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"Alfred," said Julia, "do not torment yourself. We girls care little
about a few sarcasms; it is the cold heart that wounds us. You loved
Jane, and she knew it well, and joyed in it. You were kinder to her than
you think, and so her dying thoughts were for you. It was for you she
asked, and made your father send for you, and poor I hoped you would
come. And, dearest, her last act was to write a few words to you, and
trust them to her who she knew loved you better than heart can utter.
Since it was her wish, let us try and read them together, the last words
of a saint (I have never seen them), and, if they do not prove words of
love, then I will let you think you were not a good brother to her you
and I, and poor, poor Edward, have lost."

He made a sad sign of assent; and Julia rose and got the enclosure. But,
as Jane's last written words reappeared on the scene in a somewhat
remarkable way, I will only say here, that both these poor young things
tried in vain to read them, and both in turn burst out sobbing, so that
they could not: so they held the paper and tried to see the words out of
their streaming eyes. And these two mourners had the room to themselves
till midnight; for even Mrs. Dodd's hostility respected Alfred then; and
as for Julia, she was one of those who rise with the occasion: she was
half wife, half angel from Heaven to her bereaved lover through all those
bitter hours.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

No life was ever yet a play: I mean, an unbroken sequence of dramatic
incidents. Calms will come; unfortunately for the readers, happily for
the read. And I remember seeing it objected to novelists, by a young
gentleman just putting his foot for the first time into "Criticism," that
the writers aforesaid suppress the small intermediate matters which in
real life come by the score between each brilliant event: and so present
the ordinary and the extraordinary parts of life in false proportions.
Now, if this remark had been offered by way of contrast between events
themselves and all mortal attempts to reproduce them upon paper or the
stage, it would have been philosophical; but it was a strange error to
denounce the practice as distinctive of fiction: for it happens to be the
one trait the novelist and dramatist have in common with the evangelist.
The Gospels skip fifteen years of the most interesting life Creation has
witnessed; they relate Christ's birth in full, but hurry from His boyhood
to the more stirring events of His thirtieth and subsequent years. And
all the inspired histories do much the same thing. The truth is, that
epics, dramas, novels, histories, chronicles, reports of trials at law,
in a word, all narratives true or fictitious, except those which, true or
fictitious, nobody reads, abridge the uninteresting facts as Nature never
did, and dwell as Nature never did on the interesting ones.

Can nothing, however, be done to restore, in the reader's judgment, that
just balance of "the sensational" and the "soporific," which all writers,
that have readers, disturb? Nothing, I think, without his own assistance.
But surely something with it. And, therefore, I throw myself on the
intelligence of my readers; and ask them to realise, that henceforth
pages are no strict measure of time, and that to a year big with strange
events, on which I have therefore dilated in this story, succeeded a year
in which few brilliant things happened to the personages of this tale: in
short, a year to be skimmed by chronicler or novelist, and yet (mind you)
a year of three hundred and sixty-five days six hours, or thereabouts,
and one in which the quiet, unobtrusive troubles of our friends' hearts,
especially the female hearts, their doubts, divisions, distresses, did
not remit--far from it. Now this year I propose to divide into topics,
and go by logical, rather than natural, sequence of events.

THE LOVERS.

Alfred came every day to see Julia, and Mrs. Dodd invariably left the
room at his knock.

At last Julia proposed to Alfred not to come to the house for the
present; but to accompany her on her rounds as district visitor. To see
and soothe the bitter calamities of the poor had done her own heart good
in its worst distress, and she desired to apply the same medicine to her
beloved, who needed it: that was one thing: and then another was, that
she found her own anger rising when her mother left the room at that
beloved knock: and to be angry with her poor widowed, mother was a sin.
"She is as unfortunate as I am happy," thought Julia; "I have got _mine_
back."

Alfred assented to this arrangement with rather an ill grace. He
misunderstood Julia, and thought she was sacrificing him to what he
called her mother's injustice. This indeed was the interpretation any
male would have been pretty sure to put on it. His soreness, however, did
not go very far; because she was so kind and good to him when they were
together. He used to escort her back to the door of 66: and look
imploringly; but she never asked him in. He thought her hard for this. He
did not see the tears that flowed for that mute look of his the moment
the door was closed; tears she innocently restrained for fear the sight
of them should make him as unhappy as his imploring look made her.
_Mauvais calcul!_ She should have cried right out. When we men are
unhappy, we like our sweethearts to be unhappier--that consoles _us._

But when this had gone on nearly a month, and no change, Alfred lost
patience: so he lingered one day at the door to make a request. He asked
Julia to marry him: and so put an end to this state of things.

