t it grand of her to promise to wait for him? though of course he could not accept such a promise, and had quite refused to bind her.’

Tim listened to it all, now and then squeezing his friend’s hand in token of sympathy and attention; luckily he was not expected to say much, for he would have been rather at a loss what to say. His mind was travelling one year back to the day when he had gone up to the Court and found Violet installed in the drawing-room there; all the thoughts so vague and unintelligible to him then had taken form and substance; now he understood what the shadow was that had fallen across his path that day; that thing he had dimly guessed at had come upon him, and it was to him that Carol looked for rejoicing in his joy. Of course he _did_ rejoice, and felt delighted that this new experience of his idol seemed only to bring them nearer together instead of separating them; but was it really so? It is true, he saw more of him than he had ever done before, and when he went away again, heard from him oftener; but the talks and the letters were full of Violet, and of Violet only; she was the cause of it all. If Carol desired his society, it was that to him better than any one he could discourse of her perfections; if he wrote nearly every day, it was that he was not allowed to write to her, and the next best thing was writing about her. Tim was useful only as the safety-valve which allowed him to let off some of the enthusiasm with which he was overflowing. He would have liked to cry the name of his beloved to all the winds; failing that, it was a comfort to hold forth on the subject either with tongue or pen. And Tim saw all this quite plainly, and somehow was not as grateful at being selected for the part he was playing as he felt he should be. ‘Would he like it after all,’ he asked himself, ‘since this thing was to be’ (and he bowed before the inevitable), ‘had Carol selected any one else to whom to lay open his heart?’ He took himself to task for not feeling happier in his friend’s happiness. This was not the devotion he had vowed to him in his own heart, this selfishness that put himself before the object of his affection, which refused to dance at the dear one’s piping. Somehow he felt it would be easier to lament at his mourning; and for this too he had by and by the opportunity, as we shall see.