A Lifes Morning | Page 4

all before him, declined
to believe that the body was anything but the very humble servant of
the will. So the body took its revenge.
He had been delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism
which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of

self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his
frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly
about him; it was only an excess of nervous vitality that would not
allow body to keep pace with mind. He was a boy to be, intellectually,
held in leash, said the doctors. But that was easier said than done. What
system of sedatives could one apply to a youngster whose imagination
wrought him to a fever during a simple walk by the seashore, who if
books were forcibly withheld consoled himself with the composition of
five-act tragedies, interspersed with lyrics to which he supplied original
strains? Mr. Athel conceived a theory that such exuberance of
emotionality might be counterbalanced by studies of a strictly positive
nature; a tutor was engaged to ground young Wilfrid in mathematics
and the physical sciences. The result was that the tutor's enthusiasm for
these pursuits communicated itself after a brief repugnance to the
versatile pupil; instincts of mastery became as vivid in the study of
Euclid and the chemical elements as formerly in the humaner paths of
learning; the plan had failed. In the upshot Wilfrid was sent to school;
if that did not develop the animal in him, nothing would.
He was not quite three-and-twenty when the break-down removed him
from Oxford. Going to Balliol with a scholarship, he had from the first
been marked for great things, at all events by the measure of the
schools. Removal from the system of home education had in truth
seemed to answer in some degree the ends aimed at; the lad took his
fair share of cricket and football, and kept clear of nervous crises. At
the same time he made extraordinary progress with his books. He
acquired with extreme facility, and his ambition never allowed him to
find content in a second place; conquest became his habit; he grew to
deem it the order of nature that Wilfrid Athel's name should come first
in the list. Hence a reputation to support. During his early terms at
Balliol he fagged as hard as the mere dullard whose dear life depended
upon a first class and a subsequent tutorship. What he would make of
himself in the end was uncertain; university distinctions would
probably be of small moment to him as soon as they were achieved, for
already he spent the greater portion of his strength in lines of study
quite apart from the curriculum, and fate had blessed him with
exemption from sordid cares. He led in a set devoted to what were
called advanced ideas; without flattering himself that he was on the

way to solve the problem of the universe, he had satisfaction in
reviewing the milestones which removed him from the unconscious
man, and already clutched at a measure of positive wisdom in the
suspicion that lie might shortly have to lay aside his school-books and
recommence his education under other teachers. As yet he was
whole-hearted in the pursuit of learning. The intellectual audacity
which was wont to be the key-note of his conversation did not, as his
detractors held, indicate mere bumptiousness and defect of
self-measurement; it was simply the florid redundancy of a young mind
which glories in its strength, and plays at victory in anticipation. It was
true that he could not brook the semblance of inferiority; if it were only
five minutes' chat in the Quad, he must come off with a phrase or an
epigram; so those duller heads who called Athel affected were not
wholly without their justification. Those who shrugged their shoulders
with the remark that he was overdoing it, and would not last out to the
end of the race, enjoyed a more indisputable triumph. One evening,
when Athel was taking the brilliant lead in an argument on 'Fate,
free-will, foreknowledge absolute,' his brain began to whirl,
tobacco-smoke seemed to have dulled all the lights before his eyes, and
he fell from his chair in a fainting-fit.
He needed nothing but rest; that, however, was imperative. Mr. Athel
brought him to London, and the family went down at once to their
house in Surrey. Wilfrid was an only son and an only child. His father
had been a widower for nearly ten years; for the last three his house had
been directed by a widowed sister, Mrs. Rossall, who had twin girls.
Mr. Athel found it no particular hardship to get away from town and
pursue his work at The Firs, a delightful