"Marry you, child?" cried Julia, blushing like a rose with surprise and
pleasure. "Oh, for shame!"

After the first thrill, she appealed to his candour whether that would
not be miserably selfish of her to leave her poor mother in her present
distressed condition. "Ah, Alfred, _so_ pale, _so_ spiritless, and
inconsolable! My poor, poor mother!"

"You will have to decide between us two one day."

"Heaven forbid!" said Julia, turning pale at the very idea. But he
repeated doggedly that it must come to that, sooner or later. Then he
reminded her of their solemn engagement, and put it to her whether it was
a moral proceeding in her to go back from her plighted troth? What had he
done to justify her in drawing back from her word? "I admit," said he,
"that I have _suffered_ plenty of wrong for your sake: but what have I
done wrong?"

Undeterred by the fear of immorality, the monotonous girl had but one
reply to his multiform reasons: "This is no time for me to abandon my
mother."

"Ah, it is her you love: you don't care for me," snapped Alfred.

"Don't I, dear Alfred?" murmured Julia.

"Forgive me! I'm a ruffian, a wretch."

"You are my Alfred. But oh, have a little patience, dear."

"A little patience? I have the patience of Job. But even his went at
last."

[I ought to have said they were in the passage now. The encroaching youth
had gained an entrance by agitating her so at the door that she had to
ask him in to hide her own blushes from the public.] She now gently
reminded him how much happier they were than they had been for months.
"Dear me," said she, "I am almost happy: happier than I ought to be;
could be quite so, but that I see you discontented."

"Ah, you have so many about you that you love: I have only you."

"And that is true, my poor Alfred."

This softened him a little; and then she interwove her fingers together,
and so put both palms softly on his shoulder (you never saw a male do
that, and never will), and implored him to be patient, to be generous.
"Oh," said she, " if you knew the distress it gives me to refuse to you
anything on earth, you would be generous, and not press me when my heart
says 'Yes,' but my lips _must_ say 'No.'"

This melted him altogether, and he said he would not torment her any
more.

But he went away discontented with himself for having yielded: my lord
did not call it "yielding," but "being defeated." And as he was not only
very deep in love, but by nature combative, he took a lodging nearly
opposite No. 66, and made hot love to her, as hot as if the attachment
was just forming. Her mother could not go out but he was at the door
directly: she could not go out but he was at her heels. This pleased her
at first and thrilled her with the sense of sweet and hot pursuit: but
by-and-by, situated as she was between him and her mother, it worried her
a little at times, and made her nervous. She spoke a little sharply to
him now and then. And that was new. It came from the nerves, not the
heart. At last she advised him to go back to Oxford. "I shall be the ruin
of your mind if we go on like this," said she sadly.

"What, leave the field to my rivals? No, thank you."

"What rivals, sir?" asked Julia, drawing up.

"Your mother, your brother, your curates that would come buzzing the
moment I left; your sick people, who bask on your smiles and your sweet
voice till I envy them: Sarah, whom you permit to brush your lovely hair,
the piano you play on, the air you deign to breathe and brighten,
everybody and everything that is near you; they are all my rivals; and
shall I resign you to them, and leave myself desolate? I'm not such a
fool."

She smiled, and could not help feeling it was sweet to be pestered. So
she said with matronly dignity, and the old Julian consistency, "You are
a foolish impetuous boy. You are the plague of my life: and--the sun of
my existence." That passed off charmingly. But presently his evil genius
prompted Alfred to endeavour to soften Mrs. Dodd by letter, and induce
her to consent to his marriage with her daughter. He received her answer
at breakfast-time. It was wonderfully polite and cold; Mrs. Dodd feigned
unmixed surprise at the proposal, and said that insanity being
unfortunately in her own family, and the suspicion of insanity resting on
himself, such a union was not to be thought of; and therefore,
notwithstanding her respect for his many good qualities, she must decline
with thanks the honour he offered her. She inserted a poisoned sting by
way of postscript. "When you succeed in publicly removing the impression
your own relations share with me, and when my husband owes his
restoration to you, instead of his destruction, of course you will
receive a very different answer to your proposal--should you then think
it consistent with your dignity to renew it."

