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Title: The master of St. Benedict's, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Author: Alan St. Aubyn
Release Date: February 17, 2019 [EBook #58897]
Language: English
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THE MASTER OF ST. BENEDICT'S
THE MASTER OF ST. BENEDICT'S
BY ALAN St. AUBYN
AUTHOR OF 'A FELLOW OF TRINITY,' 'THE JUNIOR DEAN,' 'THE OLD MAID'S
SWEETHEART,' 'MODEST LITTLE SARA,' ETC.
[Illustration]
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1893
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FULL OF DAYS, RICHES, AND HONOUR 1
II. DICK'S LITTLE DAUGHTER 17
III. ONLY A FRESHER 34
IV. PAMELA GWATKIN 53
V. AFTER CHAPEL 72
VI. BEHIND THE SCREEN 88
VII. LUCY'S SECRET 102
VIII. WATTLES 113
IX. A WOMAN'S PARLIAMENT 136
X. 'THAT CONFOUNDED CUCUMBER!' 148
XI. IN THE FELLOWS' GARDEN 163
XII. AN UGLY FALL 180
XIII. SLIPPING AWAY 192
XIV. WYATT EDGELL 207
THE
MASTER OF ST. BENEDICT'S
CHAPTER I.
FULL OF DAYS, RICHES, AND HONOUR.
The Master of St. Benedict's had got as much out of life as most
men. His had been a longer life than is allotted to many men--it had
exceeded four score.
There had been room in these eight decades for all the things that
men desire: for ambition, for wealth, for the world's favour, for
success--well-earned success--and for love. There had also been
distinction, and the soft, delightful voice of praise had not been
silent.
The success and the distinction had come early in life, and the love
had come late. In the nature of things it could not have come earlier.
It came in time to crown the rest of the good gifts that Providence had
poured into the lap of the Master of St. Benedict's. It had been his
already for twenty years, and it was his still. Surely we are right in
saying that he had got as much out of life as most men?
He had begun life on a bleak Yorkshire moor, following the plough over
his father's fields. A kindly North Riding vicar, noting the boy's
taste for reading, and his inaptitude for the drudgery of the farm, had
placed him at his own cost at the grammar school of the adjoining town.
With a small scholarship the Yorkshire ploughboy came up to Cambridge.
He came up with a very few loose coins in the pocket of his homely-cut
clothes, and with a broad North-country dialect as barbarous as the cut
of his coat.
He was the butt of all the witty men of St. Benedict's during his
freshman's year. He was the subject of all the rough practical jokes
which undergraduates in old days were wont to play upon impecunious
youths who had the audacity to elbow them out of the highest places in
the examinations.
He had survived the practical jokes, and he had stayed 'up' when
the witty men had gone 'down.' He had won the highest honours of
his year, and in due course he had been promoted to a college
Fellowship. Everything had come in delightful sequence: honour, riches,
distinction, love. It had all fallen out exactly as he would have had
it to fall out. He might have liked the love to have come earlier--he
had waited for it forty years: it came at sixty, and he had enjoyed it
for over twenty years!
When Anthony Rae had come up to Cambridge, a poor scholar from a
country grammar school, he had set before himself two things that
seemed at the time equally impossible. He had set before himself the
winning of a high place, perhaps the highest, among the great scholars
of his great University, and he had also set before himself--in his
secret heart--the hope of winning, to share this distinction with him,
the daughter of the kind friend who had paved the way to distinction
and honour.
He had achieved both these things--the dearest wishes of his heart--but
he had to serve a longer apprenticeship than most men. He had to wait
forty years.
Rachel Thorne was worth waiting for. She was a child when he went away
to college; she had run down to the Vicarage gate after him on that
memorable morning to wish him 'good luck,' and she had stood watching
him until a turn of the road hid him from her eyes.
She had watched for him turning that corner many times since. She had
met him at the gate of the dear old Yorkshire Vicarage when he came
back, term after term, a modest undergraduate blushing beneath his
well-earned honours, with the eager question on her lips: 'What great
things, have you done this term, Anthony?'
She always expected him to do great things, and he justified her faith
in him. Perhaps her girlish faith had more to do with his success than
he dreamed of. It was his beacon through all his lonely hours, and it
had led him onward to distinction and honour.
She was brown-haired and fresh-cheeked when he went away; she was a
middle-aged woman, with silver streaks in her brown hair, when he came
back and asked her to share with him the honours he had won.
She waited for him through all the long years of his Fellowship--sad
years when fortune had left her and sorrow had baptized her--sad
friendless years, growing older, and grayer, and sick with waiting. But
the reward had come at last, and her tranquil face had regained its
cheerfulness, and was 'no longer wan and dree.'
It was a fitting crown to a scholarly life, this mellow, mature
love--this gracious presence pervading the closing decades of his
brilliant career.
Rachel Rae had been mistress of St. Benedict's over twenty years when
our story opens. She had presided over the graceful hospitalities of
the Master's lodge in her kindly, gracious way for twenty years. She
had no daughter to share this delightful duty with her--she had married
too late in life--but a niece of the Master's had been an inmate of the
lodge for fifteen years or more, and filled a daughter's place.
Mary Rae was a daughter of a younger brother of Dr. Rae's, and had been
educated above the station in which she had been born by her uncle's
liberality. Anthony Rae in his prosperity had not neglected his humble
kinsfolk. He had done as much for them as lay in his power. He had
educated the younger branches, and provided for the declining years
of the elders. He had kept his two maiden sisters, one an invalid, in
comfort and affluence. He had paid the mortgage off the farm and passed
it over unembarrassed by debt to his elder brother. He had taken that
brother's grandson and given him an education at his own University,
and in due time had arranged for him to be presented with a college
living. It was not a rich living: it was the only one that fell vacant
when Richard Rae most wanted it, and he had accepted it gladly. He had
married upon it, and brought up a family, six children, of whom one
only was now living, a girl child, with whom this story has to do.
The old Master of St. Benedict's had aged perceptibly within the
last few years. He was already in his second childhood. His strength
had become enfeebled and his memory impaired. He could not walk
down the long gallery of the lodge now or across the grass in the
Fellows' garden without assistance; he could not remember the things
of yesterday or of last week, but the crabbed characters of his old
Semitic manuscripts were still as familiar to him as ever. He had lost
a great deal since that stroke of paralysis five years ago, but he had
not lost all. He remembered his old friends, and he could pore over his
old books, but he was dependent upon his womankind for many things--for
most things.
Mary Rae opened his letters and conducted his correspondence. She
had conducted it so long that she knew more about the college than
the Master. She transacted all the college business that had to be
transacted in the lodge, and when any public function required the
Master's presence in the Senate House Mary Rae took him up to the
door on her arm and brought him back. It was also rumoured that she
instructed him how to vote.
She was assisted in her responsible duties by the Senior Tutor of St.
Benedict's, who would in the natural course of things succeed to the
office of Master when it should fall vacant.
Mary Rae was a handsome woman well on in the thirties. She was a woman
who could not help looking handsome at any age, and the few gray hairs
that had put in an appearance in the smooth brown bands drawn back
from her broad forehead only added a new dignity to her mature beauty.
Perhaps the Senior Tutor thought that they supplied the only touch
lacking to make Mary Rae a perfect and ideal mistress of a college
lodge.
It was whispered in the combination room, where the old Fellows met
after their Hall dinner, and discussed the affairs of the college over
their walnuts and their wine, that when the Master received his last
preferment she would not have to pack up her small belongings and leave
the lodge.
It was one morning early in the Lent term that Mary Rae sat at
breakfast in the cheerful bow-windowed room of the lodge. The Doctor's
wife still presided over the breakfast table. She was younger than
the Doctor, and had worn better. She was still active and cheerful--a
bright, gentle, patient old soul, ever watchful and considerate for his
comfort, and anticipating his every want.
While Mrs. Rae poured out the Master's tea, Mary Rae buttered the
Master's toast and read his letters. There were not many letters this
morning, but there was one with a black seal that lay uppermost. The
writing was unfamiliar, and before opening it Mary glanced at the
postmark.
'A letter from Dick, uncle,' she said across the table. She had to
speak in rather a high key, as the Doctor was a little deaf, and some
days he was deafer than usual.
'What does Dick say, my dear?' he said, smiling at her across the toast
she had buttered for him. His voice was not very strong, but there was
no North-country burr in it now--a kind, mellow old voice, courteous
and gentle in tone, with a quaver in it now and then. 'I have not heard
from your uncle Dick for a long time. I am very glad he has written
now. I cannot remember when I last heard from him.'
'It is not from Uncle Dick,' said Mary, opening the letter; 'it is from
his son--at least, his grandson--Cousin Dick, of Thorpe Regis. Don't
you remember, uncle?'
'Ye--es, my dear; and what does Dick say?'
Mary read the letter in silence, and looked across the table with a
shade of anxiety on her face.
'It is not Cousin Dick who writes; the letter is from his daughter; he
had only one daughter--Lucy, little Lucy. You remember her, uncle?'
Mary Rae was evidently speaking to gain time, and the shade of anxiety
deepened on her face as she spoke.
'Ye--es, I remember, my dear. Lucy was her mother's name; she was
called after her mother. What has Lucy got to say about Dick?'
'She has not much to say, uncle; she is writing in great distress. Her
father has died, almost suddenly. He was preaching a week ago, and now
he is dead. The poor child is writing in great trouble.'
'Dick dead!' the old man repeated with a bewildered air, and putting
down his cup with a shaking hand. 'Dick dead, did you say? He was not
so many years older than I, and always hale and strong. I ought to have
gone first. There were only three of us, and Dick was the eldest.'
'It isn't your brother, Anthony, that is dead; he died long ago, dear.
It is his grandson, little Dick--Dickie you used to call him. You
had him up here, and he took his degree, and you gave him a college
living. You remember little Dickie, Anthony?'
His wife's voice recalled his wandering thoughts.
'Yes, yes, my dear; certainly, I remember little Dick very well. He
took a second class; he ought to have done better. He disappointed me.
I had no son of my own to come after me, and I should have liked my
brother Dick's son--grandson, to be sure--to have done well. He did his
best, no doubt; but he disappointed me. If he had done better, he might
have got a Fellowship. So Dickie is dead, you say, my dear?'
'Yes, uncle; and he has left poor little Lucy unprovided for. She has
written to ask you what she ought to do. She wants to go out as a
governess--a nursery governess.'
'A nursery governess? Dick's little girl a nursery governess! No, my
dear, that will never do. Tell her to come here; there's plenty of
room in the lodge for Dick's little girl. Write to her at once, Mary,
and tell her as soon--as soon as the funeral is over--her father's
funeral--poor little girl!--to come to the lodge. What do you say,
Rachel?'
'I wish we could spare Mary to go to her,' the Master's wife said,
wiping her eyes. 'Someone ought to fetch her away at once, as soon--as
soon as it is all over. I think Mary ought to go to her.'
The Senior Tutor met the Master's niece in the court as he was coming
away from a lecture during the morning, and she told him all about the
letter her uncle had received and the death of his nephew, or, rather,
his grand-nephew.
'You remember my cousin Dick?' she said; 'he was my second cousin. I am
a generation older than he,' and she smiled at the admission. She was
not the least ashamed of her age.
The Senior Tutor smiled too; he was thinking how well she wore her
years, how her age, or the signs of it, her gray hairs and the lines on
her face, became her. She would grow handsomer with the years, he told
himself as he stood talking to her in the spring sunshine, and her face
would grow finer as time went by: it was a fine face already; it could
never by any chance grow plain. He had watched a great many faces grow
old in his time--old, and lined, and soured--but he had never seen any
face grow finer with the years like this woman's face had grown.
'Yes,' he said, 'I remember your cousin, Richard Rae, very well; he was
one of my pupils. He disappointed me, and he disappointed your uncle;
he ought to have taken a first class. He went into the Church, and we
gave him a college living, I remember--a very small living--and he
married, I believe, directly after.'
'He married, and he had a large family and a sickly wife, and very
small means. It must have been a hard struggle for him, poor Dick! He
lost his wife, and his children died one after the other; there is only
one left. And now he is dead, and the girl is left quite alone.'
'Oh, it is a girl,' said the Tutor in a tone of disappointment; 'if it
had been a boy we could have done something with him here.'
'Yes,' said Mary, with a sigh; 'pity it's a girl; it would have been
so much easier if it had been a boy. She must come here, of course;
there is nowhere else for her to go.'
'What will you do with her when she comes?'
The Senior Tutor looked grave; the question had come into his head as
he stood speaking to Mary, what should he do with this girl of Cousin
Dick's when he occupied the Master's place? Of course Mary would stay,
and Mrs. Rae--he could not separate the old woman from her niece during
her few declining years; she would certainly remain an inmate of the
lodge; but this girl? he could not make the college lodge an asylum for
all the female members of the Rae family.
It was an idiotic question to arise; he was ashamed of it the next
moment.
'I think you ought to go to Thorpe Regis,' he said, 'and be with your
poor young cousin at this trying time. I will look after the Master
while you are away, if that will make the going easier.'
'Ye--es,' said Mary slowly, 'it will make it easier. You really think I
ought to go?'
There was a hesitation in her tone he could not but note; he put it
down at once to her reluctance to leave the old Master.
'Most certainly you ought to go,' he said promptly. 'I will come over
to the lodge every day. I will fill your place as far as I can. You are
not afraid to leave the Master with me?'
'Oh, no, no! I am sure you will do all, more than all, that I do for
him. I was not thinking about him. You are quite sure it is right to
bring this girl back here? She is very young, not twenty, and--and she
may be----'
'She may be attractive,' said the Senior Tutor with a laugh, 'and turn
all our heads. I think, in spite of her attractions, her place is here
with you and under her uncle's roof. We must protect ourselves against
the wiles of this siren. We must not wear our hearts on our sleeves for
Cousin Dick's little daughter to peck at.'
CHAPTER II.
DICK'S LITTLE DAUGHTER.
The Senior Tutor need have been under no apprehension for the men
of St. Benedict's. They had no occasion to cover up their sleeves
with their academical gowns. Cousin Dick's little daughter showed no
inclination to peck at their too susceptible hearts, whether they wore
them skewered on to their sleeves or out of sight in their accustomed
places.
Lucy Rae was too full of her recent loss, the great sorrow that had
fallen upon her and swept away all her household gods, to have a
thought to spare for the undergraduates of St. Benedict's.
It had almost swept away all her moorings, too, but not quite; she
still clung tenaciously to one idea--it was all she had left of the
old life to cling to: she still desired to be a governess.
It was not a very ambitious idea. She wanted to be independent, and
earn her own living in the only way that was open to her. She accepted
the shelter of the Master's lodge thankfully, but she had no idea of
settling down in the dependent position of a poor relation. When she
had recovered from this shock, and the horizon cleared, she would find
something to do, she told herself, and go away.
She was a soft, shy little thing to be so independent. She only looked
like a girl to be kissed and petted and comforted; she didn't look at
all fit to stand in the front of the battle.
She talked over her prospects--her little, humble prospects--with her
cousin Mary a few days after her arrival at the lodge. Mary was sitting
at the Master's writing-table in the library of the lodge--she was
writing some letters on college business--and Lucy was sewing in the
window.
It was a big gloomy room, and it was not at all a cheerful place for
girls to sit in on a chilly spring afternoon. There was a fire burning
in the old-fashioned grate behind the brass fire-guard--there were wire
guards to all the fires at the lodge since that last seizure of the
Master's--but it had burnt low; Mary, who was sitting near it, had been
too occupied to notice it, and Lucy's mind was full of her prospects.
There had been no sound in the room for some time but the scratching
of Mary's pen as it travelled over the paper, and Lucy sewed on in
silence. She didn't like sewing, and she put down her work two or three
times and yawned or looked out of the window. The window looked out
into the Fellows' garden. The sun was shining on the lawn beneath,
which was already green with the new green of the year, and the
crocuses were aflame in the borders, and the primroses were in bloom.
An old Fellow was hobbling slowly and painfully round the garden--a
bent, drooping figure in a particularly shabby coat and a tall silk
hat of a bygone date. He was lame, Lucy remarked, and dragged one leg
behind him. He had a long, lean, sallow face with deep eye-sockets, and
his hair was long and gray--it didn't look as if it had been cut for
years. Lucy wondered vaguely at seeing this shabby old cripple in the
grounds of the lodge; if she had seen him anywhere else she would have
taken him for a tramp. He had been a Senior Wrangler in his day, and
had taken a double-first; perhaps he was paying the penalty.
'I am very dull company, child,' Mary said, as she blotted her last
letter and pushed the writing materials aside. 'I have left you to your
thoughts for a whole hour, and we have sat the fire out. What have you
been thinking about, Lucy, all this time?'
'Oh, the old thing,' said Lucy, looking up from her work. 'I have been
thinking what I can do.'
'Well, and what conclusion have you come to?'
'There is but one conclusion--that--that I can do nothing!'
The work dropped from the girl's fingers, and her eyes overflowed. She
had wanted an excuse for weeping for the last hour, and now she had got
it.
'Oh yes, you can,' Mary said cheerfully; 'the case is not quite so bad
as that. You can sew, for one thing. See how nicely you are sewing that
frill!'
'I hate sewing! And I shall never wear that frill when I have hemmed
it! I can only do useless trumpery things!'
Lucy let the poor little bit of white frilling she had been hemming
fall to the ground, and she got up and began to walk up and down the
room.
Mary watched her in silence. It was not the first time her young
cousin had shown impatience, but it was the first time she had shown
temper--just a little bit of temper.
Mary had praised her in the wrong place: she was hurt and angry at this
learned, superior cousin implying, with her misplaced praise, that she
was only fit to do work--mere woman's work!
It was an unusual sound, that rapid pacing to and fro of impatient
feet, in that scholarly room. The Master tottered feebly across the
floor; the Master's wife moved with slow dignity; Mary walked quietly,
with soft, firm footsteps that awoke no echoes. The floor creaked
audibly beneath Lucy's rapid, impatient steps; the old boards that had
echoed to the slow tread of scholars for so many, many years, shook and
trembled--actually trembled--beneath the light impatient footsteps of
Cousin Dick's little daughter.
The colour that that useless sewing had taken out of Lucy's cheek had
come back, and her gray eyes were eager and shining beneath her tears.
Mary watched her pacing the room with a smile half of pity, half
amused, as she sat at the Master's table. Perhaps she understood the
mood. She may have been impatient herself years ago; she had nothing
to be impatient for now. Everything was happening as it should do; and
when a change came--well, her position would not be materially altered.
'I am sure you can do a great many useful things, dear,' she said
presently, when Lucy's little bit of temper had had time to cool. 'You
could not have kept your father's house so long, and done the work
of the parish, without being able to do more useful things than most
girls.'
'I don't mean that kind of usefulness; anyone can do housekeeping
and potter about a parish. I hated parish work! I never took the
least interest in it; no one could have done it worse than I did.
