"Hardly," I acquiesced."I remember thinking him very handsome.""There could not be two opinions as to that," he answered."And a man who could have done anything he liked with life, had things gone differently.His abilities were fine, but his strength lay above all in his character: he was strong,--strong in his likes and in his dislikes, resolute, fearless, incapable of half measures--a man, every inch of him.He was not generally popular--stiff, hard, unsympathetic, people called him.From one point of view, and one only, he perhaps deserved the epithets.If a woman lost his respect she seemed to lose his pity too.Like a mediaeval monk, he looked upon such rather as the cause than the result of male depravity, and his contempt for them mingled with anger, almost, as I sometimes thought, with hatred.And this attitude was, I have no doubt, resented by the men of his own class and set, who shared neither his faults nor his virtues.But in other ways he was not hard.He could love; I, at least, have cause to know it.If you would hear his story rightly from my lips, Evie, you must try and see him with my eyes.The friend who loved me, and whom I loved with the passion which, if not the strongest, is certainly, Ibelieve, the most enduring of which men are capable,--that perfect brother's love, which so grows into our being that when it is at peace we are scarcely conscious of its existence, and when it is wounded our very life-blood seems to flow at the stroke.Brothers do not always love like that: I can only wish that we had not done so.
VII
"Well, about five years ago, before I had taken my degree, I became acquainted with a woman whom I will call 'Delia,'--it is near enough to the name by which she went.She was a few years older than myself, very beautiful, and I believed her to be what she described herself--the innocent victim of circumstance and false appearance, a helpless prey to the vile calumnies of worldlings.
In sober fact, I am afraid that, whatever her life may have been actually at the time that I knew her--a subject which I have never cared to investigate--her past had been not only bad enough irretrievably to fix her position in society, but bad enough to leave her without an ideal in the world, though still retaining within her heart the possibilities of a passion which, from the moment that it came to life, was strong enough to turn her whole existence into one desperate reckless straining after an object hopelessly beyond her reach.That was the woman with whom, at the age of twenty, I fancied myself in love.She wanted to get a husband, and she thought me--rightly--ass enough to accept the post.I was very young then even for my years,--a student, an idealist, with an imagination highly developed, and no knowledge whatever of the world as it actually is.Anyhow, before I had known her a month, I had determined to make her my wife.My parents were abroad at the time, George and Lucy here, so that it was to Jack that I imparted the news of my resolve.As you may imagine, he did all that he could to shake it.But I was immovable.I disbelieved his facts, and despised his contempt from the standpoint of my own superior morality.This state of things continued for several weeks, during the greater part of which time I was at Oxford.I only knew that while I was there, Jack had made Delia's acquaintance, and was apparently cultivating it assiduously.
"One day, during the Easter vacation, I got a note from her asking me to supper at her house.Jack was invited too: we lodged together while my people were away.
"There is no need to dwell upon that supper.There were two or three women there of her own sort, or worse, and a dozen men from among the most profligate in London.The conversation was, Ishould think, bad even for that class; and she, the goddess of my idolatry, outstripped them all by the foul, coarse shamelessness of her language and behavior.Before the entertainment was half over, I rose and took my leave, accompanied by Jack and another man,--Legard was his name,--who I presume was bored.Just as we had passed through into the anteroom, which lay beyond the one in which we had been eating, Delia followed us, and laying her hand on Jack's arm, said that she must speak with him.Legard and I went into the outer hall, and we had not been there more than a minute when the door from the anteroom opened, and we heard Delia's voice.
I remember the words well,--that was not the only occasion on which I was to hear them.'I will keep the ring as a record of my love,'
she said, 'and understand, that though you may forget, I never shall.' Jack came through, the door closed, and as we went out Iglanced towards his left hand, and saw, as I expected to see, the absence of the ring which he usually wore there.It contained a gem which my mother had picked up in the East, and I knew that he valued it quite peculiarly.We always called it Jack's talisman.
"A miserable time followed, a time for me of agonizing wonder and doubt, during which regret for my dead illusion was entirely swallowed up in the terrible dread of my brother's degradation.
