J. E. C. Welldon

“ Gerald Eversley argued himself into his own predetermined conviction. He did not believe in God, therefore he did not believe in revelation. He mistook his premiss for his conclusion.
He stood then in his thoughts face to face with Christ. We all stand so one day. The ages of history are as one vast columnar gallery, and at its head looms the one pathetic Divine Figure, saying to every individual soul of man, What thinkest thou of Me? It is the one eternal question, ever ancient, ever new; there is no other question in the world. ”

“ Life is full of such presentiments, fuller than we know. But is it wrong to say that there are those whom it is natural to love? We love them for their own sake, but partly too we are predisposed to love them by the love we bear for others. It is as if a pre-established sympathy, a sort of communion of saints, existed between them and us, even when we have never seen them as yet. Miss Venniker was endowed in Gerald Eversley’s view not only with her own charm, rare as it was, but with her brother’s too. ”

“ I find this passage in one of Gerald Eversley’s papers, written, it would seem, not long after the date of his leaving St. Anselm’s. It is like much that men have thought and written since the world was.
‘What is the voice of Nature? Is it love? I see a wild battling of forces, ruthless, inexplicable, working out good—such good as exists—by agonies of evil. I see the strong trampling on the weak, life issuing from suffering and death, pain inflicted every day upon the innocent and unoffending; everywhere violence, cruelty, pestilence, cataclysm the laws of the universe. ”

“ And Ethel Venniker—did she never guess his secret? There is nothing to show. But human nature has many languages, and it may be that the language of the eyes and of the heart is more eloquent than that of the lips. It is not easy to keep from a woman a secret concerning herself.
But what should the end of it all be? Gerald Eversley, absorbed as yet in his unrevealed passion, could neither admit nor deny that it was hopeless. To speak of it would be to shut the gates of Helmsbury in his own face. ”

“ All else is conjecture, imagination. Such papers or letters as Gerald Eversley has left will therefore be used here, for in them he speaks for himself, and the record, though incomplete, is not untrue. But the difficulty in using them is that they lack date, method, consecutiveness; they are like the volcanic upheavings of a soul’s fiery unrest; the doubts which possessed him, and the reactions of his faith are welded together. Yet who is there that is at all times equally religious or equally irreligious? Is not every man a believer sometimes, a sceptic sometimes? ”

“ Like all the most sacred things in human experience, friendship is a boon, in some sense independent of human volition. It cannot be acquired by perseverance or resolution. God reserves it like personal beauty, like the appreciation of beautiful sounds and colours, in His own hands. It is His gift; He bestows it where He wills; we can but accept it with grateful and reverent hearts when it is given.
Probably there were no two boys at St. Anselm’s whose lives might be deemed to be parted by a wider gulf than Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley. They came from opposite poles of society. ”

“ Gerald’s solitude was intensified by the loss of the daily intercourse, which had been his one human treasure. While Harry Venniker was making new friends every week, his one friendship was slipping from his grasp. Love in absence is so rare and so inconstant. Reader, have you a friend whose face you have not seen for years; and if you should meet him again to-day, would you be quite the same—and he? Is there no lover who has come home in joy of heart and found despair? ”

“ Eversley look so often at the daguerreotype upon the desk in his study and sigh? Human nature has its presentiments of good and evil; how irrational they are! and how infallible! Does a lover need to be told in words that he is loved? Nay, love is a fire, it cannot burn and glow unfelt. Heaven have mercy upon him who searches for it and finds not its glad warmth!
Mr. Eversley still reasoned with himself. It might be that Gerald’s letters from St. Anselm’s had been less full or less regular than of old. ”

“ Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley were living separate lives; was it possible that they could remain the same to the end? The parade, the mess-room, drills, balls, horses, dogs, on one side; spiritual conflicts on the other—what agreement can there be between these? But if the friendship should languish, this at least was certain, that the loser would be Gerald Eversley. The rich man, with his flocks and herds, can afford to give up many a head of cattle without missing it; but the poor man misses his solitary ewe-lamb. ”

“ One man sees in Nature only the earthquake and the pestilence. Another sees the peacefulness of the evening, the sunshine, and the soft and beauteous rain. It is not Nature that is different, but it is man or the mood of man.
Mr. Eversley made no allusion to Gerald’s profession. Perhaps a place in the Treasury would seem to him to involve some danger of ‘laying up treasure upon earth.’ He had a vague idea, however, that Gerald would get on in the world, by his own ability or by Lord Venniker’s influence, and that it would not be well for him to interfere. ”