I hated--oh, no one knows how I hated--those Bands of Hope, and
Sunday-schools, and mothers' meetings, and visiting dreadful old men
and women who would insist upon telling me all about their unpleasant
complaints!'
Mary looked grave. She was accustomed to hear a great deal about old
people's complaints, though she did not do any district visiting.
'Really,' she said gravely, 'most girls like these things! They are
over now, and done with, and you will begin afresh. Tell me what you
would like to do.'
'Like!' Lucy held her breath as she spoke, and her cheeks grew
crimson. 'Oh, I should like to be a scholar, Cousin Mary!'
Mary looked at the girl with a kind of pity in her eyes. She had
seen a good many scholars in her time, men and women; some of them
were as eager once as this girl--eager and impatient with feverish
haste to climb the hill of learning; they were hollow-eyed now, and
narrow-chested, and their cheeks were sunken and sallow, and some
limped like the old scholar in the Fellows' garden--that is, those who
had lasted to the end; but some had turned back in time and regained
their youth: most likely this girl would turn back.
'You would like to go to a woman's college?'
'I should love to go! I shouldn't mind whether it were Newnham or
Girton, whichever uncle thought best. If I could only have three years
at a woman's college, I should be provided for for life. I should want
nothing further. I should be able to make my own way. Oh, Mary, do you
think he will let me go?'
She was very much in earnest. She had stopped running up and down the
room in that ridiculous manner. She was standing beside the table with
both her hands pressed down upon it and her little lithe figure bending
eagerly forward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks glowing, and her
lips parted. She looked exactly as if she were making a speech.
The door opened as she was standing there, and the Senior Tutor came
in. He shook hands with Mary, and he nodded across the table to Lucy.
He thought he had interrupted a scene.
'I saw the Master as I came up,' he said, speaking to Mary; 'he had
just finished his nap. He asked me to tell you that he was quite ready
to take a turn in the garden, if you would put on your hat. I think you
should go at once to catch the sunshine. You'll get it on the broad
walk if you go now.'
Mary rose at once.
'It is lucky I have finished my work,' she said, glancing down at the
little pile of letters, sealed and stamped ready for the post, that lay
on the table. 'Poor little Lucy here was telling me about her plans.
If you can spare time, Mr. Colville, sit down and talk them over with
her, and advise her what she ought to do, while I am in the garden.'
The Senior Tutor could spare time; and after he had opened the door for
Mary, he came back to the window that overlooked the garden and sat
down.
He did not belong to the old school of Cambridge Dons. He belonged
to that newer school that came in a quarter of a century ago with
athletics. He was not lean and hollow-eyed, and wrinkled and yellow,
like a musty old parchment, and he hadn't a stoop in his shoulders,
and he didn't drag one of his legs behind him. He had rowed 'five'
in his college boat, and his shoulders were as square now as ever.
His shoulders were square, and his forehead was square, and his
iron-gray hair was closely cut--it was only iron-gray still--and he had
tremendous bushy eyebrows that, Lucy thought, made him look like an
ogre, and that frightened the undergraduates dreadfully, and close-cut
iron-gray whiskers, and a big red throat like a bull. His throat had
not always been red; he had been mild-looking enough in his youth;
but he was now a portly, pompous Don of middle age, with a florid
countenance and fierce aspect.
'Well,' he said in his easy, patronizing way, as if he were speaking to
a freshman who had just come up, 'and what do you propose to do, Miss
Lucy?'
The colour went out of the girl's cheeks, and the long eyelashes
drooped over her eager eyes, and her pretty little slender figure grew
limp, and she didn't look the least like making a speech now.
'I am sure I don't know,' she said meekly, and she went back and sat on
her old seat in the window on the opposite side to the Senior Tutor. It
was a big bay-window, and there was a table between them littered with
pamphlets and manuscripts in Semitic languages. The girl tossed them
over as she sat there with a gesture of impatience. They were sealed
books to her.
'What were you discussing with your cousin Ma--ry when I came in?'
He lingered over the name, and prolonged the last syllable. He seemed
loath to let it go.
'I was telling her that I should like to go to a woman's college--to
Newnham or Girton.'
'Exactly.'
The Tutor nodded his head. He was listening to the girl, but he was
looking out of the window.
'No one is educated now--no woman--who does not go to Newnham, or
Girton, or Oxford. No one has any chance of success in teaching who
has not taken a place in a Tripos or done something in a University
examination.'
The Senior Tutor was smiling, but he was only giving her half his
attention.
'And what Tripos do you propose to take?' he asked in his bland,
superior, lecture-room manner.
'I? Oh, I don't think I shall ever be clever enough to take a Tripos;
but I might learn something--a little. I might learn enough to pass
the--the--Little----'
'The Little-go?' suggested the Tutor; 'or, more properly speaking, the
"Previous."'
'Yes; papa used to talk about the Little-go. He had dreadful difficulty
in passing it. I should be quite satisfied if I could pass the
Little-go.'
'I don't think you will find any difficulty in passing it,' he said. 'I
do not remember that your father had any special difficulty; I was his
tutor. He disappointed me in the Tripos. With his great gifts he ought
to have done better.'
It was Lucy's turn to smile now, and to sigh.
'Poor papa!' she said; 'there was a reason for his failure. Perhaps you
did not know.'
'No; I knew of no reason.'
'He had just met my mother, and--and he was in love. She got between
him and his mathematics; he could think of nothing but my mother. Oh,
if you had known her, you would not have wondered.'
The Senior Tutor looked across the table with a new interest in his
eyes at the sweet downcast face. If her mother had been like her, he
didn't wonder at poor Richard Rae getting only a second class in his
Tripos.
'Are you quite sure that you will not fail from the same cause? are you
sure that at the momentous time you will not do like your father--that
you will not fall in love?'
'No--o,' said Lucy gravely; 'I don't think I shall fall in love. I
don't think Girton girls do very often.'
'They do sometimes. They generally end by marrying their coaches.'
Lucy looked shocked.
'They can't _all_ marry their coaches.'
'No, not all--only the weak ones. The superior minds never sink to the
low level of matrimony.'
Lucy was quite sure he was laughing at her.
'I am not likely to need a coach,' she said stiffly; 'I shall never
be clever enough to take a Tripos. I shall be content to pass
the--the--the "Previous."'
She was going to say 'Little-go,' but she remembered he had called it
the 'Previous,' and she checked herself in time.
'We shall see. You will have to begin with the "Previous" in any case.
You need not take it all at once: there are three parts; you can take
them at different times.'
'I should prefer to take them all at once.'
'But if you are going no farther, if you are going to stop at the
"Previous," why should you be in such a hurry to get it over?'
'I don't know. It might be as well to get it over; but I have to get
into Girton or Newnham first; I don't know that they will have me; and
I have to get my uncle's consent.'
She hadn't fallen naturally into the custom of the lodge of calling Dr.
Rae 'the Master' yet. It came easier to say 'uncle.'
'There will be an entrance examination,' the Tutor said, looking out
of window and watching the Master walking in the garden below leaning
on Mary's arm. 'I believe it is nearly as stiff as the "Previous" and
takes in the same subjects. You will have to pass an examination
before you can become a student at either college.'
'Do you know what the subjects are?' she asked eagerly; 'could
you--could you get me the papers?'
He hardly heard her; his heart was out in that wet garden with Mary.
How very indiscreet of the Master at his age to walk over the damp
grass! He was actually sitting down on the bench under the walnut-tree.
Lucy followed the direction of the Tutor's eyes, but she only saw the
Master sitting in the sunshine. A tall, lean figure bent with age, with
white, silvery hair falling over the velvet collar of his coat, and
his rugged, worn old face turned up to the sun. The figure of the old
scholar sitting on the old bench in the sunshine beneath the branches
of the old, old tree, where he had sat in sunshine and in shade, oh, so
many, many years, had no poetry for her. She only wondered, as she saw
him sitting there, lifting his dim eyes to the sinking sun, whether he
would let her go to Newnham.
The Senior Tutor didn't see any poetry in the situation, either. He was
sure the old Master was catching a dreadful cold; and he was wondering
whether Mary had changed her slippers.
'Could you get me a copy of the papers set at the last examination?'
Lucy asked meekly.
'Yes, oh yes,' he said absently; 'I'll try to remember; but I think I
must go down now and bring the Master in: I am sure he is taking cold.'
CHAPTER III.
ONLY A FRESHER.
It was rather hard work to persuade the old Master of St. Benedict's
that Lucy ought to go to Newnham. He belonged to the old school--he was
almost the last left of that school--that did not believe very much in
women. He believed in a girl learning to sew, and to spell, and play a
little air on the piano--he was very fond of 'Annie Laurie,' he could
listen to it by the hour; he went so far, indeed, as the three R's in a
woman's education--and he stopped there.
He had no sympathy whatever in the movement for the higher education
of Women--spelt with a big W. He had voted consistently all his
life against women being admitted to any of the privileges of the
University, against their being allowed to take degrees; he had even
voted against their being 'placed.' He regarded every concession made
to the weaker sex as a step towards that dreadful time when a female
Vice-Chancellor will confer degrees in the Senate House, and a lady
D.D. will occupy the University pulpit.
With these views, and with his prejudices growing stronger rather
than weaker with the years, it was no wonder that Mary Rae had great
difficulty in reconciling the Master to the idea of Lucy becoming a
student of Newnham.
He had to look at the question all round, from every point of view,
and he had to talk it over a great many times. Sometimes he talked it
over with himself after dinner, when he woke up from his nap, or didn't
quite wake up; and sometimes he talked it over with his nieces.
'I don't think your father would approve of it, my dear,' he said one
day when he was talking 'it' over with Lucy. 'He was a plain man, he
hadn't the advantages of education that I had; but he had what served
him just as well, he had common-sense. He knew what was wanted in a
woman. A woman, he used to say, ought to be able to milk, and make
butter, and bring up a family. Dick's wife could do all these, and her
poultry was noted in all the country round.'
Lucy sighed. She had no ambition to make butter and bring up a family,
and she had a distinct aversion to poultry. She hated cocks and hens
and broods of yellow downy chickens. She remembered how they used
always to be getting into the Vicarage garden and digging up her
flower-seeds.
'I am afraid I couldn't get my living by making butter, uncle,' she
said meekly, 'or milking cows.'
She never could remember to say 'Master,' like everybody else.
'No, my dear, no; I suppose not. Some girls have the knack of it, and
some women, I've heard my mother say, may churn for hours and the
butter will refuse to come. Dick's wife, your mother, my dear----'
'Great-grandmother,' murmured Lucy almost inaudibly. The Master hated
to be contradicted, and he was always telling her that these far-off
ancestors were her father and mother, this humble ploughman and his
homely wife. There had been two generations of culture between, and
Lucy had quite forgotten, until her uncle reminded her, that her
great-grandmother used to carry her eggs and her butter to market. The
worst of it was he used to tell everybody it was her mother.
'Yes, yes,' the Master repeated testily; 'my memory is not what it was.
But it does not much matter which. She was a good woman; she did her
duty here; she brought up a long family--nine children--and she has
gone to her reward. She did not know a word of Greek or Latin, and she
only knew enough mathematics to reckon up the price of eggs; but if she
had gone to Girton or Newnham she could not have done more. She did
her duty here; after all, that is the great thing, my dear. There is
nothing else that will bring comfort at the last.'
It was a delightful reflection. It comforted the old scholar who had
done his duty in this place for over sixty years, who had done it
so well that by common consent men called him Master; but it didn't
comfort Lucy at all. She was quite prepared to do her duty, only she
wanted to do it in her own way.
There were other difficulties in the way of Lucy going to Newnham
beside the Master's prejudices. There was a dreadful ordeal to be gone
through before those sacred portals would be opened to admit her.
There was the entrance examination. The Senior Tutor was as good as
his word; he brought Lucy over the very next day, not only the papers
set at the last 'Previous' examination, but a copy of the last Newnham
entrance papers. The next examination was to take place in March, and
it was now the middle of February, and there were only a few weeks to
prepare for it.
Lucy looked hurriedly through the papers while the Tutor stood by, and
he saw her face fall and the pretty April colour, which was Lucy's
especial charm, go out of her cheeks.
'They are stiffer than you thought,' he said.
He couldn't help putting a little feeling into his voice; he couldn't
help being sorry for the girl. He could see she was dreadfully
disappointed.
'I did not think they would be so hard,' she said, with something like
a sob, and striving to keep back the tears; 'I had no idea that so much
was required.'
Her voice was scarcely steady, and she finished up with a little
wail--she couldn't keep it out of her voice--and she laid the papers
down.
'You don't think you can do them?'
'No, I am sure I can't.'
'Not if you work hard--very hard?--you have three weeks before you--not
if I help you?'
'You! Oh, Mr. Colville!'
The colour leaped back into her face, and her eyes brightened. She was
quite trembling with eagerness.
'If you think with three weeks' hard work you can get through, I will
help you,' he said.
It was something new to the Senior Tutor to have a pupil so eager and
willing. The eyes of the undergraduates of St. Benedict's were not
accustomed to brighten or their cheeks to flush when he proposed to
give them a few hours' extra coaching.
'I am sure I can!' she said eagerly; 'and--and you are sure, Mr.
Colville, you will not mind the trouble? I am a very slow learner, but
I will do my best, my very best.'
'I am sure you will,' he said; and then he noticed that little helpless
quivering about her lips that touched him with quite a new sensation.
He had never seen Mary's lips quiver. 'It will be no trouble,' the
Tutor said softly in quite a different voice; he even noticed the
difference himself, with a strange sense of wonder. 'I shall be very
glad to be of use to you.'
He had often been of use to Mary. She always consulted him about the
college business; she made use of him every day; but his voice had
never faltered nor his cheek grown warm when he had offered to help
her with the Master's correspondence.
Lucy began her work the next day. She turned out from the little
shabby box she had brought with her to the lodge some well-thumbed
old school-books. Small as the box was, it contained all her personal
belongings, and the books were at the bottom of the box.
Like Jacob, she had come into a strange land with very little personal
impedimenta. It could all, everything, be stuffed into one small box,
and the books were at the bottom. The books were shabby, like the box.
They had belonged to her father, and she had read them with him.
There were his old Virgil and Xenophon, and a dilapidated Euclid with
all the riders missing, and an old-fashioned Algebra. There had been
newer editions since Richard Rae had used these in his college days
more than twenty years ago. There had been delightful editions full
of notes, and directing-posts along the royal road to a classical
education; but Lucy had been plodding along the old, rough, dusty way.
The Senior Tutor smiled as he turned over these old books. They brought
back to him the old days twenty years ago, the hopes and dreams
of those early days, and the familiar faces. The dreams had been
realized--at least, some of them--but the familiar faces had faded with
the years, and the hopes--what could a man hope for beyond being Master
of his college? Nevertheless, the Senior Tutor sighed. The sight of
these old books had carried him a long way back.
'I think we can find some newer editions than these,' he said, smiling.
He not only found some newer, but he found the very newest. He found
delightful books that smoothed away all the difficulties and made stony
places plain. There will be a royal road to learning by-and-by. The
road is getting smoother every day, and the way is getting shorter--a
short, straight, macadamized road that one can travel over without any
jolting or sudden pulls-up.
Old scholars who remember the dear old rough road, and the stony ways,
and the hills of difficulty they had to climb, sigh when they look
back. There is no time now, in these hurrying days, to toil over stones
and climb unnecessary heights. The new ways are so much better than the
old; but the old men, if they were to begin again, would go the old
way, the dear old way, with all its difficulties. They will still tell
you the old ways are best.
Lucy Rae was not a scholar yet, though the desire of her heart was to
be one--a perfect Hypatia--and the new royal road was exactly what she
wanted.
She made such rapid progress by means of these short-cuts and easy
paths the Senior Tutor led her through that she was quite ready for
that dreaded entrance examination when it came. She did as well in it
as the girls who had been working for it for years.
There was nothing now to prevent her becoming a student of Newnham.
Cousin Mary had talked the old Master over and smoothed away all the
difficulties. She had wrung from him an unwilling consent. The Senior
Tutor had done his part, too, in overcoming the Master's prejudices.
He had backed Mary up in the most loyal manner; no girl could have had
better advocates. When the Doctor had urged that there had been no
precedent in his family of girls construing Latin and Greek when they
ought to be making butter and carrying their eggs to market, the Tutor
had reminded him that neither had there been a precedent in all the
generations of the Raes of one of their number being the Master of a
college.
He, on his part, had set up a precedent, and Dick's little daughter was
going to set up another--perhaps a more astonishing precedent.
Lucy Rae went up to Newnham the next term. She ought to have waited
until October, when the academical year commences, but she was much too
anxious to begin at once. She couldn't wait till October.
She had taken a little draught of the divine nectar, and she was
thirsting to drink deeply, ever so deeply--deeper than any woman had
ever drunk yet. She was going to do very big things, and she couldn't
afford to lose a minute. She would gain a whole term's work if she went
up now, she would get in ten terms' work instead of nine, like the men,
for her Tripos. She would get a whole term's start of them.
With this thirst upon her, and this emulation stirring in her heart,
Lucy packed her little box and carried it up to Newnham. She did not
exactly carry it in her arms like a housemaid going to a new place.
It was not far to carry it, and for the weight of it she might have
carried it easily, but girls do not generally go to Newnham carrying
a bandbox, or a bundle tied up in a coloured pocket-handkerchief, and
with two out-at-elbow little brothers lagging behind carrying a shabby
box between them. Lucy, alas! had not two out-at-elbow little brothers,
and she had respect for the feelings of Newnham, so she drove up to the
door of Newe Hall in a hansom, with her modest little box on the roof.
She thought it was the happiest, the proudest day of her life, this
first day at Newnham. She had been looking forward to it for weeks. She
had lain awake all the night before picturing what it would be like,
and it was not the least like anything she had pictured.
She had pictured sunshine and a blue sky, and the lilacs in the hedge
budding, and the daffodils blowing beneath the windows. It was the
middle of April, and she had a right to expect these things; it was
very little to expect.
It had been raining cheerfully all the morning, and it was raining
still when the hansom drew up at the gate of St. Benedict's; it
couldn't draw up at the door of the lodge, because college lodges are
cut off from the outside world by cloistered courts, and even royalty,
when it visits the master of a college, has to leave its carriage at
the gate and perform the rest of the journey on foot.
Lucy met Mr. Colville in the cloisters as she was hurrying through, and
he put her into the hansom, and he told the man where to drive, and
quite a crowd of undergraduates, who had come up early in the term,
stood round the gate watching her drive away.
It was quite a new thing, a girl going from St. Benedict's to
Newnham. It was the newest thing under the sun. No daughter, niece or
granddaughter of any Master of St. Benedict's had ever driven from
those gates before to Newnham.
Perhaps when there is a mixed University, and a female president at the
lodge, they will not have to go so far; they may find rooms beneath the
same roof.