As hostile testators used to leave the disinherited one shilling, not out
of a shilling's worth of kindly feeling, but that he might not be able to
say his name was omitted through inadvertency, so Mrs. Dodd inserted this
postscript merely to clench the nail and tantalise her enemy. It was a
masterpiece of feminine spite.

She would have been wonderstruck could she have seen how Alfred received
her missive.

To be sure he sat in a cold stupor of dejection for a good half hour; but
at the end of that time he lifted up his head, and said quietly, "So be
it. I'll get the trial over, and my sanity established, as soon as
possible: and then I'll hire a yacht and hunt her husband till I find
him."

Having settled this little plan, he looked out for Julia, whose sympathy
he felt in need of after such a stern blow.

She came out much later than usual that day, for to tell the truth, her
mother had detained her to show her Alfred's letter, and her answer.

"Ah, mamma," said poor Julia, "you don't love me as you did once. Poor
Alfred!"

Mrs. Dodd sighed at this reproach, but said she did not deserve it. No
mother in her senses would consent to such a match.

Julia bowed her head submissively and went to her duties. But when Alfred
came to her open-mouthed to complain of her mother's cruelty, she stopped
him at once, and asked him how he could go and write that foolish,
unreasonable letter. Why had he not consulted her first? "You have
subjected yourself to a rebuff," said she angrily, "and one from which I
should have saved you. Is it nothing that mamma out of pity to me
connives at our meeting and spending hours together? Do you think she
does no violence to her own wishes here? and is she to meet with no
return?"

"What, are you against me too?" said poor Alfred.

"No, it is you who are our enemy with your unreasonable impatience."

"I am not so cold-blooded as you are, certainly."

"Humility and penitence would become you better than to retort on me. I
love you both, and pray God on my knees to show me how to do my duty to
both."

"That is it; you are not single-hearted like me. You want to please all
the world, and reconcile the irreconcilable. It won't do: you will have
to choose between your mother and me at last."

"Then of course I shall choose my mother."

"Why?"

"Because she claims my duty as well as my love; because she is bowed down
with sorrow, and needs her daughter just now more than you do; besides,
you are my other self, and we must deny ourselves."

"We have no more right to be unjust to ourselves than to anybody else;
injustice is injustice."

"Alfred, you are a high-minded Heathen, and talk Morality. Morality is a
snare. What I pray to be is a Christian, as your dear sister was, and to
deny myself; and you make it, oh so difficult."

"So I suppose it will end in turning out your heathen and then taking
your curate. Your mother would consent to that directly."

"Alfred," said Julia with dignity, "these words are harsh, and--forgive
me for saying so--they are coarse. Such words would separate us two,
without my mother, if I were to hear many of them; for they take the
bloom off affection, and that mutual reverence, without which no
gentleman and lady could be blessed in holy wedlock."

Alfred was staggered and mortified too: they walked on in silence now.

"Alfred," said Julia at last, "do not think me behind you in affection,
but wiser, for once, and our best friend. I do think we had better see
less of one another for a time, my poor Alfred."

"And why for a time? Why not for ever?"

"If your heart draws no distinction, why not indeed?"

"So be it then: for I will be no woman's slave. There's my hand, Julia:
let us part friends."

"Thank you for that, dear Alfred: may you find some one who can love you
more--than--I do."

The words choked her. But he was stronger, because he was in a passion.
He reproached her bitterly. "If I had been as weak and inconstant as you
are, I might have been out of Drayton House long before I did escape. But
I was faithful to my one love. I have some right to sing 'Aileen Aroon,'
you have none. You are an angel of beauty and goodness; you will go to
Heaven, and I shall go to the devil now for want of you; but then you
have no constancy nor true fidelity: so that has parted us, and now
nothing is left me but to try and hate you."

He turned furiously on his heel.

"God bless you, go where you will," faltered Julia.

He replied with a fierce ejaculation of despair, and dashed away.

Thus temper and misunderstanding triumphed, after so many strange and
bitter trials had failed.

But alas! it is often so.

CHAPTER XLIX.

