The Shands
John Caldigate had promised to go direct from Folking
to the house of his friend Richard Shand, or rather,
to the house in which lived Richard Shand’s
father and family. The two young men had much
to arrange together, and this had been thought to
be expedient. When Caldigate, remembering how
affairs were at his own home, had suggested that at
so sad a moment he might be found to be in the way,
Shand had assured him that there would be no sadness
at all. ‘We are not a sentimental race,’
he had said. ’There are a dozen of us, and
the sooner some of us disperse ourselves, the more
room will there be in the nest for the others.’
Shand had been Caldigate’s most intimate friend
at college through the whole period of their residence,
and now he was to be his companion in a still more
intimate alliance. And yet, though he liked the
man, he did not altogether approve of him. Shand
had also got into debt at Cambridge, but had not paid
his debts; and had dealings also with Davis, as to
which he was now quite indifferent. He had left
the University without taking a degree, and had seemed
to bear all these adversities with perfect equanimity.
There had not been hitherto much of veneration in
Caldigate’s character, but even he had, on occasions,
been almost shocked at the want of respect evinced
by his friend for conventional rules. All college
discipline, all college authorities, all university
traditions had been despised by Shand, who even in
his dress had departed as far from recognised customs
and fashions among the men as from the requisitions
of the statutes and the milder requirements of the
dignitaries of the day. Now, though he could not
pay his debts,—and intended, indeed, to
run away from them,—he was going to try
his fortune with a certain small capital which his
father had agreed to give him as his share of what
there might be of the good things of the world among
the Shands generally. As Shand himself said of
both of them, he was about to go forth as a prodigal
son, with a perfect assurance that, should he come
back empty-handed, no calf would be killed for him.
But he was an active man, with a dash of fun, and
perhaps a sprinkling of wit, quick and brave, to whom
life was apparently a joke, and who boasted of himself
that, though he was very fond of beef and beer, he
could live on bread and water, if put to it, without
complaining. Caldigate almost feared that the
man was a dangerous companion, but still there was
a certain fitness about him for the thing contemplated;
and, for such a venture, where could he find any other
companion who would be fit?