Who shall say?
Lucy couldn't have driven away with more depressing surroundings. The
sky couldn't have been grayer, and the trees were shivering overhead,
and the hedges were dripping, and there was a nasty mist settling down
over everything. She forgot all about the lilacs and the daffodils she
had been picturing as she stood, a forlorn little black figure, in the
big, cheerless vestibule of Newe Hall, paying the driver of the hansom.
There was no one at Newnham to receive her, no one to show her to her
room, only a housemaid, who went away directly she reached the door.
She didn't even open the door of the room; she only pointed to it and
went away in another direction.
It was a little bare room, it couldn't have been barer. There was
a couch that served for a bed, a bureau with some drawers beneath,
a table, a couple of chairs, and a thinly disguised washstand with
imperfect crockery; and that was all. Unless, indeed, a chintz curtain
drawn across a corner of the room for hanging gowns behind could be
called a wardrobe.
There was no fire, and the barred windows were steaming and blurred
with the mist outside, and the raw spring afternoon was closing in.
Lucy shivered and looked round the desolate room. She didn't know what
she was expected to do next, or how she was to begin this new life. She
was a member of the University now, she told herself with bated breath;
she was really a female undergraduate, and she had got to begin as
undergraduates began.
Should she begin with lighting the fire? While she was debating this
point, and drawing off her gloves, a girl came in. She had left the
door open so that anyone passing could look in and see her standing
there, and the girl passing by looked in and saw her, and something in
her attitude touched her, and she came in. Perhaps it was her black
frock and her white face.
'Can I do anything for you?' she said. She didn't throw any sympathy
into her voice; they never do at Newnham. 'I've got a kettle boiling if
you'd like some water, or'--looking round the bare room and seeing that
Lucy's things were not unpacked--'perhaps you'd rather have some tea.'
'Ye--es,' Lucy said quite thankfully; 'I would rather have some tea,
please.'
'Then come into my room.'
Lucy followed the girl, a solid-looking girl with no profile to speak
of, and a turned-up nose and violent red hair. She had not to follow
her far, only across the passage.
There was a card slipped into a frame in the door of the room, and the
name of the occupant was written on it--'Stubbs.'
'That's my name,' said the girl, pointing to it; 'Maria
Stubbs--Capability Stubbs they call me. I suppose you are a fresher?'
'Yes,' said Lucy, 'I'm a fresher; I've only just come up. My name is
Rae--Lucy Rae.'
'Not a bad name; but you won't have any use for it here. They'll call
you Lucifer most likely; they don't call anybody by their right name
here.'
Maria Stubbs' room was unlike most Newnham rooms. It was distinctly
utilitarian. There was nothing æsthetic about it. The most prominent
thing in it was a bookshelf full of books, and there was a cabinet in
one corner with a lot of narrow drawers, which Lucy found out after
were crammed with specimens. A bright fire was burning in the little
tiled grate, and a cloth was spread, and some tea-things were laid on
the flap of the bureau, which was let down for the purpose, and there
were some cakes in one of the pigeon-holes.
'Take off your hat and sit down,' said Maria, drawing a low chair to
the fire; 'there's nothing to hurry for, they won't bring in your
things for a long time; they never hurry themselves at Newnham.'
'I don't think I ought to take off my things until I've seen someone,'
said Lucy. 'There's Miss Wrayburne I certainly ought to see. Perhaps
she doesn't know I'm here.'
The girl laughed--or cackled, rather; there wasn't the least fun in her
laugh.
'Perhaps not,' she said, as she busied herself about making the tea;
'and I don't think it would make any difference if she did. You don't
think the Dons are running about the college all day long shaking hands
with the girls? You'll see Miss Wrayburne at the "High" at dinner, and
she'll say "How d'ye do?" and smile--she always smiles--and that's all.'
'I didn't know,' Lucy said humbly. 'I'm only a fresher, you see; I
shall know better soon. But it struck me as a very chilling reception.'
Miss Stubbs cackled in her unfeeling way.
'Chilling! that's lovely! You've come to the wrong place if you expect
any warmth at Newnham, or sympathy either. It would be nothing better
than a big girls' school if we were always "How-d'ye-doing" and shaking
hands with each other--we should get to _kissing_ soon! Thank goodness
there is no spooning here! We are barely civil to each other; and we
make a point of ignoring everybody if we meet 'em out-of-doors. I hope
you won't, on the strength of this tea, nod to me if you happen to run
against me in the street, because I shan't notice you.'
'No,' said Lucy, 'I certainly won't nod to you.' She didn't say it at
all humbly, but she drank Miss Stubbs' tea. It was very good tea for
Newnham.
CHAPTER IV.
PAMELA GWATKIN.
Lucy saw the Principal, as Miss Stubbs had said, at dinner. She came
into the hall rather late, and took her seat at the High table.
It is necessary to spell it with a capital H, as it is distinctly a
proper noun, and in Newnham parlance, like the tables in men's colleges
where the Dons eat their dinners, it is known as the 'High.'
Miss Wrayburne came in rather late, after the rest were seated, and
took her place at the head of the 'High,' and then followed a moment's
interval for grace, and then the murmur of tongues began--a low,
distinctly female murmur, and occasionally a laugh--a little low laugh.
There was a good deal of talk to-day, as everybody had come up fresh,
and the atmosphere of the vacation was still about them, and nobody
had begun work yet. They would unpack their books by-and-by, and then
everything would be changed.
Lucy did not know a soul in the place, except Maria Stubbs, and she sat
at another table. She sat quite at the other end of the room, and never
once looked Lucy's way, and brushed by her in the corridor as if she
had never seen her before.
'She needn't be afraid I shall notice her, the horrid red-haired
thing!' Lucy said to herself with quite unnecessary warmth, when Maria
looked the other way. 'I wouldn't notice her for the world!'
There were quite half a dozen tables between her and Maria, long narrow
tables, with some half-dozen girls at each--girls who ignored everybody
else except their own set, and talked across a stranger as if she were
a dummy.
They talked across Lucy, and she listened to their talk with a red spot
burning on her cheeks and her heart beating. She had not much appetite
for the dinner, and she got up from the table with a strange choking
sensation that brought the tears smarting to her eyes. She took some
comfort in the thought that some day she would talk across a fresher.
Her turn would come some day; and while her mind was occupied with this
agreeable reflection Miss Wrayburne smiled at her, and said:
'How do you do?'
'How do you do?' may mean a great deal, or it may mean nothing. It
didn't mean very much from Miss Wrayburne's lips, and the smile that
accompanied it meant less. If it had been a whole smile, or a smile
meant entirely for Lucy, there might have been something in it; but it
was only the fag-end of a smile that had already been distributed over
half a dozen girls.
Lucy accepted it meekly; and with those red spots burning on her cheeks
and a choky feeling in her throat she went back to her room--her little
desolate, bare room. She felt so utterly miserable and lonely on this
wretched first night that she sat down on the side of her bed and had
a little weep. Everything was so different to what she had expected;
all her castles had been so rudely thrown down.
And then, while she was weeping these foolish tears, she remembered
a little curate--a weak-minded young man with red hair; perhaps Miss
Stubbs had recalled him--who had once asked her to be his wife. She
had refused him indignantly. What girl in her senses would accept a
curate with red hair and one hundred and fifty pounds a year? She was
not sure, if he had come to her now as she sat in that dismal room,
feeling so utterly lonely and miserable, that she would have given him
the same answer. She wanted a little love so much; and he loved her
in spite of his red hair. She was not so certain, after all, that the
higher education of women is quite the best thing--the thing most to
be desired in the world. There are other things--she had not thought
of them till now, as she sat weeping at the edge of the bed--that make
up a woman's life: love, religion, duty, ministering to the wants of
others; but love chiefly. She was not sure, after all, if this was not
the _summum bonum_ of a woman's life.
Lucy was so utterly miserable as she sat there weeping that, if the
red-haired curate had come to her at that weak moment, she would have
thrown over all her ambitions, she would have given up the higher
education altogether, and she would have gone away with him to that
poor little moorland cottage, and pinched, and pared, and slaved for
him, as dear women before her have pinched and slaved for those they
love ever since the world began.
While she was still thinking of the curate, and the tears were
dropping into her lap, there was a knock at the door, and someone came
in. Lucy started guiltily, and hurriedly wiped her eyes. It was not
the red-headed curate. It was a girl--to be more correct, a woman.
Everybody is a woman at Newnham. A second-year girl, who had called
to see if she could help her to unpack her things and get her room in
order.
It wasn't a formal 'call.' Calls at Newnham are usually made after ten
p.m., when work is supposed to be over and one is yearning for bed.
The second-year girl was a little bit of a thing--smaller than Lucy. A
girl who looked as if she had shrunk--as if she had once been round,
and plump, and bright-eyed, and soft-cheeked, and red-lipped as a girl
ought to be at twenty. She was none of these things now. She was lean
and angular; her eyes were dull, her lips were pale, and her cheeks had
lost all their youthful roundness and rosiness, if they had ever had
any. The roundness had gone into her figure, her back was quite round,
her shoulders were bent and stooping, and her chest was narrow and flat
like a board.
She had been at Newnham two years, and she was twenty now, and wore
glasses, but, alas! not 'sweet and twenty.' She looked exactly like a
girl who had used up all her brains.
'I think you have made a mistake,' she said, as she knelt upon the
ground unpacking Lucy's books, 'in taking Classics. You should take the
Natural Science Tripos. Classics are a thing of the past. They are
quite worn out. They will be superseded altogether shortly. Soon--very
soon--Latin and Greek will not be compulsory in the examinations; we
shall have more useful subjects. Life is so short--so very short' (she
was just twenty)--'that we have no time for learning things that will
not help us in the rush. Life is getting more of a rush every day, and
Science is the only thing that can help us forward. There is no knowing
where Science will lead us!'
She clasped her hands, and gasped at the bare thought of it.
'No,' said Lucy, in a low-spirited way.
She hadn't the least interest where Science was going to lead the girl
on the floor--it wasn't likely to lead her very far--but she did object
to see her pet Classics turned out of the box in that scornful way.
'You will learn all this trash,' the girl continued, opening the pages
of Lucy's Euripides and letting the leaves drop through her fingers as
if they were not of very much account, 'and you will pore over these
rubbishy stories of a quite barbarous age--stories and fables and
metamorphoses that, if they were written at the present time, would
lay the writer open to a prosecution for perverting the public morals.
You will soak your mind with all this nonsense and impurity, and you
will think that you have attained culture. Oh, to think how girls waste
their lives!'
'I'm sure Classics are ever so much nicer than Natural Science,' Lucy
said with some spirit. 'Look at the dreadful subjects you have to
study! and to sit side by side with men in lecture-rooms, and listen to
lectures on things most women would blush to speak of! Oh, I wouldn't
be a Natural Science student for the world!'
The atmosphere of Newnham was beginning to tell. A few hours ago Lucy
was as meek as a mouse, and if anyone had slapped her on one cheek she
would have been quite ready to offer the other. Now she had plucked up
sufficient spirit to defend her choice of a Tripos.
If Newnham doesn't do anything else for a girl, it teaches her to take
her own part.
Lucy didn't learn the lesson all at once. It takes a long time to
learn, when one has been brought up in the old-fashioned way, to
consider other people first and to think of self last. It would never
do to practise such a foolish doctrine at a college for women. There is
only one person to consider--self, self, self!
Lucy had a great deal to unlearn when she came to Newnham, and a great
deal to learn; and she did not learn it all at once. She had always had
somebody else to consider first, and now it was ever Number One. Oh,
that horrid Number One!
Everybody called upon her in Newe Hall the first week, and some of the
girls from the other Halls called later on. The girls at Newe called
generally after ten o'clock at night, when she was too sleepy to talk
to them, and they went away and voted her 'stupid,' and took no further
trouble about her.
Among the girls who called upon Lucy when she was nearly asleep, and
went away and voted her stupid, was Pamela Gwatkin, a girl who was much
looked up to and worshipped at Newnham. It was no wonder Pamela thought
her stupid. She was the leader of the most advanced set in the college,
and held opinions that would make one's hair stand on end.
There will be a good many Pamela Gwatkins by-and-by, when there
are more Newnhams and the world is ripe for them. They will quite
revolutionize society.
They will not be misunderstood like the Greek women of old. Nobody will
question their morals because they seek to lead and teach men. Men will
be quite willing to be taught by them. It will no longer be a shame for
a woman to speak or preach in public. There will be nothing to debar
them from taking orders.
Women have proved long ago that they can reach beyond such heights of
scholarship as are demanded from a candidate for ordination. But women
of Pamela Gwatkin's order will not go into the pulpit--their demands
will be even more audacious.
Lucy hadn't any opinions in particular, she was only a fresher; but
she was such a poor-spirited creature that she went with the herd and
worshipped the very ground that Pamela Gwatkin walked upon.
She hadn't even the excuse of a nodding acquaintance with her after
that unlucky call--she only caught glimpses of her at a distant table
at Hall, or met her by chance in the library, or ran against her in the
streets, coming and going from lectures, when Pamela looked over her
head in her superior way and ignored her completely.
She could very well look over Lucy's head, for she stood six feet in
her shoes--they had rather high heels. A tall, fair girl, not plump
or round by any means, nor rosy-cheeked--she was not a milkmaid; she
was an advanced thinker--but lithe, and elastic, and dignified--very
dignified.
Lucy thought she had never seen anyone so dignified in her life as
Pamela on the night of the first debate of the term at Newnham.
She opened the debate on this particular evening--it happened to be
some question of woman's rights which she was always advocating--and
she spoke for half an hour without a single pause or hitch.
Some people confess that they cannot bear to hear a woman speak; that
when a woman stands up to speak in public it always gives them the
sensation of cold water running down their backs. No one who listened
to Pamela Gwatkin would have this uncomfortable sensation for a moment.
It seemed as if she had been made to stand up in public; as if Nature
had intended her for a female orator, and had given her the voice--the
clear, penetrating, resonant voice--the quiet, assured manner, the
full, free flow of words, without which no woman may attempt to stand
on a public platform.
Pamela Gwatkin had all these rare gifts, and she had opinions--very
advanced opinions--on every subject under the sun--religion, morals,
science, philosophy--nothing came amiss to her. When women are
admitted into Parliament she will probably represent an important
constituency, perhaps the University.
Lucy, looking down from the gallery above, listened breathlessly, and
when the debate was over watched her sailing down the hall in her pale
violet gown, with the soft folds of her train gliding noiselessly after
her. They didn't rustle and sweep like the frills and furbelows of the
other girl, who came _frou-frouing_ down the room, pencil in hand,
counting the votes. She might have spared her pains; of course, every
girl in her senses voted with Pamela.
There was a dance as usual after the debate, and the unique spectacle
of fifty female couples spinning round untainted by the arm of man.
Pamela Gwatkin danced as well as she spoke, but she didn't put any
enthusiasm into it. She took it as the least troublesome way of
taking exercise, but she didn't put any spirit into it. She didn't
smile once all the evening, except in a weary, disdainful way when
her partner broke down or fell out of the ring. She never broke down
or fell out herself, and when she had tired out one girl she took up
another. Lucy remarked that she always chose small girls--the smallest
girls she could find--and that they were invariably 'gentlemen.'
Lucy was wondering how ever they could drag her round, when, to her
consternation, Pamela stopped in front of her.
She had worn out all the other small girls in the room, and she had
to fall back upon Lucy. The silly little thing stood up in quite a
flutter. If a Royal Highness had asked her to dance she could not have
been more flattered. Of course, she would take 'gentleman'! She told
the most outrageous fibs, and said she preferred being 'gentleman;' she
always chose it when she had the chance.
After she had dragged Pamela round until she was fit to faint, and
had ascertained how hard her whalebones were, and how regular her
breathing, and that her favourite perfume was heliotrope, and that
dancing with a goddess whose chin was on a level with the top of her
head was not all pure bliss, she had her reward.
Annabel Crewe, the Natural Science girl, asked her to 'cocoa' after
the dancing was over, and here she met Pamela. It was Lucy's first
experience of a Newnham 'cocoa.' There was quite a spread on Annabel
Crewe's little writing-table--sweets and cakes and fruit, and cups
brimming over with the nectar of Newnham.
Pamela Gwatkin came in last; there was a crowd of girls in the room
when she came in, filling it quite up, and occupying all the chairs and
the ottoman and both sides of the bed. There was an art covering thrown
over the bed embroidered with dragons, and a cushion with an impossible
monster with a flaming tail; nobody but a Newnham girl would have
dreamed it was a bed.
Lucy was occupying a low cushiony-chair--the nicest chair in the
room--and she got up directly Pamela came in and gave it up to her. She
accepted it in her superior way, and flopped down into it as if it
were in the order of things for everyone to make place for her. Then
that wretched little sycophant, Lucy, waited upon her in her servile
way, as if she were nothing short of a Royal Princess. She brought her
her cocoa, and sweets, and cakes, and fruit. She positively snatched
them from the other girls to offer them to Pamela, and be snubbed for
her pains. She hadn't the spirit of a mouse.
Everybody was talking at once, and there was such a clatter of tongues
that Lucy couldn't have heard the goddess speak if she had deigned to
speak to her. She did deign just before the party broke up.
Lucy hadn't anywhere to sit, and she was tired out with dragging Pamela
round, and she had found an idiotic three-legged milking-stool, and she
was trying to sit upon it. It was an objectionable stool; in the first
place, it had been painted with yellow buttercups, and varnished before
the paint was dry. It was not dry yet, and it stuck to Lucy's black
gown and left a proof impression of the buttercups on the back. In
the second place, the legs hadn't been stuck in firmly, and it wobbled
under her weight and threatened to collapse every moment. Lucy sat in
fear and trembling, trying to look as if she were quite comfortable and
used to wobbling, and while she sat the goddess spoke:
'I have a brother at St. Benedict's,' she said; 'I dare say you know
him; he is in his third year.'
Lucy murmured that she hadn't that pleasure; she didn't know any
undergraduates.
'No, I suppose not,' Pamela said wearily--she generally spoke wearily,
as if commonplace subjects were beneath her. 'They are an uninteresting
class; only Eric is so quixotic; he does such absurd things that I
should not have thought he could have been anywhere long without being
known and laughed at.'
'Really!' said Lucy, in rather a shocked voice; she didn't know what
else to say.
'It was one of his absurdities to come up here as an undergraduate.
He had qualified--fully qualified--for another profession. He was a
doctor, and when he had passed all his examinations, after seven years'
work, he threw it all up. He found out that he had missed his right
vocation. He had some absurd notion that he was specially called for
the Church--that the Church couldn't do without him--and so he has come
up here.'
Pamela spoke scornfully, with her thin upper lip curling, and just a
suspicion of pink in her face--her beautiful worn, weary face.