Both the parted lovers were wretched. Julia never complained, but
drooped, and read the Psalms, and Edward detected her in tears over them.
He questioned her and obtained a lame account; she being far more bent on
screening Alfred than on telling the truth.

Edward called on the other; and found him disconsolate, and reading a
Heathen philosopher for comfort, and finding none. Edward questioned him,
and he was reserved and even sulky. Sir Imperturbable persisted quietly,
and he exploded, and out came his wrongs. Edward replied that he was a
pretty fellow: wanted it all his own way. "Suppose my mother, with her
present feelings, was to take a leaf out of your book, and use all her
power; where would you be then? Come, old fellow, I know what love is,
and one of us _shall_ have the girl he loves, unless any harm should come
to my poor father owing to your blunder--oh, that would put it out of the
question, I feel--but let us hope better. I pulled you out of the fire,
and somehow I seem to like you better than ever after that; let me pull
you out of this mess too."

"Pull away," cried the impetuous youth. "I'll trust you with my life: ay,
with more than my life, with my love; for you are the man for me: reason
is always uppermost with you:

Give me the man that is not passion's slave,
And I will wear him in my heart's core, ay----"

"Oh bother that. If you are in earnest, don't mouth, but put on your hat
and come over."

He assented; but in the middle of putting on his coat, made this little
observation: "Now I see how wise the ancients were: yes, friendship is
better than love; calmer, more constant, free from the heats and chills
of that impetuous passion; its pure bosom is ruffled by none of love's
jealousies and irritabilities. Solem e mundo tollunt qui tollunt
amicitiam."

"Oh bother quoting; come and shake hands with Julia." They went over;
Mrs. Dodd was in the city. Edward ushered in Alfred, saying, "Here is the
other Impetuosity;" and sagely retired for a few minutes. When he came
back they were sitting hand in hand, he gazing on her, she inspecting the
carpet. "That is all right," said Edward drily: "now the next thing is,
you must go back to Oxford directly, and read for your first class."

The proposal fell like a blight upon the reconciled lovers. But Edward
gave potent reasons. The delays of law were endless: Alfred's defendant
had already obtained one postponement of the trial on frivolous grounds.
Now the Oxford examination and Doncaster races come on at a fixed date,
by a Law of Nature, and admit of no "postponement swindle." "You mark my
words, you will get your class before you will get your trial, and it
won't hurt you to go into court a first-class man: will it? And then you
won't quarrel by letter, you two; I know. Come, will you do what I tell
you: or is friendship but a name? eh, Mr. Bombast?" He ended with great
though quiet force: "Come, you two, which is better, to part like the
scissors, or part like the thread?"

Similes are no arguments; that is why they convince people so: Alfred
capitulated to the scissors and thread; and only asked with abnormal
humility to be allowed to taste the joys of reconciliation for two days.
The third found him at Oxford; he called on the head of his college to
explain what had prevented his return to Exeter in the October term
twelve months ago, and asked for rooms. Instead of siding with a man of
his own college so cruelly injured, the dignitary was alarmed by the bare
accusation, and said he must consider: insanity was a terrible thing.

"So is false accusation, and so is false imprisonment," said Hardie
bitterly.

"Unquestionably. But I have at present no means of deciding how far those
words apply." In short, he could give no answer; must consult the other
officers, and would convey the result by letter.

Alfred's pride was deeply mortified, not less by a certain cold repugnant
manner than by the words. And there came over his heart a sickening
feeling that he was now in the eyes of men an intellectual leper.

He went to another college directly, and applied to the vice-president,
the vice-president sent him with a letter to the dean; the dean looked
frightened; and told him hesitatingly the college was full; he might put
his name down, and perhaps get in next year. Alfred retired, and learned
from the porter that the college was not full. He sighed deeply, and the
sickening feeling grew on him; an ineradicable stigma seemed upon him,
and Mrs. Dodd was no worse than the rest of the world then; every mother
in England would approve her resolutions. He wandered about the scenes of
his intellectual triumphs: he stood in the great square of the schools, a
place ugly to unprejudiced eyes, but withal somewhat grand and inspiring,
especially to scholars who have fought their keen and bloodless battles
there. He looked at the windows and gilt inscription of the Schola
Metaphysices, in which he had met the scholars of his day and defeated
them for the Ireland. He wandered into the theatre, and eyed the rostrum,
whence he had not mumbled, but recited, his Latin prize poem with more
than one thunder of academic applause: thunder compared with which Drury
Lane's us a mere cracker. These places were unchanged; but he, sad
scholar, wandered among them as if he was a ghost, and all these were
stony phantoms of an intellectual past, never, never to return.

