Mr. Wycherly, a look of great perplexity upon his face, sat by the hearth far into the night. The lamp burned low, went out, and he sat on staring into the darkness till the dawn, cold and gray-mantled, came creeping through the unshuttered windows to find him still seated, clear-eyed and contemplative, but with the puzzled lines smoothed out of his forehead as by a kind hand. Bewilderment and self-reproach had given place to memory, as the years since the children had come passed before him in procession.
There was that strange, dreadful journey homeward from Portsmouth, the long cramped hours of sitting, he and Miss Esperance, each with a child clasped in stiff, unfamiliar arms: those first bewildering days when the children made all sorts of incomprehensible demands upon his inexperience. As he sat alone in the darkness Edmund's indignant lamentations because he could not "make a 'abbit" sounded in his ears, and his triumphant outcries when once the manufacture of the creature was accomplished.
The rabbit scenes came back to him, and a thousand others—those pretty daily doings full of quaint solemnity, that parents take for granted, but that come with an ever-recurring shock of almost reverential pleasure upon such gentle-hearted maids and bachelors as have to do with little children late in life.
It had never ceased to fill Mr. Wycherly with amazement that baby Edmund managed to put his spoon into his mouth and not into his eye; and he never fastened those absurd little strap shoes that were for ever coming undone, without a slight trembling of the hands. It seemed so wonderful that he, of all people, should be permitted to officiate at these mysteries. His memory was clamorous with the children's endless demands for "stories." Picture after picture unrolled before him of attentive, eager-eyed Montagu, listening with breathless interest to the tales that are old and new as life itself; of sturdy, fidgety Edmund with the loud laugh and handsome, fearless face.... And in all the pictures, the figure of Miss Esperance, bent now, but quick as ever to deeds of kindness, moved like the sound of music, gracious and beneficent.
The clock on the mantel-piece struck four, and the room was suddenly filled with the clear, rosy light that proclaims the advent of the day. Mr. Wycherly raised himself stiffly from his chair, and crossing the room to Montagu's table, rearranged his already tidy pile of books with gentle, tremulous hands. As he left the room to go to bed he stood still on the threshold and looked back into it as though to fix its image on his mind.
When Montagu came in to lessons that morning his tutor was not as usual seated at his writing-table, but in the big chair by the fire. He was not reading, and was so evidently waiting for the little boy that Montagu, instead of going to his own seat in the window, went straight to Mr. Wycherly, who stood him between his knees, laid his hands on the child's shoulders, and looked long and earnestly into his face. Montagu, although rather puzzled by this unusual proceeding, was always patient, and waited in silence, holding the lapels of his old friend's coat the while, till he should choose to speak.
At last he said, "Montagu, tell me exactly what you meant when you told Miss Esperance that you would like to be an Epicurean when you are grown up?"
It seemed a sudden reversal of the accepted order of things that Mr. Wycherly should ask Montagu to explain anything, and as that youth had entirely forgotten his enthusiasm for the doctrines of Epicurus directly his own fear of death had evaporated, he looked rather foolish and mumbled:
"It seems a comfortable sort of religion."
"And do you consider our religion uncomfortable?" asked Mr. Wycherly, putting one finger under the little boy's chin and lifting the downcast face to his.
"Yes, I do," he replied with great decision, looking his teacher straight in the eyes, "most uncomfortable, with so many ways you can go to Hell, and people you like, too, and no getting back when you're once there, either." And Montagu grew quite red in the face with the vehemence of his objection to these doctrines.
Mr. Wycherly withdrew his hand from under Montagu's chin and laid it on one of the little brown hands holding his coat so firmly.
"Why do you bother your head about it?" he said gently. "You may take it from me that no one, above all, no little boy who tries his best to behave well and pleasantly, ever goes to Hell—and as for the others—who knows? you certainly don't. Besides, do you honestly think that any wise person would choose a religion merely because it was comfortable? There is very little use in any religion that does not at times make us most uncomfortable, and spur us every day to try to do better. Dear me, Montagu! when I was your age I believed what I was told, and never troubled my head about such things. I learned my catechism without a murmur."
"The Shorter Catechism?" Montagu interrupted.
"No, not that one, but it's very much the same thing," said Mr. Wycherly mendaciously.
"Well, I believe what I'm told," said Montagu somewhat aggrieved by this unsympathetic attitude on the part of his old friend. "That's what makes me so uncomfortable. If I didn't believe it, sir, it wouldn't matter."
"I assure you, Montagu, if you ask Miss Esperance, or Mr. Gloag, himself—he is a most sensible man on the whole—they will both tell you that it is absurd for you to worry yourself about Hell. You don't know anything about your own religion yet, far less that of the Epicureans. But now I want you to listen to me very attentively for I have something serious to say to you. You may take absolutely on trust, either upon this or upon any other subject, anything that Miss Esperance may tell you. She is a far safer guide than I, or Mr. Gloag, or indeed any one that you know. And above all, I beg you to try even harder with whatever lessons she may set you, than you do with mine. You must try to please her, to make her happy...."
