Part 6 (1/2)

'You made a very good shot,' said Augusta, smiling at the recollection.

'But how on earth did you come to have a stone that size in the hall with you?'

Hyacinth told the story of the man who had been felled by the chair and his murderous bequest.

'That's the proper spirit,' said Augusta. 'I admire that man, and he couldn't have pa.s.sed his stone on to better hands than yours. Shea went down as if he had been shot. I was afraid of my life he would clutch at my skirts as he fell or squirm up against me after he was down. But he lay quite still. By the way, Mary, I suppose your dress was ruined?'

Mary O'Dwyer was quite subdued.

'It was torn,' she said meekly enough.

'Have you another one?'

'Of course I have. I've three others, besides some old ones.'

'Well, then, you'd better go and put on one of them. An old one will do.

It's disgusting to see a woman slopping about in a dressing-gown at this time of day. I'll have tea ready when you come back.'

Miss O'Dwyer obeyed sulkily. She wished very much that Augusta Goold had stopped at home. It would have been a great deal pleasanter to have gone on practising hysterics with Hyacinth as a sympathetic spectator. When the door was shut Augusta Goold turned to Hyacinth again.

'That's the worst of women'--apparently she did not consider herself as one of the s.e.x--'they are all right at the time (nothing could have been better than Mary's behaviour at the meeting), but they collapse afterwards in such idiotic ways. But I want to talk to you about yourself. I owe you a good turn for what you did last night. Only for you, I think Shea would have dared to touch me, and then very likely I should have killed him, and there might have been trouble afterwards.'

She spoke quite calmly, but Hyacinth had very little doubt that she meant exactly what she said. 'Grealy of course, was useless. One might have expected him to give utterance to an ancient tribal war-cry, but he didn't even do that. Tim Halloran got frightened when the row began. I noticed him dodging about behind Mary and me, and I mean to let him know what I think about him. It's you I have to thank, and I won't forget it.

If you get into trouble over this business in college, come to me, and I will see you straight. In fact, if you like to give up the divinity student business at once, I dare say I can put you in the way of earning an honester livelihood.'

Hyacinth was gratified at the way Augusta Goold spoke to him. Since the evening on which he had given his opinion about the morality of desertion and murder he had been conscious of a coolness in her manner.

Now he had apparently reinstated himself in her good graces. Praise, even for an act he was secretly ashamed of, and grat.i.tude, though he by no means recognised that he deserved it, were pleasant to him. He promised to remember the offer of help, but declined for the present to commit his future to the keeping of so bloodthirsty a patroness.

Curiously enough, Hyacinth's reception in college was a great deal more cordial after the Rotunda meeting than it had ever been before. For a while the battle which had been fought at their doors superseded the remoter South African warfare as a topic of conversation among the students. Their sympathies were with Augusta Goold. Even members of the divinity cla.s.ses suffered themselves to be lured from their habitual wors.h.i.+p of respectability so far as to express admiration for the dramatic picturesqueness of the part she played. It is true that the lady herself was called by names universally resented by women, and that the broadest slanders were circulated about her character. Still, a halo of glory hung round her. It was felt that she had done a surprisingly courageous thing when she faced Mr. O'Rourke on his own platform. Also, she had behaved with a certain dignity, neither throwing chairs nor stones at her opponents. Then, she was an undeniably beautiful woman, a fact which made its inevitable appeal to the young men. The mere expression of sympathy with this flamboyant and scandal-smeared heroine brought with it a delightful flavour of gay and worldly vice. It was pretty well known that Hyacinth was a friend of Miss Goold's, and it was rumoured that he had earned his piece of sticking-plaster in her defence. No one knew exactly what he had done or how much he had suffered, but a great many men were anxious to know. Very much to his own surprise, he received a number of visitors in his rooms. Men who had been the foremost of his tormentors came, ostensibly to inquire for his health, in reality to glean details of the fight at the Rotunda. Certain medical students of the kind which glory in any kind of row openly congratulated him on his luck in being present on such an occasion. Men who claimed to be fast, and tried to impress their acquaintances with the belief that they indulged habitually in wild scenes of revelry, courted Hyacinth, and boasted afterwards of their second-hand acquaintance with Miss Goold. It became the fas.h.i.+on to be seen arm-in-arm with him in the quadrangle, and to inquire from him in public for 'Finola.'

This new popularity by no means pleased Hyacinth. He was not at all proud of his share in the Rotunda meeting, and lived in daily dread of being recognised as the a.s.sailant of Mr. Shea. He knew, too, that he was making no way with the better cla.s.s of students. The men whose faces he liked were more than ever shy of making his acquaintance. The sub-lecturers and minor professors in the divinity school were coldly contemptuous in their manner, and it seemed to him that even Dr.