“ His eyes met Gerald’s with a glance of deep affection as the carriage drove away. The boys all raised their hats in respectful sympathy. Gerald Eversley turned on his heel, without a word, and went to his room. He was bereft of his friend for a time; and he was bereft of him—though he knew it not then—at the time when he would have the sorest need of his presence.
After Harry Venniker’s departure, life at St. Anselm’s for such brief part of the term as was left, resumed its usual tenor. The memory of errors and sorrows is but short-lived, among the young especially—nay, among all men. ”

“ In every school there are some boys to whom a library is more valuable than any classroom. For it is not what the young are compelled to do, but what they do of themselves and for themselves, that is the lasting educational result. Education rightly considered does not follow narrow hard lines—that perhaps was Mr. Brandiston’s mistake—it expatiates in a wide and ample domain, and its country walks are sometimes worth more than its dusty high road. Gerald Eversley had other tastes than literature, though none perhaps so dear, so delightful. ”

“ People seem to be made heartless by sport. They lose their humanity—I mean, they lose it for the moment. I suppose it is a survival from the time when men lived in daily terror of wild beasts and paid honour to those who destroyed them.’
‘I am sure,’ she said warmly, ‘papa and Harry are not cruel; nobody is kinder than papa; but they enjoy the fun and exercise so much they never think of any cruelty in sport.’
‘It is the word “sport,” said Gerald, ‘that I object to as much as the thing. No doubt it is necessary that the animals should be killed for human life. ”

“ When Gerald Eversley in his lonely meditations [255] found that the belief in God (which he had always taken as axiomatic) was gravely questioned, it was as though the earth were quaking under his feet. The extinguishing of the sun or moon in the heaven would not be a more terrible shock than is the loss of God to a young soul. It is altogether desolate if bereft of Him. It is so trustful, so generous, so positive; it leans so hard upon its faiths, and is so sure of their ability to endure whatever assault of criticism may be opposed to them, that to lose aught is to lose all ”

“ Who is there that has passed from the sick-room where one boy lies tossing between death and life through the playing-fields where all the others are at their games, and has not marvelled that the sickness could be possible—or the play? In the chapel of one of the great public schools of England is a memorial tablet recording the name of a boy who died during his school life, to the eternal sorrow of his parents, and on it are the words: ‘Beside him they had neither son nor daughter.’ What a tale! ”

“ A revelation which can be denied is no revelation. Would He have committed it to fallible men and to yet more fallible records and documents of men? Would He not have written it in flaming characters across the heaven, like the sacred sign that made the Emperor Constantine a Christian? Who will stake his all upon an hypothesis? Who will die for a superior probability? It cannot be a divine providence that loving souls, eager to believe, should be tossed to and fro as on a wild sea and be never at rest. ”

“ In his admiration for Harry Venniker there was no tinge or trace of jealousy. He looked up to him as to a being of higher order. That his own intellectual distinction could be weighed in the balance against Harry’s popularity and athletic powers, was an idea that never entered his mind. Who will say that it had been better if he had formed a more just estimate of human worth? What would not the world lose in happiness, nay in sublimity, [115] if there were no souls exalted by strong, unspoken reverence for those whom they mistakenly deem higher and nobler than themselves? ”

“ Gerald Eversley’s feeling for his friend was of a [114] different kind. Although standing to some extent outside the common interests and quarrels of school life, he was not unappreciative of those who shone in them. No one can live in a busy and intent society without thinking somewhat of the subjects of which it thinks much. And there had arisen in Gerald’s mind a passionate admiration, a sentiment akin to hero-worship, for the boy, his inferior in intellect, but so brilliant, so prominent in the common ways of school life. ”

“ The duty of parents to the children whom they have begotten, perhaps to those children’s bitter pain, is a law of Nature. But the duty that children owe to parents needs a revelation of the Divine Will. And what if the revelation fails?’
Thus Gerald for the first time in life began to look with angry eyes upon the father who had once been his ideal of human goodness. Mr. Eversley held that children were ‘an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord;’ he had been known to say that, where God sent the mouths, He would send the bread to feed them. ”