T Oxford, where he was not unpopular and was always a good deal observed in his goings and comings, they used to say of him that he veiled behind languor an immense egotism. This annoyed his constant friend, Thaxton, who insisted that no libel could be more factitious.
But not a few of the other Balliol men treated Thorpe Thaxton's defensive stand as the merest snobbish pose. Of course, he had his motives. Money was a huge power nowadays, and this Thaxton fellow could hold his own well enough, past a doubt, as eldest son of a hugely rich Birmingham cutler. Nevertheless, blood and title were always dear to these new Croesuses. Old England wasn't quite hopelessly vulgarized yet. The upstarts knew a gentleman—or a lady. And Adalbert Hereward had a sister, pretty and rather poor.
"It's all such rubbish!" Thorpe said, while he sat one afternoon in a corner of the ancient Mitre Inn, eating Scotch scones and drinking deep draughts of tea with a Balliol man of his own year. "You tell me, Brownynge, that they think this about us, think that about us, and think the other thing. Rot, dear boy! I've no more 'ambitions'—absurd word!—with respect to Adalbert than if he were a Turkish Grand Vizier. He knows it, I know it, and we both disdain the idea. It's merely a friendship on both sides." Here Thorpe, in a mood of peculiar confidence, threw back his head and laughed. "He's an incessant amusement to me; he's wondrously attractive. I mean the way in which he lets himself drift."
"Lets himself drift?" said Brownynge, who at once thought of a boat on the near Isis, and didn't at all understand. He was rather ugly of visage and build himself. He envied Thaxton his tall, straight frame, short crop of brown curls, and face that seemed, even on the dreariest day, somehow to have the sun in it.
"He's a fatalist. I suppose one would call him that. He never tries, he never objects, he takes everything for granted."
"But he tried in the boat race last year."
"Not much. Not at all, in fact. By nature he's enormously muscular. His crew won; he never cared; he forgot all about it the next day."
"But if he takes any prize, this graduating term, in Greek?"
"He adores Greek; he's drenched with it. He won't recollect, however, five or six days after his possible triumph, whether he's been crowned with laurels or—ashes. And that's what all you men call—" pursued Thorpe, with a big gulp of the scalding tea that he loved on a damp Oxford day—"affectation! It's nothing of the sort; it's simply Adalbert. Now look here, Brownynge," and Thorpe suddenly buttonholed his companion, "I don't ask you to tell me what they're saying about my friend's behavior at the Armitages', but you must know as well as I do that Miss Cecilia is no match for him."
Miss Cecilia Armitage was certainly six years older than Adalbert Hereward. The Armitage family were poor folk, of good descent, who had lived in Oxford for many generations. Proctors, deans and dons were like leaves, rather than branches, of the genealogical tree, and it was said that they had not had for fifty years a single daughter of their house unable to construe the first six books of the Iliad at sight.
"Miss Cecilia," it had got about, "may be able thus to construe the first six books, but she certainly has no such compromised appearance." Beyond doubt she was engaging; and when, quite near his hour of graduation, Adalbert had distinctly failed to propose to her, everybody blamed Thorpe Thaxton.
But the latter, one day, almost shouted to Adalbert his distress. "They're putting it all on me," rang his complaint. "If you love the girl, why on earth don't you tell her so?"
Adalbert nodded rather vaguely, pulling at the end of his pointed blond beard, and surveying Thorpe with his big eyes of drowsy blue. "My dear Thorpe," he said, "do you really think it's in the current of things?"
"Not a bit. I know you well enough to tell you so, and by all means I should advise your breaking off at once with Cecilia Armitage. You're not cut out for one another at all. She hasn't a penny, and you, as you've told me"
"Have only twelve hundred pounds a year," finished Adalbert, behind a yawn. He put his hand, the next moment, on Thorpe's arm. "Dear old chap! I won't propose. But how about fate?"
Thorpe suppressed a laugh. "Damn your 'fate!' Hasn't a fellow free will?"
"Oh, has he?" And then Thorpe remembered how immensely Adalbert had read the German and French philosophers—Kant, Hegel, Comte, Descartes, and many another.
"Oh, if you're going to talk like that!" he exclaimed. "Well, all I've got to answer is, slip away from Oxford and leave the affair in my hands."