'Perhaps he has done right,' said Lucy. 'A man ought never to go into
the Church unless he feels that he is called. Papa might have been
Senior Wrangler, but he felt his vocation was the Church. He gave up
everything for it, and----' 'And mamma' she was going to say, but she
looked at Pamela and stopped short.
'It would be all very well if the Church were going to last,' she said
wearily; 'but it isn't. Everybody knows that it isn't. Nobody but women
and children believe in it now. Its methods are all exploded; its
teaching is preposterous; it has had its day, like other beliefs, and
now a new day is dawning. Oh, it was ridiculous of Eric to go into the
Church just as it was falling to pieces!'
Lucy was past expressing an opinion. The milking-stool had collapsed.
The three idiotic legs had all gone different ways; it had fallen quite
to pieces, like the Church was going to, and Lucy was seated on the
floor.
CHAPTER V.
AFTER CHAPEL.
The day succeeding the debate was Sunday, and Lucy went over to St.
Benedict's to morning chapel.
She was so glad to go. It was quite a relief to get outside Newnham
and shake from her skirts the atmosphere of so much learning. It was a
distinct relief to take her place in the stalls of St. Benedict's and
look down upon the men who took life so much more easily.
She was only just in time for the college chapel. The bell was going
as she crossed the court, and the men were hurrying in in their white
surplices. They were all smiling and debonair. There wasn't a single
cloud on the brow of one of them, except the cloud of last night's
tobacco. They were lusty and strong and fresh-coloured, and some of
them had frames like giants; and they came across the court with a
swinging stride, and health and life and vigour in every movement. Men
take things so much more easily than women.
The choir and the Master came in directly after Lucy had taken her
seat. The Master looked across his wife and Mary, who sat between them,
and nodded to Lucy.
'Very glad to see you, my dear,' he said in quite an audible voice.
It was a longer service than usual at St. Benedict's on Sunday
mornings. The Master read the Litany, and he took a long time in
reading it, and Lucy had plenty of opportunity of looking among the men
for Pamela Gwatkin's brother.
He was a twin brother, she had learned from Annabel Crewe, who knew all
about Pamela, and therefore he ought to be exactly like her. Tall and
fair and thin-lipped, with clear, steady eyes--blue ought to be the
colour, or gray, she was not sure which; but she could not mistake the
profile. There could be no doubt about that clear-cut face, without an
ounce of superfluous flesh upon it.
Lucy looked at the men eagerly one after the other; she looked at
every man in the chapel. The Senior Tutor from his stall on the other
side saw her looking down at the men. She didn't look at him, and he
wondered at the change in her. Her eyes were not wont to rove over the
faces of the men sitting below in that eager way; they might have all
been sticks and stones for the notice Lucy had hitherto vouchsafed them.
Was this the outcome of a week at Newnham? Had she seen so much--so
very, very much--of women in her new developments that she was
thirsting for the sight of man?
Cousin Mary saw her looking down at the undergraduates in the seat
below, too, and sighed. She remembered the time when she used to look
across the benches. She had seen so many generations of undergraduates
come and go in fifteen years. She may have looked more than once in all
that time to see if among them there was that one face that was to be
her beacon through life; she had ceased to look for it now.
Lucy had decided before she left the chapel that the man in the third
row near the top was Pamela's brother. A tall man with a thin, fair,
fresh-coloured face and firm lips--a capable face, a face quite worthy
of the brother of Pamela Gwatkin.
Lucy watched the men file out of chapel, and the man in the last seat
of the last row naturally came out last. She refused to go into the
lodge with Mary. She let the old Master and his wife toddle off down
the cloisters together, and she stood holding Mary back and begging her
to wait 'just a minute.'
The man in the back seat came out at last and took off his cap to the
Master's nieces as he passed.
'There!' said Lucy breathlessly, 'this is the man I waited for. Is he
Eric Gwatkin?'
'Eric Gwatkin!' Mary repeated impatiently; she objected to being kept
standing in the court watching the men come out of chapel; she could
see them every day--twice a day if she liked--and she had seen them for
fifteen years. 'Eric Gwatkin?' she repeated. 'The man who has just come
out is Wyatt Edgell, the best man of the year. He will take a very high
place in the Tripos--perhaps the highest--and Eric Gwatkin is only a
Poll man. He is taking the theological Special, I believe, and I dare
say he will be plucked.'
'Oh, I am sure there is some mistake!' Lucy said hotly; 'Pamela's
brother never could be plucked. She is awfully clever, and--and he is a
twin.'
Cousin Mary didn't take the least interest in Pamela's brother; even
the fact of his being a twin didn't move her. She went into the lodge
and looked after the table that was spread for lunch. She altered the
arrangement of the flowers, and put some finishing touches to it, and
Lucy stood beside the window that overlooked the court watching her.
She couldn't help pitying Mary for being interested in such small
things, for being taken up with such petty cares. She had lived in the
midst of culture for fifteen years, and yet she could potter about that
dinner-table and be absorbed in the arrangement of the flowers.
'I am very glad to see you, my dear,' the old Master said to Lucy when
she had dutifully kissed him and whispered to her aunt how well he was
looking--the sure key to that dear, kind, simple heart was to tell
her how well the Master was looking. It would be a sad day when those
welcome words could no longer be said.
'And how is the Greek getting on, my dear? Who would have thought of my
brother Dick's daughter learning Greek? She didn't get the taste for it
from her father, for he was no scholar. He was good only for his own
work, none better. There was not a man in the parish who could drive
a straighter furrow than my brother Dick, and his wife was famous for
her poultry. I remember her carrying her butter and eggs to market. She
had the corner stall in the old butter market, my dear. I mind the
very spot.'
'It was my grandmother, or great-grandmother, rather,' said Lucy,
feebly trying to set him right. 'Mamma never kept a stall in the butter
market.'
'Never mind which it was,' said the Senior Tutor, who had just come in,
and was shaking hands with Lucy; 'a generation or two doesn't matter.'
It didn't matter to him, who knew all the homely details of the
Master's humble history; but suppose he were to go maundering about
that stall in the butter market to Pamela Gwatkin, it would be all over
Newnham that it was Lucy's mother, and that Lucy herself used to milk
the cows. With such a pedigree there was no excuse for her tumbling off
a milking-stool.
If Lucy hadn't been so full of her own concerns that she had no eyes
for others, she would have seen the reason for Cousin Mary's anxiety
about the dinner-table. The Senior Tutor was coming to dinner.
The lunch, or rather the dinner--for it was a real dinner; except on
state occasions, the old Master dined in the middle of the day--was
spread in the dining-room of the lodge--an old, old room panelled up
to the ceiling with dark oak, with a delightful carved frieze running
round the top, and a big oriel window with diamond panes and stained
glass coats-of-arms of the old Masters who had occupied the lodge since
it was first built, centuries ago.
There were portraits of some of them in their scarlet gowns on the
walls, looking down upon them as they sat at meat. It was a ghostly
company, so many old Masters, and soon there would be another to hang
among them. He was painted already, and hanging in the gallery outside;
he would come in here soon, and take his place, not at the table, but
on the walls with the rest.
Perhaps the Senior Tutor was thinking of that not far-off time as he
lay back in his chair glancing up at the dingy old walls that wanted
beeswaxing dreadfully. There would be plenty for him to do when his
time came. There had been nothing done here for years. He would have to
go right through the house; he hardly knew where he should begin.
And then Lucy broke in upon his pleasant reverie, and asked him about
Eric Gwatkin.
'Gwatkin?' said the Tutor absently. He was just considering whether he
should have the oak varnished or beeswaxed. 'Ye--e--s; he's going in
for his Special, but I don't think he'll get through.'
'Only his Special!' Lucy hadn't got through her Little-go yet, but she
regarded the Special from the Newnham standpoint. No woman has ever
yet descended so low as a Special. 'His sister is one of the cleverest
girls at Newnham. She has already taken a first in one Tripos, and now
she is working for another. She is sure to take a double-first. He is
her twin brother, and I'm sure she expects great things of him.'
'Then I'm very sorry for Miss Gwatkin,' the Tutor said with a laugh.
'If he gets through it's as much as he will do.'
He declined to have anything more to say about Pamela's unpromising
brother; and he talked to Lucy until the ladies left the table about
her life at Newnham, and the progress she was making with her work.
The old Master did not sit long over his wine; it had come to one glass
now after dinner--one glass of that old, old wine that had already lain
a dozen years in the darkness of the college cellar when he had come
up a raw scholar to St. Benedict's. It did him quite as much good as a
dozen glasses of a less generous vintage. It brought a warm flush into
his wrinkled cheeks, and a light into his dim eyes, and stirred the
slow blood circling round his heart, and it sent him to sleep to dream
again of the old time, and to win afresh the laurels of his youth.
While the Master sat nodding in his big chair on one side of the wide
fireplace, where a fire was still burning, and his faithful partner sat
nodding on the other side, Lucy slipped out of the room.
She was only going to the old study to find some books, but she had to
pass through the picture-gallery to reach it. The gallery of the lodge
of St. Benedict's was very much like the galleries of most college
lodges, only it was narrower--a long, low, narrow old room extending
the length of one side of the cloistered court. It had been built
when the cloisters beneath had been built, and it had suffered few
changes since. The walls were panelled to the ceiling with oak, and
it was lighted with deep, old-fashioned bay-windows; not particularly
well lighted, as the diamond panes were darkened with painted arms of
founders and benefactors, and old, dead and forgotten Fellows. The
walls of the long gallery were hung with portraits from end to end.
They began in the right-hand corner by the door in the fourteenth
century--flat, angular, awful presentments of men and women whose
names are household words in Cambridge, and they went on and on until
it seemed that they would never cease. The walls were so full that it
would be difficult to find room for another Fellow.
Lucy paused on her way to the study, and looked round with quite a new
feeling on these old painted faces. They represented something to her
to-day that they had not represented before.
She began dimly to understand what had made Cambridge the power it
is in the land. It was these still faces looking down from the walls
who had built up this great Cambridge. It was the men, after all, the
patient men of old, whose toil had accomplished so much; and now the
women were entering into their labours.
There were not many portraits at Newnham; it was only in its infancy.
There would be plenty by-and-by. Lucy ran over in her mind the women
whose portraits would hang upon those white walls between the windows.
She could not in that brief retrospect think of any who were doing such
great work that they would earn that distinction, only Pamela Gwatkin.
She was sure Pamela would one day hang on the walls. She would be an
old woman then, most likely, a lean, wrinkled, hard-visaged old woman,
with gray hair and spectacles, and she would have a big book beside
her--a book she had written or explained--and she would wear--what
would she wear?
She would have gone quite bald by that time, like the old Fellows
on the walls; her head would be bald and shining. She would wear it
covered, of course, with--with a scholar's cap, with a long tassel
depending over her nose, or a velvet Doctor's cap, which would be more
becoming, and she would wear a scarlet Doctor's gown and hood. The
picture would look lovely on the white walls of Newnham.
Lucy had just settled to her satisfaction how Pamela Gwatkin was to be
handed down by a future Herkomer to another generation, when the Senior
Tutor entered the gallery.
He, too, had been thinking. He hadn't been paying any attention to what
Mary Rae had been talking about while the Master took his after-dinner
nap; his thoughts were with Lucy in the gallery. He had watched her
narrowly at dinner, and he had detected a change in her. He was used
to watching men, and now he had begun to watch women. He remarked
that her eyes were no longer soft; they were hard and eager, and had a
hunted look in them. He knew the look; he had seen it in boys come up
fresh from school--not brilliant boys from the sixth form of big public
schools, but frank, fresh-faced fellows who had come up from country
parsonages. He had seen the look on their faces when the work was new
to them and the strain had begun to tell upon them. They lost it after
a term or two when they bossed their lectures, and drifted away with
the stream, or broke down, and went back to the country parsonages, and
never came up again.
He had seen this hunted look on boys' faces, but he had never seen it
on a girl's face before. He wasn't sure if it wouldn't be well to take
Lucy away before she broke down. She would never want the mathematics
she was getting up with such labour for the Little-go; she would be
able to add up the butcher's book quite as well without. As the future
mistress of the lodge--it had really come to that; he had ceased to
think about Mary, and he had almost unconsciously put Lucy in her
place--he would have liked her to have the prestige of Newnham, and,
considering her humble antecedents, it was quite as well that she
should win her spurs. She had pluck enough, if her strength would only
hold out. She was a brave little thing; he had never seen a girl so
brave. The Little-go examinations would soon be over, and then, if the
result was satisfactory, he would speak. She would have quite culture
enough after the Little-go--quite enough to condone even the stall in
the butter market.
'I think you had better let me coach you for the exam.,' he said, as
they talked about her mathematics; 'for the Additionals, at any rate,
you'll find the dynamics and the statics rather stiff.'
'Ye--es,' Lucy said with a sigh; 'they are dreadfully stiff.'
'When will you come to me? Will you come here, or shall I come up to
Newnham?'
'Oh no, no! It would never do to come to Newnham!'
Lucy turned quite pale at the suggestion.
'You have male lecturers,' said the college Don with a laugh. 'The
difference would be that I should only be lecturing one girl instead of
six.'
'I'm sure it wouldn't do; I'm sure Miss Wrayburne would object. I would
rather, if you don't mind, come to you,' Lucy said meekly.
'Come, by all means. You had better come to my rooms; there will be
less interruption than at the lodge. I can give you four hours a week,
but it must be in the afternoon. When will you begin?'
Lucy was quite ready to begin at once. She settled to go to the Tutor's
rooms the very next day. She didn't even think of consulting Cousin
Mary about the arrangement, or the Master, or the Master's wife. She
had already made a distinct advance; she had decided for herself; she
had engaged a University coach, and arranged to spend four hours a week
alone with him in his college rooms. The woman of the future could not
do more.
CHAPTER VI.
BEHIND THE SCREEN.
Lucy went to her coach the next day. She ought to have known her
way about a college staircase by this time, but she had never yet
penetrated beyond the outer courts. She had never ventured up those
mysterious stairways sacred to gyps, bed-makers and gownsmen.
A great many gownsmen must have climbed the stairs that led to Mr.
Colville's rooms before her; they had left their marks here, if they
had left them nowhere else in the annals of the University. Mr.
Colville's rooms were in the oldest part of the college, and his
staircase was as narrow and steep and dark as any lover of mediæval
architecture could desire.
It was so dark that when Lucy reached the first landing she didn't see
where to go; there was a passage in front of her and doors on either
side. Instead of looking at the names painted over the doors, she went
down the passage and knocked at the door at the end.
There are several ways of knocking at a door, but there is only one way
of knocking at a college door if one expects to be heard. A timid rap
with the knuckles is wasted effort; the knob of an umbrella, or the
handle of a walking-stick, or any other form of bludgeon one happens
to have at hand, is more effective; or a succession of well-delivered
blows with a fist, or the body falling heavily against the door, have
been known to attract the attention of persons within the room; but
Lucy had recourse to none of these devices. She knocked feebly with
her gloved hand on the door and waited. She was sure it was the right
landing. She had read the directions painted on the door-post at the
foot of the staircase:
FIRST FLOOR--MR. COLVILLE.
She knocked again presently; and then, as nobody answered, she went
in. The Senior Tutor was expecting her; it was surely right to go in.
She thought she heard voices as she opened the door--at least a voice,
a voice that had a familiar ring in it; she heard it clearer when she
opened the first door; there was an outer oak, as usual to a college
room. Lucy opened both doors and went in. She went quite into the room,
and closed the door--there was a screen before the door--before she saw
the occupants of the room.
What she saw didn't exactly make her hair stand on end, but she gave
a little cry. She couldn't help crying out. On the couch behind the
screen a man was lying, with the blood flowing from a wound in his
throat, and on his knees beside him was a man praying.
The man who was praying stopped and looked up at the sound of that
startled cry, and saw Lucy standing in the middle of the floor. He got
up from his knees, and with a gesture of silence went behind the screen
and fastened the two doors.
'I am glad you are come,' he said, going back to Lucy. 'I did not know
the doors were open. You must be sure to keep them fastened. We don't
want the authorities to know of this, and the Senior Tutor has the next
rooms. You must be sure not to let him suspect anything. If you can do
what is necessary for Edgell by day, I will sit up with him at night.
It is not a bad wound; I don't think it is at all serious.'
Lucy stood frightened and speechless. What did the man mean? Did he
take her for a nurse?
'I am afraid there is some mistake,' she said in a low voice; she
couldn't keep from shaking. 'I--I thought this was Mr. Colville's room.'
Then a light seemed to break in upon the man, and he looked at Lucy
with a quick, startled glance.
'Oh!' he said, 'I thought you were the nurse. I beg your pardon.
There--there has been an accident here; our friend has not been quite
himself--he has been over-working--and--and this has happened. Thank
God it is no worse! It might have been fatal; a mere hair's breadth
and it would have been fatal. We are anxious to keep it from the
authorities. It would be very serious for him if it were known. It
would ruin him for life. May we ask you to keep the chance knowledge of
this most deplorable occurrence secret?'
What could Lucy say? Clearly it was her duty as the Master's niece to
go straight to the lodge and acquaint him with the state of affairs. It
was her duty to summon Mr. Colville without a moment's loss of time; he
was only separated from the scene of this tragedy by a narrow passage.
Of course, the man lying bleeding there ought to have a doctor and a
nurse, and his friends should be telegraphed for, and the whole college
ought to be thrown into a commotion. Suppose the man were to die, what
would her feelings be if she were _particeps criminis_ in this dreadful
secret?
All these things flashed through Lucy's mind as she stood there looking
at the man on the couch. She knew him now; it was the man who had taken
his hat off to her as he came out of chapel.
It was the man that Cousin Mary said was going to take a very high
place in the Tripos, perhaps the highest. It was Wyatt Edgell.
She made up her mind in a moment.
'Yes,' she said, 'I will keep your secret. But I cannot go away from
here and leave you like this. There is something I can do. I am used to
nursing and sickness; tell me what I can do.'
She had torn off her gloves and thrown down her books, and was kneeling
beside the couch where the man lay, wiping away the blood that was
trickling beneath the bandage, and dropping down over his chest.
There was so much she could do that a woman could best do, and the man
with his hand on the wrist of the patient stood by and watched her
while she did it.
'You know something about medicine?' she said.
'I have been a doctor. I have spent seven years in acquiring a
knowledge of surgery--seven years out of my life--but it has not been
wasted if I have been the means of saving him;' and he nodded towards
the bed.
'And you think you have saved him?'
Where had she heard this man's voice before, and where had she seen his
eyes? She was asking herself this question as she was speaking to him.
'Yes, I think he is saved. He will do very well with careful nursing.
One of the men has a sister at Addenbroke's, and he has gone to fetch
her. I thought she had come when I saw you standing there. She will
certainly be here presently. I don't think we need detain you.'
'I shall not go till she comes,' Lucy said with such decision that she
quite frightened herself. 'I shall certainly stay here as long as I can
be of any use.'