He telegraphed Sampson and Edward to furnish him with certificates that
he had never been insane, but the victim of a foul conspiracy; and, when
he received them, he went with them to St. Margaret's Hall; for he had
bethought him that the new principal was a first-rate man, and had openly
vowed he would raise that "refuge for the oft-times phoughed" to a place
of learning.

Hardie called, sent in his card, and was admitted to the principal's
study. He was about to explain who he was, when the doctor interrupted
him, and told him politely he knew him by reputation. "Tell me rather,"
said he shrewdly, "to what I owe this application from an undergraduate
so distinguished as Mr. Hardie?"

Then Alfred began to quake, and, instead of replying, put a hand suddenly
before his face, and lost courage for one moment.

"Come, Mr. Hardie," said the principal, "don't be disconcerted: a fault
regretted is half atoned; and I am not disposed to be hard on the errors
of youth; I mean where there is merit to balance them."

"Sir," said Alfred sadly, "it is not a fault I have to acknowledge, but a
misfortune."

"Tell me all about it," said Dr. Alder guardedly.

He told it, omitting nothing essential that could touch the heart or
excite the ironical humour of an academician.

Well, 'truth is more wonderful than fiction,'" said the doctor. And I
conclude the readers of this tale are all of the doctor's opinion; so
sweet to the mind is cant.

Alfred offered his certificates.

Now Dr. Alder had been asking himself in what phrases he should decline
this young genius, who was sane now, but of course had been mad, only had
forgotten the circumstance. But the temptation to get an Ireland scholar
into his Hall suddenly overpowered him. The probability that he might get
a first-class in a lucid interval was too enticing; nothing venture,
nothing have. He determined to venture a good deal.

"Mr. Hardie," said he, "this house shall always be open to good morals
and good scholarship while I preside over it, and it shall be open to
them all the more when they come to me dignified, and made sacred, by
'unmerited calamity.'"

Now this fine speech, like Minerva herself, came from the head. Alfred
was overcome by it to tears. At that the doctor's heart was touched, and
even began to fancy it had originated that noble speech.

It was no use doing things by halves; so Dr. Alder gave Alfred a
delightful set of rooms; and made the Hall pleasant to him. He was
rewarded by a growing conviction that he had made an excellent
acquisition. This opinion, however, was anything but universal: and
Alfred finding the men of his own college suspected his sanity, and
passed jokes behind his back, cut them all dead, and confined himself to
his little Hall. There they petted him, and crowed about him, and betted
on him for the schools as freely as if he was a colt the Hall was going
to enter for the Derby.

He read hard, and judiciously, but without his old confidence: he became
anxious and doubtful; he had seen so many first-rate men just miss a
first-class. The brilliant creature analysed all his Aristotelian
treatises, and wrote the synopses clear with marginal references on great
pasteboard cards three feet by two, and so kept the whole subject before
his eye, till he obtained a singular mastery. Same system with the
historians: nor did he disdain the use of coloured inks. Then the
brilliant creature drew lists of all the hard words he encountered in his
reading, especially in the common books, and read these lists till
mastered. The stake was singularly heavy in his case, so he guarded every
crevice.

And at this period he was not so unhappy as he expected. The laborious
days went swiftly, and twice a week at least came a letter from Julia.
Oh, how his grave academic room with oaken panels did brighten, when her
letter lay on the table. It was opened, and seemed written with sunbeams.
No quarrels on paper! Absence made the heart grow fonder. And Edward came
to see him, and over their wine let out a feminine trait in Julia. "When
Hurd calls, she walks out of the room, just as my poor mother does when
you come. That is spite: since you are sent away, nobody else is to
profit by it. Where is her Christianity, eh? and echo answers-- Got a
cigar, old fellow?" And, after puffing in silence awhile, he said
resignedly, "I am an unnatural monster."

"Oh, are you?" said the other serenely; for he was also under the benign
influence.

"Yes," said Edward, "I am your ally, and a mere spy in the camp of those
two ladies. I watch all their moves for your sake."