Mr. Wycherly paused and cleared his throat, the earnest, puzzled face looking up into his grew suddenly dim, and the little boy felt his tutor's hand tighten on his own, as he asked suddenly, "Montagu, have you ever seen anybody drunk?"
"Yes, lots of times: they look horrid, and walk crookedly and have hoarse voices, the people on the road to Leith are often drunk."
"There was once a man, Montagu, who got into the habit of drinking more than was good for him. How and why he got into that habit does not matter, it was at all events no excuse.
"He grew worse and worse—I don't think he ever looked quite like the people you mention, but I don't know. His brain was going, his friends were ashamed of him, there seemed no place for him in this world, and how should he dare face the next? He was not altogether a stupid man, he knew many things, and best of all that the weakness he encouraged was a fatal weakness, but he seemed to have no strength of mind or body to pull himself together till an angel from heaven took him into her house and helped him, and protected him against himself—till he was cured. It was not done quickly, and God, who gave her her great heart, alone knows what she had to bear in the doing of it."
Mr. Wycherly paused, he felt Montagu's body tremble between his knees, but the child did not speak, and the broken voice went on, "The angel was your aunt, Montagu, and I, I was the man. And the last time I was drunk, your father, not much older than you are now, brought me home."
The clock ticked loudly, and a thrush was singing on the alder tree outside. There was no other sound in the room till Montagu, moved to a sudden passion of tears, flung himself forward into his old friend's arms, clasping him round the neck and exclaiming between his sobs, "What does it matter? Why did you tell me? I didn't think I could love you any more, but I do, I do, I do!"
* * * * *
"And now," said Mr. Wycherly, some five minutes later, wiping Montagu's tear-stained face with a large, clean handkerchief, "we had better begin work, and you may write out the rules concerning the sequence of the tenses, that you learned yesterday."
As Montagu settled himself at the stout, stumpy table, the sun shone in on him with a radiance that made him blink. And Mr. Wycherly looked round the room with the relieved expression of one who, expecting everything to be changed, found it still blessedly the same.
He had played his great stake and won: and never was winner more happily relieved. When Montagu finished his morning's lessons and went downstairs and Mr. Wycherly moved about his room dusting his books and rearranging the piles of papers on his desk, he might have been heard to sing softly and with subdued but joyful emphasis certain stanzas that always concluded with a rollicking "fal la la la la la la."
Presently he went to Montagu's window and looked out toward Arthur's Seat. But he did not see it, for in dreams he walked in his college garden beside the bastioned city wall. "I would like to see the chestnuts in bloom once more," he said softly, "and the perfect grass."
Montagu met his aunt on the staircase as he was going down and she at once noted that his face looked tear-stained and his eyelids were swollen with crying. It was so unheard of a thing that Montagu should cry during his lessons, whatever else he might cry about, that Miss Esperance stopped him to ask anxiously what had happened. The boy crimsoned to the roots of his hair. "It was about the catechism, Aunt Esperance," he said slowly. "I am sorry; I won't be tiresome any more.
"Then he did speak to you?" she exclaimed in surprise.
"Oh, yes!" said Montagu earnestly. "He made me very sorry," and he fled past his aunt down the little crooked staircase and out into the garden, for he feared what she might ask him next, and like Elsa, when she discovered the gaps made by the missing books six years ago, the boy felt that here again was a sacrifice that "she maun never ken."
The long-stilled voices of habit and tradition called loudly to Mr. Wycherly, and moving as if in a dream, he went and opened a drawer in his desk and drew from it a framed picture of his college arms. The gules were faded but the seeded Or on the tudor roses caught the sunlight and gleamed gladly, as though it rejoiced to see the brightness of the day once more. With trembling hands he took down the portrait of John Knox above the mantel-piece, and hung the arms of New College in its place.
* * * * *
In looking forward for Montagu Mr. Wycherly had learned to look back, no longer wholly in pain and shame, but sometimes in liveliest gratitude that there was so much to remember that was lovely and of good report. And the more he remembered, the more did action of many sorts seem imperative, and in the July, after he had confessed himself to Montagu, he went back to see Oxford once more. Back to the city, of perhaps all others in the civilised world, to fill the minds and hearts of her sons with an adoring passion of tenderness, of real filial affection. The love, that while it worships the virtues of a mother, is only strengthened by a perfect understanding of her weakness, her humanity, her beautiful inconsistency.
The great quadrangles spread themselves empty and silent in the sunlight: the fields, untenanted of "young barbarians all at play" stretched green and peaceful to the river.
But the gray old buildings smiled their gracious welcome as of old, with that wonderful mediæval friendliness that neither time nor absence can change or lessen. And just as a mother who gets her son home after long absence in a far country will talk fondly of the dear, by-gone, boyish days—remembering only such things as made her glad and proud—so Oxford whispered kind, friendly things to Mr. Wycherly, and he was comforted.
The day after his arrival he went to Matins in Christ Church choir, and there seemed something peculiarly applicable in the psalms for that, the twenty-seventh day. For lo! had he not returned to his Jerusalem, well content to pray for her peace?
Peace be within thy walls: and plenteousness within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions' sakes: I will wish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God: I will seek to do thee good.