She had been of a good deal of use already. She had removed all traces
of the dreadful deed; she had washed up every stain that could be
washed away, and she had covered up the rest. She had fetched a pillow
and some coverings from the adjoining room, and straightened the
couch, and anyone coming into the room and seeing the man lying there
with a white handkerchief over his throat, and the quilt drawn up over
his chest, would not have dreamed of the ghastly sight beneath.
He looked as he lay there as if he had broken down in the middle of
his work, and had thrown himself down there in a sudden attack of
faintness. His face was dreadfully white, as white as the coverlet, and
he was breathing hard, and there was a strange faint odour Lucy noticed
as she bent over him. He was not sensible, but once he opened his eyes
and looked at her with a strange, far-away look in them that haunted
her for days.
They were beautiful eyes, tender and dreamy as a woman's, with a depth
in them Lucy had never seen in any eyes before. But then she had not
been accustomed to look into young men's eyes. She could not remember
bending over a man before and seeing herself reflected in his eyes.
Perhaps it was the novelty of the situation that moved her. Having done
all, everything she could do, she settled herself down in a chair by
the head of the bed and began to weep.
The man was nothing to her, she had never heard his name till
yesterday, and here she was sitting by his side weeping for him as if
she had known him all her life.
The man who stood by let her tears fall unchecked.
'I don't think you will disturb him,' he said with a smile; 'I have
given him an anodyne. Nobody could tell what he would do if he were
left to himself, so I have made things sure by quieting him for a time.
Pray have your cry out if it does you any good.'
He evidently knew something of girls. There is nothing like a little
weep for soothing the nerves.
While Lucy was availing herself of her woman's privilege, he turned
down the coverlet and examined the bandages; the blood was trickling
down beneath them, thick and black where it had congealed, and a paler
streak behind.
'It's broken out again,' he said quietly. 'I think there must be a
stitch. Can you help me?'
If Lucy had been told an hour ago that she could have stood by and
assisted as the man sewed up that gaping wound, and never by word or
look betrayed faintness or alarm, she would not have believed it.
It was the little weep that did it.
'I think it will do now,' said the man, drawing up the coverlet over
his work. 'There is only one thing we can do more for the poor fellow,
and that is commit him to God. Will you kneel down beside him while we
ask His blessing on the means that we have used? Remember, when two or
three are gathered together--we are two, and--and I am sure his mother
is here with us.'
Lucy knelt down beside the couch while the man prayed aloud.
He talked to God as he knelt there as one who knew Him as a Friend of
old. He made no preamble in entering this solemn Presence Chamber, but
went straight up to the throne with his petition, and laid the poor,
blind, suffering soul at the foot of the Cross.
Lucy had been brought up in the bosom of the Church; she had heard
prayers read every morning and evening of her life, and she had never
missed being in her place on Sundays. She had heard her father read the
prayers hundreds of times, and she had heard, oh, so many sermons, but
she had never heard a man pray like this.
It was heart speaking to heart; it was the spirit of man speaking to
the Spirit of God.
While he was still speaking the door, or doors, rather, opened, and
someone came in. He did not stop or get up from his knees, but went on
wrestling for the blessing that he sought.
Lucy felt dreadfully guilty kneeling there. She heard the door
open, and people--distinctly people--come in; and she had an awful
overwhelming sense of guiltiness, as if she had been consenting to a
murder. She was afraid to get up; she expected to see the Senior Tutor
standing there and her cousin Mary. She didn't at all know why she
expected Mary.
She was almost afraid to look up when she rose from her knees, and she
felt herself shaking all over. But it was not Mary, and it was not the
Tutor. It was a man that Lucy had often seen in the courts below, and
he had a girl in a nurse's dress with him.
He looked over to Lucy in some alarm, and took off his cap.
'It's all right,' said the other. 'You didn't lock the door after you,
old man, when you went out, and this lady found her way in--at least,
God showed her the way in. If she hadn't come at the right moment it
would have gone hard with our friend here. I am glad you have brought
your sister. And now,' he said, turning to Lucy, 'we need not detain
you any longer. This lady will stay with us, I hope, till late; and I
shall sit up with him to-night. To-morrow, I hope, the worst will be
over.'
'I hope so,' Lucy said with a sob she couldn't choke down--she hadn't
the heart to say any more.
'I am sure you will respect our secret,' the man said, as Lucy was
drawing on her gloves.
She didn't answer him; she only looked at him, and she saw the blood
flush up under his skin. She remembered somebody else's cheeks she had
seen flush in the same way--not a man's.
'I beg your pardon,' he said humbly.
Lucy was so angry with him for doubting her that she did not see his
proffered hand; she drew her gloves on hurriedly, and picked up her
books and went out into the passage, but she beckoned the nurse to
follow her.
'I don't think the man's going to get better,' she said in a hurried
whisper. 'It's like consenting to a murder to let him lie there and
die; but _I_ am not going to tell. I think his mother ought to know. I
think someone ought to write and tell her that he is ill--dying!'
The nurse shook her head.
'It would kill her!' she said. 'She has such faith in her son--her
beautiful son! He is such a noble, splendid fellow! Oh, it is a
dreadful pity!'
'Why did he do it?'
'Why? Oh, don't you know?'
'No----'
The door of the room opened as they were speaking, and the nurse's
brother beckoned her to come in.
'Come to me to-morrow morning at Addenbroke's,' she said. 'Ask for
Nurse Brannan;' and then she went into the room and shut the door.
Lucy crept guiltily down the stairs. She quite shivered as she passed
the Tutor's door: she would not have encountered him for the world. She
didn't feel safe until she had got outside the college gate, and then
she ran all the way back to Newnham.
CHAPTER VII.
LUCY'S SECRET.
Lucy felt dreadfully guilty all through that wretched evening. If she
had assisted in a murder she couldn't have felt worse.
She had no appetite for dinner, and when she went back to her room,
what was still more unusual, she had no appetite for her work. A
Newnham girl is a gourmand where work is concerned; she may leave her
meals untasted, but that terrible craving within creates an appetite
that is akin to ravenous where work is concerned. When that craving
ceases she goes down--or breaks down.
It had ceased quite suddenly with Lucy; she hated the very thought
of work; she loathed with an unutterable loathing the sight of those
mathematical books she had brought back from St. Benedict's. She
shrank from them with a dreadful sense of faintness and sickness when
she attempted to open them. They smelt of blood, or else she fancied
they did.
The air was full of fancies. It was a stormy night, and the wind was
wailing round her corner of the building, and every now and then a
sharp blast of driving rain would strike upon her window. She heard the
rain distinctly dropping down the pane like tears, and she fancied--oh,
it was a dreadful fancy!--that it was drops of blood.
She bore it in that lonely room as long as she could, and then she got
up and went out into the passage. The lights were out, and the place
was quite still; everybody had gone to bed. Dark and deserted as the
corridor was, it was not so lonely as her own room. There were girls
sleeping behind every one of those closed doors. She heard them--for
the ventilators of most were open--breathing audibly, and some were
moaning in their sleep.
Lucy walked up and down the long corridor; her feet were bare, and she
had thrown nothing over her shoulders. Cousin Mary would have scolded
her dreadfully if she had seen her, with her white garments trailing on
the stone floor.
She never thought of the draughts or the cold stones; she only thought
of getting away from that everlasting drip, drip of the window-pane,
that brought the scene of the afternoon so vividly before her. She was
nervous and overwrought, and she was burdened with a secret she ought
never to have bound herself to keep.
Wild horses shouldn't tear it from her, she told herself, as she paced
up and down that draughty passage. Whatever happened, she would be
true to her word. It would be hard if a girl couldn't be trusted as
well as a man. What was the use of coming to Newnham if gossip and
emptiness--the habits of the slave--still had dominion over her?
It was all very fine and high-sounding; but she would have given the
world to have told somebody, to have eased her overburdened mind and
poured out the dreadful story on some soft feminine, sympathetic bosom.
And then, while she was telling herself all these fine things, and
repeating Lord Tennyson's nice verses about that open fountain that was
to wash away all those silly human things and make woman perfect--quite
perfect--a strange thing happened.
She heard the voice of the man praying. He was praying now; she heard
him quite distinctly, but she could not catch the words. She was quite
sure it was the voice; it had sunk down so deep into her ears that she
could never forget it. Lucy paused in the darkness and listened. The
voice came from a room at the door of which she was standing. She had
no idea, in the darkness, whose room it was; she was only sure--quite
sure--of the voice.
An overpowering desire to see the speaker--perhaps to get her
release--seized her, and she opened the door of the room.
There was no man there praying; there was only a girl sitting reading
by the light of a shaded lamp, and she was reading aloud. It was
Pamela Gwatkin, and she was reading a Greek play.
Lucy went a few paces into the room and stood there as if spellbound,
listening to the girlish voice, in low solemn accents, mouthing the
rhythmic Greek. She didn't read it as if it were Wordsworth, or Cowper,
or Keats, or even Tennyson; she mouthed it; and the noble words,
falling in noble cadence, brought back the voice of the man wrestling
with God for his friend.
Pamela heard the door open, and she looked up. She didn't divide the
shuddering night with a shrill-edged shriek, and bring all Newnham
about her, as she might have done at the sight of the white-robed
figure standing in the doorway. She thought it was a girl walking in
her sleep, and she got up softly and went towards her.
For a moment, as she came forward, she saw the figure swaying in
the doorway, and as she came nearer Lucy tottered forward with her
arms out-stretched like one walking in a dream, and fell upon her
bosom--literally fell, with her clinging arms around her, and her head
pillowed on Pamela's bosom.
'Oh, it is Eric Gwatkin!' she sobbed, 'it is Eric Gwatkin!'
Pamela got her over to the couch--it was a bed now, not a couch; the
serge rug had been removed, and a snowy coverlet was in its place,
and a real pillow, not a sham roundabout bolster covered with an
embroidered dragon.
Pamela Gwatkin laid the girl down on her own bed and covered her up.
She was shaking dreadfully, and her hands and feet were like ice, and
she was sobbing hysterically.
When Pamela had covered her up, she shut the door of the room; it
was no good making a scene and arousing everybody, because a girl--a
little weak-minded fresher--had broken down under the strain and got
hysterical. All girls get hysterical at times, only the stronger ones
lock the door and wrestle with the enemy in secret.
'Oh, Eric Gwatkin!' moaned the girl on the bed. 'I can't keep it any
longer; I must tell!'
'What have you got to do with Eric Gwatkin?' Pamela asked severely.
'I am sure he is nothing to you; he is never likely to be anything to
anybody.'
'Oh yes, he is! He is everything to--to Wyatt Edgell. He has saved his
life. Oh, you don't know what he is to him!'
'Saved his life? What are you talking about? What has Wyatt Edgell got
to do with you, and with Eric?'
'_He sewed it up_--the wound--the dreadful gaping wound!'
Lucy covered her eyes with her hands to shut out the dreadful sight,
and she was trembling so dreadfully that the bed shook with her.
Clearly the girl was in a fever, and her mind was wandering. The name
of Wyatt Edgell was familiar to Pamela; it was familiar to everybody in
Cambridge. He was the coming Senior Wrangler. What could Eric have to
do with him--poor Eric, who was grinding for his 'Special'?
'What wound?' said Pamela impatiently; 'and who sewed it up?'
'Eric sewed it up, and I helped him. I drew the edges together, while
he put the needle in the quivering flesh. Oh, it was horrible!'
Lucy sank back on the couch, and her lips grew pale, and her cheeks
gray, and Pamela thought she was going to faint. She hadn't got
anything but eau-de-Cologne to give her--not a nip of brandy for the
world; not even a pocket flask is allowed at Newnham. She went to the
water-jug and poured out some water in a basin, and dabbed it over the
girl's face and hands, and made her own bed streaming. Perhaps there
was something in the girl's story, after all! She couldn't have dreamed
these hideous details.
'Where was the wound? how had he hurt himself?' she asked presently.
'He had cut his throat.'
Pamela let the basin of water she was holding fall on the floor. She
didn't scream as any less well-regulated mind would have done, but she
let the basin slip out of her hands, and the water made a dreadful mess
on the floor.
'Cut his throat?' she repeated faintly--she was nearly as white as
Lucy--'and Eric----'
'Eric sewed it up.'
'Is--is he dead?'
She asked the question hoarsely, in a voice Lucy couldn't have
recognised for Pamela's, but she was past noticing voices.
'No--o; Eric has asked God to give him back his life, that he may begin
it afresh.'
'What use is that?' said Pamela bitterly.
'I am sure God heard him--we were praying for him when the nurse came
in. He was asking that the nurse might be sent quickly, and she came
while the words were on his lips.'
'Of course the nurse would be sent; you can get a nurse at any moment
from Addenbroke's without praying for one.'
'Oh, you don't understand!' Lucy moaned; 'you don't know the worst. It
had to be done secretly: no one must know. It would ruin him for life
if it were known.'
'You don't mean that they haven't told anyone? that they are trying to
hush it up, and not let the tutors know?'
Lucy moaned.
'Oh, what folly is this! I am sure Eric is at the bottom of it.'
'Yes; it was Eric made me promise I wouldn't tell, and I have told
you,' Lucy murmured helplessly.
'Of course you have told me. Having told me so much, you must tell me
all--you must keep nothing back.'
And so Lucy sat up in the bed with her arms round Pamela--she couldn't
have told her without having something to cling to--and told her her
wretched little story, and how she had pledged herself to keep this
young man's secret.
'What do you think I ought to do?' she asked weakly, when the recital
was finished.
'Do?' said Pamela, but she didn't answer the girl's question. She
disengaged herself from her clinging arms, and she paced up and down
the room, her feet dabbling in the water on the floor. She stopped
presently in her walk, her chin up, and her face set with the light of
a high resolve upon it towards the light that was breaking in at the
east window; she might have been reciting that Greek play. 'Do?' she
repeated, and her face was hard and cold and tired. The old weary look
had come back to it--no wonder; it was three o'clock in the morning.
'Do? Why, go to bed, of course!'
She refused to say another word about Lucy's secret. She helped her
back to her room, and put her to bed, and tucked her in, and drew back
the curtains, that the light of the new day might drive away the ghosts
of the night.
Pamela did all this without speaking a word; but when she got to the
door of Lucy's room she stopped and looked back. She could see from the
tremulous motion of the clothes that the girl was weeping, and she went
over to the bed and put her cool lips to Lucy's forehead.
'Good-night, dear!' she said softly. 'I think you have behaved
beautifully!'
CHAPTER VIII.
WATTLES.
As soon as she could get away from Newnham the next morning, Lucy went
to Addenbroke's to see Nurse Brannan. She couldn't get away very early;
there was a mathematical lecture at nine o'clock that wasn't over till
eleven, and she had to plod, plod through those weary diagrams while
her mind was far away. Oh, how she hated those problems and riders,
and all the dreary, dreary round! She made one or two futile little
diagrams on her paper, and then she rubbed them out again, and sat
staring at the blackboard, and watching the perplexing white lines come
and go while her mind was far away. She was calculating what would
happen if the man had died in the night.
'What would they do with the body? Would Eric Gwatkin expect her to
keep the secret, and assist, perhaps, at some mysterious obsequies?' It
was with a distinct feeling of relief she saw the duster sweep over the
blackboard and wipe all those cabalistic characters away. It was like
wiping out the record of her guilt.
Lucy shook off the dust and gloom of the lecture-room and ran off to
Addenbroke's. She really could run a good part of the way. She went
across the Fens, as less frequented, and giving her space to breathe
and think. It was such a blue day, and the fresh green of the year was
over the low-lying fields, and the chestnut-tree by the bridge was
budding, and the pollard willows that marked the winding course of the
river were sallow-gray in the sunshine, and the daisies were in bloom.
Lucy walked over quite a carpet of flowers; she crushed the little
tender pink buds remorselessly under her feet in her hurry to get to
Addenbroke's.
She had never been to the hospital before, and she was rather afraid
to go in when she got there. There were a lot of people coming out with
newly-bandaged limbs and white faces, and some children were carried
in in their mothers' arms. There were people of all ages, men and
women, and little children all with that sad patience on their faces
which is born of suffering. Lucy was so sorry for the people. She had
no idea her heart was still tender; she had rather prided herself on
its growing cold and hard like Maria Stubbs and the rest of the Stoics
of Newnham. There was a tired-looking woman coming up the path with a
puny little creature in her arms, with, oh! such a white, white face.
Its eyes were open, and it was smiling a wan little smile up into the
mother's face, and she was crooning over it; she was a poor, weakly
thing, and she carried it as if even its light weight were too much for
her. Lucy turned to look after the sickly mother and the sickly child,
and she noticed the child's arm--a lean, puny little arm--had escaped
from the shawl in which it was wrapped, and was feebly embracing the
mother's waist.
The sight of that small clinging hand brought a rush of tears to her
eyes. There was compensation even here; there was something here
between that sickly mother and child--there wasn't much to show for
it, only a crooning voice and a wan smile and a little wasted clinging
hand--that would last longer than the Stoics, that would last 'to and
through the Doomsday fire.'
Strangely softened by this every-day sight, Lucy crept up the wide
stone staircase to find Nurse Brannan. She looked so lost that a man
going up, a medical student, asked her where she was going, and took
her to the ward where Miss Brannan was nurse.
'I am afraid the doctors are going their rounds,' he said, as he looked
in at the door, 'but I will take you into Miss Brannan's room, and you
can wait there.'
He led Lucy through the ward--a large, delightful chamber, well lighted
and cheerful, and with quite a bank of tall palms and ferns on a table
near the door, an oasis of verdure for tired eyes to feast upon.
Lucy saw all this at a glance, and she saw also a group of men round
a bed, and the nurses standing near, and she crept softly into Nurse
Brannan's room.
She had time before the nurse came to her to see what a nurse's room
was like. It was a tiny bit of a room partitioned off the ward, and it
seemed all walls and ceiling. There was a little floor room, however,
and a big window that went nearly up to the ceiling.
It was not unlike a room in a woman's college, only that there were
texts on the walls, and there are no texts on the walls of the Stoics.
The occupant of the room must have understood Latin and Greek, for
there were texts in both these languages. There was one text only in
our common tongue, and that was over the mantelpiece. It was not an
illuminated text, and it had no lovely floral border. It was written in
plain, bold characters in black and white: 'Inasmuch as ye do it unto
the least of these My brethren, ye do it unto Me.'
Lucy couldn't keep her eyes off those familiar words which she read now
in a new light. There wasn't much else in the room to look at. There
was a bed that was a couch by day; it was a bed still, though it was
past eleven o'clock; Nurse Brannan had evidently not long risen from
it. The room was in the disorder of the early morning, and the day
arrangements did not yet prevail. It was as untidy as a nurse's room
well could be: the breakfast things were still on the table, and the
demure little bonnet and cloak looked as if they had hastily been taken
off and thrown on the bed, and a pair of outdoor shoes were lying in
the middle of the floor.