Henry was less friendly. He became desperately anxious to get out of a position which he found more intolerable than the original isolation. He applied himself with extreme diligence to his studies, even affecting an interest, unnatural for the most pious, in the expositions given by learned doctors of the Thirty-nine Articles. At lectures on Church history he made notes about the vagaries of heretics so a.s.siduously that the professor began to hope that there existed one student at least who took an interest in the Christological controversies of the sixth century. He never ventured back again to the Wednesday prayer-meeting, but he performed many attendances beyond the required minimum at the college chapel. Morning after morning he dragged himself from his bed and hurried across the dusky quadrangle to take his part in the mutilated matins with which the college authorities see fit to usher in the day. He even went to hear the sermons delivered on Friday afternoons, homilies so painful that the preachers themselves recognise an extraordinary merit in enduring them, and allow that submission of the ears to one of them is to be reckoned as equal to two ordinary acts of devotion.

It is to be hoped that Hyacinth derived some remote benefit from the discipline to which he subjected himself, for the immediate results were not satisfactory. He seemed no nearer winning the respect of the more serious students, and Dr. Henry's manner showed no signs of softening into friendliness. His surfeit of theology bred in him a dislike of the subject. The solemn plat.i.tudes which were posed as expositions of the creeds affected his mind much as the expurgated life histories of maiden aunts do the newly-emanc.i.p.ated school-girl. The relentless closing in of argument upon a single previously settled doctrine woke in him a desire to break through at some point and breathe again in the open. He began to fear that he was becoming hopelessly irreligious. His morning devotions in the foggy atmosphere of the chapel did not touch the capacity for enthusiasm within him. The vague splendour of his father's meditations had left him outside, indeed, but sure that within there lay a great reality. But now religion had come to seem an altogether narrower thing, a fenced off, well-ordered garden in which useful vegetables might be cultivated, but very little inspiring to the soul.

The unwelcome attention of the students whose friends.h.i.+p he did not desire, and his increasing dislike for the work he was expected to do, led him to spend more and more of his time with Augusta Goold and her friends. He found in their society that note of enthusiasm which he missed in the religion of the college. He responded warmly to their pa.s.sionate devotion to the dream of an independent Irish Republic. He felt less conscious of his want of religion in their company. With the exception of Augusta Goold herself, the members of the coterie were professedly Roman Catholics; but this made little or no difference in their intercourse with him. What he found in their ideals was a subst.i.tute for religion, a s.p.a.ce where his enthusiasm might extend itself. He became, as he realized his own position clearly, very doubtful whether he ought to continue his college course. It did not seem likely that he would in the end be able to take Holy Orders, and to remain in the divinity school without that intention was clearly foolish. On the other hand, he shrank from inflicting what he knew would be a painful disappointment on his father. It happened that before the term ended his connection with the divinity school was cut in a way that saved him from the responsibility of forming a decision.

He was a regular attendant at the lectures of Dr. Spenser, who had never from the first disguised his dislike and contempt for Hyacinth. This gentleman was one day explaining to his cla.s.s the difference between evidence which leads to a high degree of probability and a demonstration which produces absolute certainty. The subject was a dry one, and quite unsuited to Dr. Spenser, whose heart was set on maintaining a reputation for caustic wit. He cast about for an ill.u.s.tration which would at once make clear the distinction and enliven his lecture. His eye lit upon Hyacinth, upon whose cheek there still burned a long red scar. Dr.

Spenser's face brightened.

'For instance, gentlemen,' he said, 'if I should reason from the fact that our friend Mr. Conneally affects the society of certain charming ladies of doubtful reputation, like Miss Goold, to the conclusion that Mr. Conneally is himself a Nationalist, I should only have arrived at a probable conclusion. The degree of probability might be very high; still, I should have no right to regard my conclusion as absolutely certain.'

The cla.s.s t.i.ttered delightedly. Dr. Spenser proceeded without heeding a deep flush on Hyacinth's face, which might have warned a wiser man that an explosion was coming.

'If I should then proceed to reason thus: All Nationalists are rebels and potential murderers--Mr. Conneally is a Nationalist; therefore Mr.

Conneally is a rebel and potential murderer--I should, a.s.suming the truth of my minor premise, have arrived at a certainty.'

The syllogism was greeted with loud applause. Hyacinth started to his feet. For a time he could only gasp for breath to utter a reply, and Dr. Spenser, secure in the conviction of his own intellectual and social superiority to the son of a parson from Connemara, determined to pursue his prey.

'Does Mr. Conneally,' he asked with a simper, 'propose to impugn the accuracy of my induction or the logic of my deduction?'