While Lucy was still noticing these details Nurse Brannan came in.
She was a little bit of a nurse, with pink cheeks and steady blue eyes
and fluffy hair. She was not at all a formidable person.
Lucy ran up to her when she came in, and took both her hands. She
couldn't ask the question that was on her lips, she was moved out of
all sense and reason. The anxieties of the night and the mathematics
of the morning, and the lean little encircling arm had moved her
strangely, and now she was hardly master of herself.
Nurse Brannan shook her head.
'He is no better,' she said.
She didn't say it at all sadly. She was so used to such things--to
sickness and suffering and death--it didn't move her in the least.
'I have just come back from St. Benedict's, and there is no
improvement. He has had a dreadful night. They thought at one time of
calling up the Tutor.'
'And they have not told him yet?' Lucy asked, pale to the lips. 'Are
they going to let him die?'
'They have not told him; they have not told anyone in the college; but
I don't know about letting him die.'
'You think he'll get over it? Oh, do you really think it possible with
that--that dreadful wound he can get better?'
Only talking about the wound made Lucy sick and faint. She was made of
very poor stuff. She would have been no good at Addenbroke's.
Nurse Brannan smiled.
'The wound is nothing,' she said: 'it is not at all serious. He will
get better if he is well watched, and they protect him from himself.
When the attack passes off he will not be much the worse--only it may
occur again at any time.'
'The attack?' Lucy said feebly; she was quite at sea as to Nurse
Brannan's meaning.
'Oh, you didn't know he did it in a fit of delirium tremens. This is
the second time he has had an attack, and he has attempted his life
both times. His friends ought to take him away and put him under
restraint.'
Lucy didn't know what delirium tremens meant; happily she had been
spared all her life from such miserable knowledge. She vaguely knew it
was a 'possession' of some kind, an awful 'possession' like that which
used to seize the men of old.
'You think the fit will pass?' she said.
'Oh yes; there is no reason why it shouldn't pass, and then the less
they say to him about it the better. It would be well if he never knew;
but the scar will remain, they cannot cover up that. There is no reason
why he shouldn't be well enough to take his Tripos and go "down." The
best thing that can happen to him will be to "go down."'
'Go down'--he looked very much more like going 'up,' Lucy thought,
as she recalled the white face on the pillow; but she was immensely
relieved by the nurse's assurance.
'And you have seen him this morning?' she said.
'Yes; I ran over for a minute directly I got up. I was not up till
late. A woman was dying in the ward, and I stayed with her till she
died. She did not die till daylight, and then I lay down for a few
hours; and I had just time to snatch some breakfast and run over to St.
Benedict's before the doctors came their rounds. I was only just back
in time. I had to throw my things down and put on my slippers--I hadn't
even time to put my cap straight. They were waiting for me in the ward
when I came back. Oh dear! what a mess I left my room in!'
Her pretty plaited nurse's cap, that ought to be worn in the most
demure fashion, that ought to be as straight as those lines of that
detestable blackboard, was all awry, was positively jaunty, and her
fluffy hair was quite outrageous. She didn't look the least like a
real, staid nurse who is called upon to face death at any moment, and
is always doing dreadful disagreeable things. She might have been
playing at nursing, only her eyes were steady, and her lips had a great
calm about them; they didn't quiver, and tremble, and curl, and ripple
with laughter, like other girls.
Lucy was almost angry with her for the cool, not to say unfeeling, way
in which she spoke of these dread realities--death and suffering. 'She
has no heart!' she said to herself as she went back over the Fens to
Newnham. 'Nurses are so used to pain that they have no sympathy. I
wouldn't be a nurse for the world!' Then she remembered the words over
the mantelpiece: 'Inasmuch----.' Was this the secret of that little
fluffy, girlish nurse's hardness and endurance?
They don't do very much for other people at Newnham; and they do
nothing for each other. They positively ignore each other. Perhaps
this is owing to culture--the higher culture--and it hadn't reached
Addenbroke's yet.
Lucy had written to the Tutor of St. Benedict's when she got back the
previous day, excusing herself, in an incoherent fashion, for not
keeping her appointment, and promising to come to his rooms at the same
hour the next day.
She knew her way quite well this time, and she was five minutes before
the hour she had appointed. The Senior Tutor's door was closed, and the
way was quite clear. There was not a soul on the staircase; there was
not a soul in the passage. Lucy could not resist the desire to knock at
that closed door at the end of the passage, and find out for herself
how the man was. She hadn't much faith in that thick-skinned little
nurse; she would see for herself.
She knocked at the door at the end of the passage in her futile way,
but of course nobody answered. If she had wasted all her strength
upon it, it would have been the same thing, as the inmates of that
mysterious room only gave admittance to privileged individuals upon
preconcerted signals.
Lucy hadn't got the secret of that 'Open sesame,' and she was turning
away. She hadn't got to the end of the passage, when the door really
did open and someone came out. It was the bed-maker with a tray.
Somebody had been having a meal, and she was carrying the débris away.
Lucy stopped her at the end of the passage, and the two women stood
looking at each other--the bed-maker suspiciously, and Lucy eagerly.
There was no mistaking the anxious eagerness in Lucy's eyes.
'How is he?' she asked, more with her eyes than her lips, and she
laid her detaining hand on the woman's arm. There must have been some
Freemasonry in the touch, for the bed-maker softened, and the look of
suspicion gave place to one of pity.
'He's quieter,' she said in a whisper, drawing Lucy back into the
passage, out of sight of the Tutor's door; 'but he's been orful bad all
the morning. As much as two of 'em could do to keep him in bed. It's a
sad pity, miss, and such a nice gentleman--there isn't his fellow in
the college!'
The bed-maker sniffed; she would have wept, no doubt, but she held a
tray, and it would have been inconvenient, so she sniffed instead, and
regarded Lucy with a watery eye. She evidently thought Lucy was his
sweetheart.
Lucy took a coin from her slender purse and laid it on the tray. She
didn't give it to anybody in particular, she only laid it on the tray,
and the bed-maker curtsied.
'Will you ask Mr. Gwatkin if I may come in?' she said--'the lady who
was with him yesterday.'
She didn't give her name, but the woman knew her quite well--every
bed-maker in St. Benedict's knew her. She wasn't the least surprised
at the Master's niece taking an interest in one of her gentlemen--the
nicest gentleman in the college. She had a tender spot in her withered
bosom, under that rusty old shawl, and she was quite flustered at an
_affaire de coeur_ on her staircase.
She toddled back, tray and all, and by a preconcerted signal the door
was opened, and she said a few words to someone inside, and then Eric
Gwatkin came out into the passage and led Lucy in and closed the doors
behind her.
He was looking dreadfully tired, she thought, and there were quite deep
lines on his face; he seemed to have aged since yesterday. Perhaps it
was with want of sleep, but Lucy put it down at once to his guilty
conscience. She was feeling old herself, years older than yesterday.
'He has had a very bad night,' Eric Gwatkin said, speaking in a low
voice and with his lips twitching, 'such a night as I pray God I may
never witness again. You were not praying for us last night. You did
not pray for him--for me--when you went away.'
Lucy bowed her head; she remembered she had not prayed for these men.
What were they to her that she should pray for them?
She had been walking about the passages and frightening Pamela out of
her wits instead, when she ought to have been on her knees.
The screen had been moved since yesterday; it had been drawn nearer the
bed, so that the middle of the room where they were standing was left
clear.
'He does not like to see anyone whispering,' Eric explained; 'he is
very suspicious, and the least thing excites him.'
'You were alone with him all night?' Lucy asked, with a perceptible
quiver in her voice; 'you have been up two nights.'
'That doesn't matter,' he said, 'I shall have all the strength I need;
but last night he was very violent, and--and I thought I should have to
call Mr. Colville. It was a great temptation--I could hardly resist
it.'
'Oh, why didn't you?' said Lucy. 'Why do you take all this
responsibility upon yourself?'
Eric Gwatkin smiled. His smile was not the least like Pamela's. Lucy
couldn't help thinking, as she stood there, how it would change
Pamela's face and take the weariness out of it if she had that smile.
'I don't mind the responsibility,' he said, 'or the anxiety, if I can
save him. It would be worse than death to him to have it known. Oh, I
think you must go home and pray that he may be brought through this,
and may be kept for the future. He will need all our prayers.'
'What on earth are you whispering about, Wattles? I wish you would
speak so that a fellow can hear what you are saying.'
The voice came from behind the screen--an impatient voice, not weak by
any means.
'All right, old man; Miss Rae has come to ask how you are. He saw you
yesterday,' he said, turning to Lucy and speaking in a lower voice;
'he remembered you quite well.'
'It's awfully good of you,' Wyatt Edgell said as Lucy came from behind
the screen; 'I'm afraid we don't look like receiving visitors. Old
Wattles here insists upon making a mess.'
He was lying back on the pillow with a wet bandage round his head, and
a basin of lotion and some rags on a chair beside the bed. His shirt
was torn open as if in a struggle, and his chest was bare. There was
a scarf round his throat, a large silk scarf striped with the colours
of his college that concealed whatever was beneath. Lying there with
his head thrown back and those wet bandages, and his chest open--his
splendid manly chest with all the muscles exposed--he looked like a
man stricken down with fever, or some head trouble; no one would have
guessed what the scarf thrown so loosely around his neck concealed.
'I am so glad you are better,' said Lucy softly, coming over to the bed
and bending over him; 'you ought to get well soon, you have got such a
good nurse.'
'Old Wattles, yes; he's very well, only he persists in keeping me in
such a mess.'
He took the bandages off his head as he spoke, and rolled them up into
a ball, and flung them to the other end of the room, where they rolled
under a heavy piece of furniture, and Wattles, or Gwatkin rather, had
to go on his knees and fish them out.
'There!' he said, 'that will give Wattles an excuse for going on his
knees. He has been going on his knees all night. He would be a good
fellow if he weren't always preaching and praying.'
He rolled his head impatiently on one side, and flung the pillow after
the bandages, and Lucy, looking down upon him, saw a dark light in his
eyes she had never seen in any eyes before. It wasn't exactly terror,
but it was disgust and loathing and impatience.
'I beg your pardon,' he said, 'but there was a creature on that--a
toad. I hate toads!' He shuddered as he spoke, and his eyes followed
the direction of the pillow. 'It's there now! I wish Wattles would put
it outside. It's been here all night.'
Gwatkin took up the pillow and shook it, and appeared to take something
off it, and opened the window and made a gesture as if he had thrown
the thing into the court below.
'There, old man,' he said reassuringly, 'it's gone now. It can't
trouble you any more.'
And then he brought back the pillow, and Lucy put it under the poor
fellow's head while he supported it, and she arranged it and smoothed
it as only a woman's hand can arrange a pillow.
When she had done this, she put on the wet bandages afresh and bathed
his head, and as she bathed it the dark light seemed to fade out of his
eyes.
'You are very good,' he said with a sigh; 'you have exorcised that
hideous little beast. It is gone now'--and he looked round the room
fearfully--'quite gone.'
'Thank God!' said Gwatkin. 'Your visit has done some good, Miss Rae, if
it has dispelled that hideous nightmare that has been pursuing him all
night. I think he will sleep now.'
'I'm sure you ought to sleep yourself,' Lucy said, as she suddenly
remembered the time and began dragging on her gloves. 'It is quite
gone,' she said to Edgell, bending down over the bed; 'I am going to
pick it up as I go out and carry it away.'
Having told this little fib, she went out, and Gwatkin closed the two
doors after her.
She had to tell another fib or two when she went into the Tutor's room.
He had been waiting for her exactly fifteen minutes, and he had waited
an hour the day before.
She was absent and distrait all through the lesson; she was thinking
about the man in the next room, and the creature she had promised to
pick up in the court.
The Senior Tutor had never coached such an unpromising pupil. She would
never get through her Little-go, he told himself--never, never. She
would get plucked to a certainty.
Oh, it would never do for the future Mistress of St. Benedict's to be
plucked!
He debated with himself while he was bending over her, and remarking
what a dainty little profile it was, and how the little rings of
chestnut hair clustered on her forehead, and how clear, how deliciously
transparent, was the carnation tint of her cheek, and the shapely curve
of her throat--such a little throat he could clasp it with his hand--he
debated with himself, as he remarked these quite every-day things that
no man in his senses except an old bachelor Fellow of a college would
have noticed, whether it would not be better to settle the thing at
once, and stop all this unprofitable work.
If Lucy knew what was before her, she would have other opportunities of
fitting herself for her high position besides poring over mathematics,
for which she clearly had no vocation.
'I'm afraid you find the work rather hard,' he said with a preliminary
'H'm' and 'Ah' to clear his throat. He didn't know exactly how to
begin. What comes by nature at thirty is uncommonly hard at sixty. It
is like going in again for a hurdle-race, or taking the high jump. He
could have done it easily years ago, but he couldn't do it now. He
stopped with that preliminary 'Ah.'
'Yes,' said Lucy, 'it is not very easy, but I am going to work eight
hours a day. It is more than a month to the exam.; if I work very hard
eight hours every day, I think I may manage it.'
Eight hours a day for a whole month! She was so much in earnest; and
when she lifted her little pale drooping face to his, with just a
suspicion of a tear on her eyelashes, he was really sorry for her. He
was very near taking her in his arms and kissing away that fugitive
tear and settling the matter--he was never nearer in his life.
Perhaps it was the best thing he could have done, but he missed the
chance, and Lucy picked up her books and began to talk about the work
she was to prepare for the next lesson.
'I wouldn't work eight hours a day,' he said; 'you will get through
easier than that. I would give an extra two hours to tennis.'
He had never given a man this advice--perhaps it was not needed. He
watched her, out of his window, cross the court. She did not happen to
pick up the thing by the way as she had promised. Her step was less
elastic, he noticed, than it used to be, and her face was paler--paler
and thinner. She would never, never be young again, and life would
never open afresh. There is only one young life, one time of roses, one
sweet blossoming time, and it was just a question in the Tutor's mind,
as he watched Lucy cross the court, whether the loss of this were worth
all the mathematics in the world.
CHAPTER IX.
A WOMAN'S PARLIAMENT.
Lucy saw Pamela Gwatkin once only during the day, and that was at
dinner. She only caught a far-off glimpse of her at the High table.
Pamela very often sat at the 'High' among the Dons. The younger Dons
were very fond of her: her opinions kept pace with theirs--they were
very advanced opinions--and sometimes they outran them. She would be a
Don herself some day, and she would be a pioneer in quite a new school
of thought.
Lucy watched her with a feeling of awe as she sat among those great
minds eating gooseberry pie--Lucy wouldn't have sat there for the
world. The presence of so much learning would have taken away
her appetite. The presence of the Master of St. Benedict's at the
dinner-table never took away her appetite, but the dear old thing
never talked above her head. He was very fond of recalling those
old days, as he sat at meat, when Dick--not Lucy's father, but her
great-grandfather--used to drive a team afield, and his good wife kept
the stall in the butter market.
But the President and the Dons of 'Newe' never discussed such
commonplace topics. They talked of literature, philosophy, science,
with a fine breadth of handling which is peculiar to a woman's college.
Pamela Gwatkin was in her right place among them.
There was the weekly political meeting held after Hall--a little
miniature House of Commons--where the affairs of the nation were
discussed, a foretaste of what will be by-and-by, when things are
rearranged.
When the House took its seat at nine o'clock, Lucy found herself in
the Opposition, and a long way off from the benches occupied by the
Government of the country.
Lucy only represented an insignificant little borough that nobody else
would stoop to represent. She had a little freehold in it--her only
freehold--six feet of earth beneath the east window of her father's
church at Thorpe Regis. Most people have a freehold of this sort, but
it does not always give them a voice in the affairs of the nation. Lucy
was returned unopposed on the strength of her little freehold, and as
her views, if she had any, were not at all advanced, she found herself
in the minority.
Pamela Gwatkin, or, as the girls called her, Newnham Assurance, was
the Leader of the House, and Annabel Crewe Secretary for the Colonies,
and Capability Stubbs had been unanimously elected Chancellor of the
Exchequer; every girl that was worth anything had a place in the
Cabinet.
Lucy hadn't much interest in the business that was going on, and she
took out her knitting and turned the heel of a sock while the great
affairs of the State were being discussed.
It was quite clear from what she did gather from the speeches on the
Ministerial side that the country had been misgoverned long enough by
the feeble race of men. It was quite time there was a change. A great
deal of time had been lost; ages had been lost in the history of the
world. Men had been first in the field; women took a longer time to
ripen. They had ripened now; they were quite, quite ripe; they were
ready for the change.
Oh, it was beautiful to hear the girls speak! There is an idea among
narrow-minded people that debating societies encourage volubility of
speech. Perhaps they do among men, and the practice of public speaking
is apt to make them too loquacious, too apt to air their elementary
knowledge and crude information in senseless verbiage. But garrulity is
not the sin of the students of colleges for women. They not only know
a great deal more than men know, but they have the delightful gift of
ready and accurate language. They do not haggle and hesitate, and 'H'm'
and 'Ah,' and have that dreadful difficulty in finding words that even
prevails in a real House of Commons.
It was remarkable to see with what ease the Newnham girls handled
those topics which old-fashioned legislators have been puzzling over
Session after Session. There was a certain fine breadth in their way of
handling them that would have taken a Conservative Leader's (the Leader
of a real House of Commons) breath away.
It didn't take anybody's breath away in the Ladies' Parliament.
Everybody knitted and listened unmoved, and when eleven o'clock came
two very important Bills that had been brought forward from last
Session were advanced a stage.
There was an exciting division before the House separated, that
resulted in an overwhelming majority for the motion, 'That the Legal
Profession and the Church be thrown open to women.'
That foolish little Lucy voted in the minority; there were not a dozen
girls in Newnham who showed such a poor spirit, and of these five, it
was rumoured, were engaged to curates.
The girls ran off to their rooms when the sitting of the House was
ended in the highest possible spirits. Some of them sang snatches of
songs, and some caught each other round the waist and waltzed madly
down corridors. The thing was practically settled. The Bar and the
Church opened vistas, immense vistas, for every sort of talent, and
especially for the kind of talent that Newnham produced.
There would have to be more colleges for women--Newnham and Girton
could not turn out nearly enough--there would have to be a great many
Newnhams. Some girls, no doubt, sat down at once and began to prepare
a sermon, and others took down Blackstone and began seriously to study
law.
Lucy went back to her room alone. The Chancellor of the Exchequer,
though she 'kept' next door, wouldn't take the slightest notice of her.
She had lighted her lamp, and was just thinking what she would give for
a cup of tea, when someone knocked at her door. It wasn't a girl with a
cup of tea, as she hoped it might be--the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
with all her fine airs, generally brought her in a cup of tea before
she went to bed, and sometimes she condescended to sit down for five
minutes and discuss the burning questions of the day. It was not the
Chancellor of the Exchequer--it was a far greater person--it was the
Leader of the House.
'Well?' she said, when she came in and had shut the door after
her--'well?'
She had come in so suddenly, and Lucy's mind was so full of the motion
of the evening--this Parliamentary business was quite a new thing to
her, and she had taken it _au serieux_--that she could not collect
herself sufficiently to think what Pamela meant. Her mind was so full
of the lady curates and the female barristers that she looked up at the
Leader of the House in bewilderment.
'Well,' said Pamela impatiently, 'how is he? I saw by your face at Hall
that he was not dead. Is he going to get well?'
Then Lucy remembered all about it.
'Oh dear!' she said, 'how could I have forgotten! Yes, he is going to
get well, I think. He will owe his life if he does to Eric. Oh, Eric
has been lovely!'
'Eric has done no more than anyone else would have done,' Pamela said
coldly; 'no more than a woman would have done if a woman had been in
his place.'
'I don't think a woman _could_ have done what Eric has done,' Lucy said.
She was thinking of those stitches he had put in, and how he had
struggled with the poor fellow all night, and how he had been watching
and praying beside him for two whole nights and days.
Nurse Brannan would have done as much as most women, but she would not
have done all this.
'Oh, you don't know what women can do!' Pamela said, with a little curl
of her lip. Her lips were so thin and so hard--such crisp lips that
they couldn't help curling. 'You are only a fresher; when you have been
here three years you will have found out what a woman can do. He would
never have cut his throat if a woman had been near him.'
'No,' said Lucy eagerly, 'I am sure he wouldn't--not if a woman he
loved had been near. Oh dear! you should have seen the wistfulness in
his poor eyes when I put the wet bandage on his head! It was enough to
melt one's heart. Eric says he will be sure to do it again--at least,
that we must never leave off praying for him. I am sure that there is
only one thing that can save him from doing it again.'
'Only one thing?' Pamela repeated, with just an inflection of scorn in
her voice. 'And what is this panacea for his wickedness and folly? What
is this fine thing that is to save him from himself?'
'Don't speak of it so lightly; it is not a little thing!'
There were tears in Lucy's voice as she spoke, and in her eyes. She
had the picture before her of the strong man, with his beautiful
bare chest, and his splendid frame, and those wistful eyes, and the
loathing and the dread with which he shrank from the creature on his
pillow. The pity of it was strong upon her, and she was deeply moved.
'A great love would save him--the love of a good woman. He would do a
great thing for a woman he loved; he would make any sacrifice. I don't
think anything else would save him.'
The Leader of the House of Commons turned from white to pink. Lucy
might have been talking about her. She wore a very pretty white gown
of some soft silky stuff, and it was folded across the bosom, and
the folds heaved up and down as Lucy spoke, as if she were breathing
heavily.
'Perhaps he has done this for a woman's sake,' she said bitterly. 'Men
are such fools! they will do anything for a woman's sake--not always a
worthy woman.'
'I am sure he has not!' said Lucy hotly. 'He has been working too
hard, and he has broken down. I heard at the lodge that he was working
ten hours a day; that he was certain to come out first. Oh, you don't
know how they are building upon him at St. Benedict's! It isn't a
woman--it's overwork.'
Pamela smiled.
'You are a capital champion, my dear, only don't suffer yourself to get
too much interested in this foolish young man; it will interfere with
your work. You must not make a mistake and let pity drift into--love.'
She made a little pause before the word, and the colour came again into
her cheeks. She looked ever so much prettier talking about pity--and
love--than she did speaking on those troublesome Bills that had already
occupied the time of two Sessions.
'Oh, he is never likely to love me!' said Lucy. 'He could only love his
equal; no one else would have any influence over him. He would only
love a queen among women.'
'Perhaps he has found his queen already. Most men have before they are
twenty-three.'
The colour went out of the girl's face, and the cold light came back
into her eyes, and her lips, that a moment before were tremulous and
tender, were hard and firm.
'I wouldn't go too often to Mr. Edgell's rooms, if I were you, dear,'
she said when she went away. 'The authorities would make a fuss if
they heard of it. We are not supposed, you know, to visit a man's room
without a chaperon. I don't think it would do to take a chaperon there.
If you have any more interest in him, I will find out for you how he is
going on from Eric.'
'Thank you,' said Lucy warmly; 'I can find out for myself. I can hear
all about the St. Benedict's men at the lodge.'
She was quite frightened at herself for speaking in that way to the
Prime Minister. She had got into the way now, since she had been at
Newnham, of taking her own part; she was beginning to have no respect
for dignities.
CHAPTER X.
'THAT CONFOUNDED CUCUMBER!'
Lucy didn't go to Wyatt Edgell's room again. She caught sight of the
friendly bed-maker once or twice on the staircase when she went to Mr.
Colville's room to be coached in mathematics, and she held a little
whispered conference with her on the stairs.
Edgell was better: he was up again and at work--working very hard, the
woman said (and bed-makers know something about work). He was 'going on
as quiet and as steady as any gentleman on the staircase.' This verdict
from such a quarter was as good as a college testimonial.
When there is a mixed University, and a lady President at the lodge,
and a female Vice-Chancellor, and the affairs of the Senate are
conducted by dowagers, bed-makers will no doubt be required to sign
college testimonials.
The first time Lucy saw Wyatt Edgell after that day when she put the
wet bandage round his head, and promised to pick up the dreadful thing
Eric had thrown out of window, and carry it away with her, was at the
college chapel.
It was a fortnight after the day when she had picked him out from
among all the men of St. Benedict's as Pamela Gwatkin's brother. He
was sitting in the same place, and he was very little changed; he was
paler, Lucy thought, and he was muffled up round the throat for that
warm May day. She couldn't help looking at him. Her eyes would wander
over to the bench where he sat, do what she would to keep them fixed in
quite an opposite direction.
The Master took such a long time over the Litany that morning. He had
read it for so many years in that college chapel, Sunday after Sunday,
but he had never read it so slowly as he was reading it to-day. The
men yawned and fidgeted as he read, and the old fellows in the stalls
opposite looked across with grave, questioning eyes--they would have to
elect another Master shortly--and the women-folk kneeling by his side
looked up anxiously; but Lucy's eyes had wandered again to the end seat
on the last bench, while her lips were murmuring:
'"That it may please Thee to raise up them that fall, and finally to
beat down Satan under our feet."'
Wyatt Edgell looked up while she was praying for him--she was
distinctly praying for him, she had prayed this very prayer for him
every night and morning since Eric had told her how he needed her
prayers--and their eyes met.
Lucy was covered with confusion. She was quite sure in that swift
momentary glance that he had read her inmost thoughts. She was ashamed
that he should know that she had been praying all this time that he
should be strengthened and comforted and helped and picked up again
when he fell, and that the enemy should be beaten down under his feet.
She never looked at that end of the chapel again all the rest of the
service.
It was over at last--the long, long Litany and the slow, faltering
prayers: the men need not have been so restless, they would not hear
them much longer. The old walls would echo another voice soon, and the
feeble lips would be repeating another Litany elsewhere.
The old college chapel was full of echoes and shadows; there would be
another shadow shortly, and the echo of a tremulous, quavering voice
would join those other ancient echoes in the roof. It was a dark,
gloomy old chapel; it had been built for hundreds of years, and it was
full of old memories. Every bench and stall and desk had a memory of
its own, stretching back, far back, into quite early ages--memories
of old Masters and Fellows and scholars and undergraduates who had
worshipped there through, oh! so many generations.
There was a musty smell of old Masters rising up from the vaults
beneath and pervading the chapel, and in the ante-chapel beyond there
were monuments on the walls, and brasses--quite lovely old brasses--on
the pavement, and great hideous tombs of long dead and gone Masters
and Fellows. It was touching to see how they were forgotten after a
generation or two; how even their very tomb-stones were hidden away in
a corner, and covered up with organ pipes. There was the marble effigy
of an old, old Master, whose learning and virtues were recited in a
long Latin epitaph on an elaborate tablet hidden away behind the organ.
Everyone had forgotten him years ago, and his old monument was in the
way, and so they had covered it up. Music is so much more delightful
than old memories. They will all be swept away soon, and a new chapel
will be built. There will be no old memories and old ghosts and old
storied windows, no decaying woodwork or musty odour of old Masters. It
will all be fresh and bright and sweet-smelling and shiny as new paint
and varnish can make it, and there will be a new organ with electric
stops. It will be dark and shadowy no longer; the old echoes and the
old ghosts will all be scared away--they will vanish quite away in the
blaze of the new electric lamps with which the chapel will be lighted.
Lucy vanished out of the college chapel almost as rapidly as the ghosts
will by-and-by. She did not linger in the cloisters to-day. She hurried
back to the lodge, and left Cousin Mary and the Master's wife to toddle
back beside the Master.
'How do you think your uncle looks to-day, my dear?' the old lady asked
Lucy when they had got him safely back to the lodge, and had put him in
his great armchair, and given him some wine.
There was a shade of anxiety in her voice as she asked the question.
Lucy hadn't seen the Master for a week, so she might have been expected
to notice any change in him.
'Oh, I think he looks lovely, aunt! He walked back from chapel quite
strong.'
Mrs. Rae shook her head; she was not quite convinced.
'There were two of us supporting him, my dear, one on either side, and
I thought he leant rather heavily.'
He had nearly crushed the poor little soul into the ground; she could
not have supported his weight a dozen steps more.
'Perhaps you are not so strong yourself to-day, auntie dear; you are
looking pale. Most likely the weakness is yours, and you are not so
well able to bear his weight. He always leans heavily; I often wonder
how you and Mary can keep him up!'
'Perhaps so, my dear. I hope it may be so!' But still the cloud on the
dear old face did not quite vanish. 'I fancied that his reading in
chapel was slower to-day than usual--that his voice was weak. Did you
notice it?'
'Oh yes; I noticed that he read lovely! I never heard him read so well
as he read to-day.'
'You really think so? I am very glad! The fault must be in me. I don't
think I am quite so strong to-day--I can't expect to be at my age; but
I am very glad there is nothing unusual the matter with the Master. You
would have been quite sure to have noticed it, my dear, if there had
been, as you haven't seen him for a week.'
She kissed that mendacious little Lucy and tottered out of the room.
She was very feeble to-day--perhaps the Master's weight had been too
much for her; but there was quite a glad smile on her patient face. She
was so happy, the brave old soul, to feel that the weakness was hers,
not his.
Wyatt Edgell went back straight from chapel to his own rooms. He met
Eric coming out of chapel, and they went back together.
'Where have I seen that girl before?' he asked Eric when they got back
to the room.
'Oh, you've often seen her in chapel. She's the Master's niece, or
grand-niece, or something of the kind,' said Eric evasively.
But the other was not so easily put off.
'I have seen her somewhere else, besides in chapel,' he said
thoughtfully. 'I've seen her in this room. I've seen her beside my bed.
Good heavens! Wattles, you didn't let that girl in--when--when----'
'When you weren't quite yourself, old man,' said Eric cheerfully,
filling up the gap. 'What on earth should the Master's niece come in
here for? Be reasonable, and don't ask such foolish things!'
'Foolish or not, I'll be hanged if I didn't see her in this room,
standing where you stand now! You may as well tell the truth, Wattles.
You may as well say you called her in and showed her the spectacle!'
He was a very determined-looking young man, and he didn't look like one
to be trifled with, as he stood with his back to the empty fireplace,
leaning against the mantelpiece, and his great hands stuck down well in
his pockets.
'Dear old man, you may take my word for it: I did not call her in; I
should as soon have thought of calling the Master in!'
'I wish to Heaven you had called the Master in--I should have known the
worst then; but for this girl to see me--in--in that state!'
He paused and groaned, and two upright lines came out on his forehead.
'You take too much for granted, old man,' said the other; but he
couldn't put any heartiness into his voice. 'Haven't I told you
that not a soul in the college but Brannan and myself came into the
room--while--while you were ill?'
'Yes,' said the other moodily--'not a soul in the college; but this
girl from Newnham came in. I'll swear it! I saw it in her eyes.'
It was no use Eric pretending. Edgell was not in a mood to be trifled
with. He was a great big, determined fellow. He could have taken Eric
up and flung him to the other end of the room with the same ease with
which he had flung the pillow.
'Go on,' he said moodily; 'go on, and tell me all about it. Tell me why
this girl came in, and the spectacle she saw. Let me know exactly the
degradation to which I have sunk!'
There was no help for it. Eric had to tell him all about Lucy's
visit--Lucy's second visit; he didn't say anything about the first. How
could he tell the poor fellow that she had come in at that dreadful
time; that it was her hands that had wiped up all the traces of
his crime; that it was she who had helped him when he had put those
stitches in that gaping wound in his throat!
Eric told him quite enough. His head had fallen forward on his breast,
and he looked a picture of despondency. A despondent giant of six
feet, with a great broad chest, and big muscular limbs, and a splendid
head splendidly set on a splendid full white throat--it was muffled up
now, but it was as white and shapely as a woman's beneath the crisp,
close-cut whisker curling down below the cheek. His chin and his great
square jaw were close-shaven, but there was a thin, slight, crisp
moustache on his upper lip, and his short hair curled crisply at the
edges. He wore it parted in the middle, not very neatly parted, and
tossed back off his forehead. Everything about him denoted strength and
courage--such a man could not be despondent long.
'Then she knows the worst,' he said--'the very worst. There is nothing
else she has got to learn about me. There is only one thing to be
done, Wattles, with a girl who knows so much about me: I must marry
her. You must introduce me again, old man, and I shall make her an
offer, and--and she will marry me.'
His gloom and depression had quite gone, and he was smiling again. He
was a delightful fellow when he smiled. Not a man in the college could
resist that delightful smile; it disarmed the wrath of all the Dons,
and it won the hearts of bed-makers.
'Marry her!' said Eric, turning quite pale. 'Dear old man, don't be
in such a hurry. Think it over. She isn't the sort of woman for you,
Edgell.'
Wyatt Edgell laughed. His laugh was a full-blown edition of his smile;
but Gwatkin looked serious.
'Perhaps you'll tell me, Wattles, what is the sort of woman for me.'
'Oh, I wouldn't pretend to say; only, old man, don't trifle with this
poor little thing. She's the sort of girl to break her heart for a man.
I wouldn't break her heart if I were you.'
'Perhaps she'll break mine,' said Edgell dryly; and then he sat down
and ate his lunch which the bed-maker had already spread out on the
table.
It was a very nice college lunch. It was not tinned beef, or brawn, or
tongue, or any questionable dainty that had been soldered up a year
or two in a metal case. It was a lovely head and shoulders of salmon,
and it had been judiciously pickled, and there was cucumber cut up
in a dish--little delicate flakes of cucumber which Edgell ate with
the healthy returning appetite of a man who had long been denied this
delicacy.
The salmon was followed by a chicken and a ham, to which he also
applied himself with the same zest. The edge was quite taken off his
appetite, when Eric pushed these things aside and set a jelly just
freshly turned out of a mould before him.
'I don't want any of that stuff,' he said, and he pushed over his glass
in the direction of the claret.
'I don't think I'd take any more, old man,' said Eric; 'you've already
had four glasses. I wouldn't have any more. Have a soda?'
'I'll be hanged if I do!' said the other doggedly, 'unless you put
some brandy in it. I must have a nip of brandy, Wattles. I'm sure that
cucumber has disagreed with me. I haven't had any cucumber for an age,
and it never did agree with me.'
Eric got up and unlocked a cupboard, and took out a liqueur-bottle more
than half full of brandy, and poured a small--a very small--quantity
into a glass, and filled it up with seltzer-water.
He had put the bottle back into the cupboard and the key into his
pocket, and was putting on his gown to go out. He always took a service
somewhere in the country, or did some open-air preaching on Sunday
afternoons, and he was in a hurry to get away.
'I wish you'd leave that key behind you, Wattles,' Edgell called out
when he got to the door. 'That confounded cucumber or the pickled
salmon has disagreed with me. I may want the key before you come back.'
Eric took the key out of his pocket reluctantly and laid it on the
mantelpiece.
'You'll be careful, old man,' he said; 'you'll be sure to be careful.
Remember----'
'Shut up!' said the other angrily. 'Do you think I'm such a fool?'
Eric went out and shut the door. When he came back two hours later the
liqueur-bottle was on the table empty, and Edgell was breathing heavily
on the floor.
It was all that confounded pickled salmon and cucumber!
CHAPTER XI.
IN THE FELLOWS' GARDEN.
That mendacious little Lucy, in spite of all her assurances to the
Master's wife, was a little anxious about the Master. He had not taken
his dinner with his usual appetite; he had scarcely eaten a morsel, and
he had not had his usual nap after.
He had left half the wine in his glass, and he had got up from the
table earlier than usual; but he had not fallen asleep in his chair
after, as was his wont. He had sat talking to Lucy all the afternoon
about the old time. His memory was wonderfully clear about the things
that had happened, oh! so long ago--more than half a century before
she was born--and he talked to her about them as if they had happened
yesterday.
He was always so glad to see Cousin Dick's little daughter; she brought
back the past to him, and seemed a link between the old far-off time
and the present. He recalled to-day his very earliest years, his first
remembrances. He recalled the time when his brother Dick carried him on
his shoulders to the fair.
'It was Midsummer Fair, my dear,' he explained, 'and your father
left off work early; he was very fond of fairs, and junketings, and
wrestling matches. He liked bull-baiting, too. I mind the bull-ring
at the end of the village on a piece of waste ground; I dare say it
is there now. I've seen many a bull baited there in my day. There was
never a fair within ten miles but your father was there in his best,
with a flower in his button-hole--he always wore a flower in the
button-hole of his plum-coloured coat. I remember that coat well; it
had gilt buttons, and he wore a waistcoat to match, with two rows of
buttons on either side--it was the fashion then, my dear. He carried
me on his shoulder all the way to the fair; it was held on the green;
there was a large green in the middle of the village in those days, but
it is built over now; things have altered since then.'
The old Master shook his head and sighed. He hated changes of any
kind; he would have liked the world to go on in the same old grooves
for ever. He was silent for some time, and his watchful women-folk
thought he was going to sleep--that he would have his after-dinner nap,
after all; but he was only thinking. Those old chambers of memory were
unlocked, and the old faces of his youth were crowding around him.
'Yes,' he said presently, brightening up, 'your mother was there, too,
my dear. Dick met her in a dancing-booth. She wouldn't look at Dick at
first, she had so many sweethearts. She was a proud little thing, with
a spirit of her own; she nearly broke Dick's heart before he married
her, but she made him a good wife--a good wife and a good mother, and
always in her place in church, and bringing her children up to work and
to fear God. I don't know that women do more in these days when they
learn so many things.'
Lucy couldn't help thinking of that motion in the House of Commons,
which was carried with such an overwhelming majority, that was to admit
women to practise at the Bar and in the Church, to say nothing of those
other learned professions that were already practically open.
The old Master's views were very, very old-fashioned; the world had
made rapid strides while he had been sitting in his armchair and
reading his Sunday Litanies in that musty old college chapel.
'Your father had a spirit of his own, too, my dear,' the old man
babbled on with quite surprising vigour--these old memories made him
quite young again; 'he wouldn't stay there to be slighted, with all the
neighbours looking on. He left your mother going round with a young
spark who had come down from London, and with me on his shoulder he
went through the fair. I mind the booths quite well, with the gilt
gingerbread, and the toys, and the trumpets, and the drums, and the
merry-go-rounds. There was a show with a fat woman--I have never
forgotten that fat woman. I have never seen anything like her since.
There was a dwarf there, too--the smallest dwarf that was ever seen. I
remember him strutting about the stage with his little sword; he wore
a sword, and a gold-laced coat, and a cocked hat. The fat lady took
his arm when the performance was over--she had to stoop down to do it,
and he had to stretch up. I shall never forget seeing them go off the
stage, arm-in-arm--the funniest sight I have ever seen--or how the
people in the show laughed and clapped their hands when the showman
made a ridiculous speech as they went out. "That's the way they go to
church every Sunday of their lives!" he said, pointing after them. I
believed him, if the crowd didn't, and for years after I used to watch
the church door to see them coming in; but I have never seen them
since.'
Lucy was so anxious about the old Master that when she went for her
lesson to the Tutor's rooms the next day she could do nothing but talk
about him.
The Tutor was anxious too, perhaps, in another way. He had noticed a
change in the Master, and he went over to the lodge with her as soon as
the lesson was over.
The Master was very feeble to-day, but he was up, and downstairs, and
he was talking about going out into the garden. He was very fond of
the old Fellows' Garden, and the seat beneath the walnut-tree--a sunny
seat in the winter, a shady seat in the summer. It was shady now, but
the garden was full of sunshine; the lilacs were in bloom, and the
laburnums were a blaze of gold, and the thorn-tree was white with may.
It was the blossoming time of the year, and everything was at its prime.
The Tutor took him out on his arm and sat him down on his old seat. He
noticed how heavily he leant upon him as he tottered feebly across the
grass. He would have crushed a woman with his weight. The Master's
wife came out too, and sat by his side, with his hand in hers, and
Lucy walked with the Tutor in the shady, winding paths beneath the
trees. The trees were all old and gnarled, and some had broken down
with age, and were propped up. The borders were full of old-fashioned
flowers--perennials that went down into the earth every winter, and
came up again every spring. There was nothing new here.
The Senior Tutor, as he walked by Lucy's side, was thinking how he
should change all this by-and-by. He would cut down those useless old
trees, and he would have the turf rolled and laid out for tennis.
Nothing could be better for Lucy than tennis, and she could invite her
Newnham friends. Those old flower borders should be all dug up, and
some standard rose-trees planted. He would have nothing but first-rate
sorts, the very latest. He would do away with that vulgar cabbage
rose in the corner, and that poor, shabby little pale blush that hung
in clusters on the wall. It had hung there for so many years; it was
quite time it should be cleared away. It seemed a pity to lose time.
There were so many improvements to be made; it seemed a pity not to
begin now.
Looking across the grass and the sunshine at the old stooping figure
under the walnut-tree--it was bent more than usual to-day--he could
not but feel that the time was not far off when it would be there no
longer. There was nothing pathetic in the sight to him. He had waited
for the place--the Master's place--so long. If he waited much longer he
would be feeble and old and white-haired, too.
There is little pathos in the young. The sad realities of life touch
only those who know something about them. One must have suffered one's
self to have any sympathy with suffering.
Lucy, looking across the sunshine, was touched, in spite of herself, at
the group under the walnut-tree. It didn't affect her as it affected
the Tutor. It would be no gain to her if the old Master were to die; it
would mean loss and change and being driven out again homeless into the
wide world.
But it was not this consideration that moved her. She was touched
by the tender picture of the two brave, patient old souls sitting
hand-in-hand in that calm closing evening of their life.
Here was a love that Lucy knew nothing about--a love that had weathered
all the storms of life, and was burning brightly at its close. Riches
and honour and learning were nothing to it. They were the Master's
still, but they were nothing beside love. He would leave these behind
him, but love would cling to him out of time. He wouldn't shake that
off when he shook off everything else.
Lucy didn't put the idea into words, but it touched her; and then,
strangely enough, rose up before her the face of the man who had sat on
the last seat in the chapel and had caught her looking at him. It was
quite ridiculous to think of Wyatt Edgell at such a moment; there was
nothing here to remind her of him.
There was an old disused greenhouse at the end of the Fellows' garden.
Nothing had grown in it for years. A neglected vine was dropping down
from the roof in one corner, and a great deal of the glass was broken,
and the woodwork was decayed and rotting. The Tutor shook the door as
he passed, and it opened, and he paused and looked in.
'I think we must have this place rebuilt,' he said, thinking aloud.
'You would like a greenhouse. We must get some ferns and palms and
foliage plants. Do you like foliage plants?'
'Not much,' Lucy said. She could not think what he meant by appealing
to her. 'I like flowers best. I don't care for leaves. I'm afraid my
taste is very vulgar. I like geraniums, and mignonette, and camellias;
I am very fond of camellias. We used to have some in our greenhouse at
home.'
'You can keep as many as you like here,' he said. 'We will get all the
varieties there are, and you can have geraniums in flower all the year
round.'
He shut the door, and they walked down the path together, while Lucy
wondered what he could mean. It would be scarcely worth while to do up
the old greenhouse and fill it with flowers when it was not likely she
would be there another spring to see it.
In the long path they met Cousin Mary coming towards them. She looked
rather pale and worn in the sunshine, and she had on a most unbecoming
garden-hat. It had been hanging up in the hall all the winter; it might
have been hanging there for years, and it was battered out of all
shape. There was not a bed-maker in the college that would have worn it.
The Tutor had never noticed before how gray her hair had grown, and
that there were crow's-feet round her eyes, and that her cheeks were
faded. She had not changed lately. She had looked like this for years,
getting a little grayer every year, and adding a line or two beneath
her eyes, but he had never noticed it before. He was very fond of her
still; he had the highest opinion of Mary Rae, but he was very glad
that Lucy had come in time--just in time--to save him from throwing
himself away.
'Mr. Colville is going to have the old greenhouse done up, Mary,' Lucy
shouted to her when she was quite a dozen paces away. 'He's going to
have camellias and geraniums all the year round; but perhaps you don't
like camellias.'
The Senior Tutor for once in his life blushed. It was not for Mary he
was going to have those geraniums in perennial bloom.
'I don't think it's worth it,' said Mary bluntly--'at least, not for
us. We shall soon be going away.' And she looked in the direction of
the walnut-tree beneath which the old Master and his wife were still
sitting.
'That should make no change,' the Tutor said awkwardly; 'the lodge
would be still your home.'
He grew ridiculously red, and he did not dare to look Mary in the face.
'We need not talk about that yet,' she said with a smile; 'the dear
Master is still with us. I came to ask you to help him in; he has sat
there long enough. He is not so strong to-day; I can't manage him
alone.'
'I should think not!' said the Tutor, and he hurried off across the
grass and took the old Master back to the lodge.
Lucy did not go in; she slipped through the garden-door into the court,
and hurried back to Newnham. She had promised to drink tea in a girl's
room, and she was already half an hour late.
She went back by way of the Fens, and when she was near the bridge she
saw some figures she thought she knew crossing it, and they stopped
while she came up, and looked down into the water.
It was Pamela Gwatkin and her brother, and there was another man with
him. She had never seen Pamela with her brother before, and she was
struck as she came up to them with the points of difference between
them.
Being twins, they ought to have been exactly alike. Eric was short, and
Pamela was tall--tall and graceful and slender, as a girl ought to be,
with a proud, self-reliant bearing that is peculiar to the students
of a college for women. Eric was not only short, but he was stout,
and not at all graceful, and he had no bearing to speak of. He was an
awkward, well-meaning, commonplace fellow. There was nothing remarkable
about him whatever, except that he was Pamela's twin brother. This
in his case was a decided disadvantage--the ingredients hadn't been
properly mixed. All the masculine characteristics had gone to Pamela,
and the tender, endearing qualities to her brother. He saw Lucy come
tearing along across the Fen, and he took off his hat as she came up to
him.
'You have met Eric before,' said Pamela, by way of introduction.
She was looking very pink and white and cool as she stood there on the
bridge looking down into the dark shady water, and Lucy had run herself
into a fever, and was hot and flushed, and looking 'hideous,' as she
told herself.
'Oh yes,' she panted--she was quite out of breath with running in the
hot sun--'I have met Mr. Gwatkin before.'
She didn't see, until Pamela's brother introduced her, that the other
man leaning over the bridge was Wyatt Edgell. She was so flustered with
running, and so taken by surprise, that she blushed like a peony.
She felt she was blushing furiously, and that Pamela, cool and critical
and self-possessed, was watching her. Oh, how she hated herself for not
being cool and dignified and self-possessed like other people!
They walked back over the Fen and through the lane to Newnham in
couples, Lucy and Wyatt Edgell in front, Pamela and her brother behind.
Lucy would have given the world to have reversed the order, but the man
took his place by her side, and he wouldn't go away until he left her
at the gate of Newnham.
'You have met me before, Miss Rae, as well as Gwatkin,' he said, as
he walked by Lucy's side. 'I believe he invited you in to see the
spectacle.'
'He didn't invite me in at all,' Lucy said hotly; 'I came in. You were
very ill when I saw you; I did not expect you would get well so soon.'
'No?' he said indifferently, 'I suppose not. It did not much matter
either way.'
'It mattered a great deal!' she said sharply. She was very angry with
him for speaking in that absurd way--absurd and ungrateful--considering
what a trouble he had been to his friends. 'It mattered a great deal to
Mr. Gwatkin. Oh, you don't know how anxious he was about you! He saved
your life.'
'Yes,' he said in his slow, indifferent way, flicking with his cane at
the nettles in the hedge; 'I believe he did. It was rather a pity he
should have taken so much trouble, but I suppose he liked it. I believe
he didn't get off his knees all one night. He's always glad of an
excuse for getting on his knees.'
And then he laughed. It was such a delightful laugh that it ought to
have been infectious, but Lucy looked grave.
'I suppose he was on his knees when you came in?' he said.
'Yes,' said Lucy shortly, but she didn't tell him that she had knelt
down beside Eric and prayed that the life he valued so little might be
spared. She was very angry with him; she could only trust herself to
say 'Yes.'
'Oh, he is a good fellow is Wattles, but he has his little crazes.'
'He is a splendid fellow!' said Lucy warmly.
She was ashamed of her warmth the moment after she had said it, but
they had reached the gate of Newnham by this time, and she was glad to
say 'Good-bye' and run away. She left him standing at the gate waiting
for the others to come up, while quite a dozen girls on the lawn were
looking at him and admiring him, and making up all sorts of fine
stories in their heads about him.
If they had only known what Lucy knew about him they would have made up
a great deal more.
CHAPTER XII.
AN UGLY FALL.
There was a row royal when Pamela got back to Newnham. She told Lucy
that her conduct was disgraceful, and that if it came to the ears of
the Dons she would be 'hauled.'
There had been several girls 'hauled' lately for the same
offence--walking with an undergraduate to the very gate of the college.
Lucy mildly suggested that she was not exactly alone, that Pamela and
her brother were with her, and that she herself, when she came up to
her on the bridge, was walking in the young man's society.
'You forget that Eric was with me,' Pamela replied sharply. 'It makes
all the difference if you have a brother, or any male relative, with
you; but to be walking alone, tearing along at the rate you were,
and talking confidentially--anyone could see that you were talking
confidentially--dozens of girls have been sent down for less than that!'
Lucy wasn't 'hauled,' and she wasn't 'sent down'; but Pamela behaved
like a bear to her for the remainder of the term.
Lucy was so anxious about the Master that she went over to the lodge
the next day directly after lunch. Cousin Mary was out; she had left
him sitting in his chair taking his after-dinner nap as usual, and
she had gone out. He woke up directly Lucy came in, and began to
talk to her about her father and the old time. She was very glad
that she had not brought Pamela in with her, or any of the Newnham
girls, as she sometimes did. He would have told them that ridiculous
story that was running in his mind, how his brother Dick had met her
mother at a dancing-booth at the fair. He would have dwelt on all the
homely details of their humble history. It would have been all over
Newnham the next day that her father was a ploughman, and her mother
kept a stall in the butter-market. Annabel Crewe, who had a fine
taste for caricature, would have drawn delightful pictures of Lucy's
progenitors--a lovely old man in a smock-frock with straw round his
legs, and a milkmaid with her pail!
She couldn't divert the Master's attention from this ridiculous topic.
He had forgotten all about the things that had happened in later years,
and had gone back in memory to the old familiar scenes and faces of his
youth. His eyes were brighter to-day, and he was more restless than
usual; he wanted to go out into the garden and sit in his accustomed
seat on the lawn. It was such a perfect May day that no wonder he
wanted to get out of that dark, gloomy old room, with the stuffy moreen
curtains over the windows, and the faded carpets, and the worm-eaten,
old-fashioned furniture, and the musty old books, into the sweet summer
sunshine, where everything was fresh and new.
There was nothing dark and gloomy and oppressive out there in that
sweet leafy Fellows' garden. The lilacs were in their prime, pale
puce and white and purple, every delightful indescribable hue, and
the laburnum was dropping gold upon the grass. There was a cuckoo
somewhere, calling, and the thrushes were singing, and the blackbird's
note was still shrill and clear. It would soon be hoarse as a raven's,
and the thrush would be silent, and the cuckoo would have altered his
tune, and the lilac would have faded, and the gold of the gleaming,
down-dropping laburnums would have turned to gray--and--and he might
not be here to see it. If he wanted to enjoy the fleeting sunshine and
the flying blossoms of the year, there was no time like the present.
The Master didn't exactly put it in this way, but he was impatient to
be out in the garden, in his old seat, and he wouldn't wait a minute
longer for anybody.
If Mary wasn't there he would go without her.
There are none so impatient as the old. The young have plenty of
time to spare--they have their life before them; but the old have not
a minute to lose. The Master went out as usual, leaning on the arm
that had supported him so many years, that had never failed him yet.
Mrs. Rae and Lucy took him out between them. He walked in his slow
accustomed way, leaning rather heavily on these two frail props until
he reached his seat beneath the walnut-tree, and here he ought to have
sat down.
But he didn't sit down. He insisted on going farther; he insisted on
going down the path to the greenhouse. Mary had been saying something
about it, repeating what the Tutor had said yesterday about having
it done up and turned to some account, and the Master would not be
satisfied until he had seen it. He must be consulted about it; nothing
should be done in the gardens without his consent. He had been worrying
about it all night.
He had got half-way down the path, when Lucy fancied he was beginning
to lean heavily, more heavily than she could bear, though she put out
all her strength. There was not a seat near, but she stopped and begged
the Master to rest awhile. He was so anxious to see the greenhouse
that he would not listen to her. He never thought of the women who
were being weighed down with his great weight. He was as eager and
determined as a child.
'I am sure, aunt, you are not strong enough to keep him up,' Lucy said
in despair; she was getting really frightened. 'We must get someone to
help him back. Oh, if someone would only come in!'
There was not a gardener in sight, and it was not likely that anyone
would come in. Nobody but the Fellows ever walked in that garden.
The Master tottered on, feebler at every step; but he would not be kept
back, and the two frightened women held him up as well as they could.
He seemed to want more support every step he took; he was as feeble
and helpless as a child, but still he pressed on. Lucy was sure she
couldn't bear the strain a minute longer, and the dear old mistress was
straining with all her might to keep up with him. She was putting out
all her strength. It wasn't much to put out at the best, but she didn't
keep back a feather weight. Oh, if someone would only come!
They came in sight of that wretched greenhouse at last, and here the
Master stopped. He didn't exactly stop, but he tottered forward, and
Lucy with a supreme effort kept him up, and with all his weight upon
her he swayed to and fro, and before she knew what was happening he had
slipped through her arms to the ground. He lay on the path, as he fell,
all of a heap. He had no power to help himself, and he lay panting and
breathing heavily as he had fallen, and the women stood beside him
wringing their hands.
Lucy didn't stand beside him long. There was a door in the wall beside
the greenhouse that led out into one of the courts, and she flew over
to it. Fortunately the door was unlocked. Lucy looked eagerly round
the deserted court and raised her feeble cry for help. It was such a
feeble, piteous cry; it was like a wail. A man sitting reading at an
open window looked out at that strange sound, and Lucy called to him:
'Oh, come, come, do come!'
The man didn't stay to ask what had happened; he was at Lucy's side
in another moment, and she took him in through the open door to where
the Master lay. It was Wyatt Edgell. A gyp coming across the court had
heard the cry for help, and between them they bore the Master back to
the lodge.
When Mary Rae came in she found a little anxious group gathered round
him, and Wyatt Edgell was trying to reassure the frightened women.
Nothing very serious had happened. No bones were broken, but the Master
was very much shaken, and he was not quite himself. Wyatt Edgell stayed
with him until the doctor had come, and had ascertained that things
were not very bad--not so bad as they might have been--and had calmed
the fears of the women; and then Lucy was so shaken that he walked
back with her to Newnham.
Lucy certainly would have been 'hauled' if the Dons had seen her
walking back leaning heavily on an undergraduate's arm. She would have
been invited to an interview with the authorities in the Principal's
room, and she would have received a caution, perhaps a reprimand, and
she would have been very lucky if nothing worse had happened. Lucy
forgot all about the Dons and Pamela's warning. She only thought about
that poor old man at the lodge.
'I don't think he will ever get over this,' she said, or rather sobbed.
She was not herself at all. She was such a tearful, frightened little
Lucy. She was not in the least like a Stoic.
'I am afraid not,' said Edgell. 'The Master has been failing for some
time. The men all remarked that he would never read the Litany again in
chapel.'
'You think he is so bad as that?' Lucy said tearfully.
'Yes, quite. Think of his age. His time must come some day, and he has
lived longer than most men. You could not expect him, in any case, to
live for many months longer.'
'No,' said Lucy sadly; and then he saw the tears dropping down her pale
face. He could not believe she was weeping for that old, old man whose
time had come, and who was a stranger to her till yesterday.
'What will you do when he is gone?' he asked abruptly.
'Do? I don't know--I have not thought. I shall stay at Newnham, I
suppose, two years; I shall not be able to afford three; and then--and
then I shall go out as a governess.'
'You shall never go out as a governess!' said Edgell with an oath.
Lucy looked at him, frightened and bewildered; she couldn't think what
he meant, and then she broke down and began to cry.
'Dear Miss Rae--Lucy!' he said, and then he stopped and looked at
the girl. He would have liked to take her in his arms, but there were
several Newnham girls all hurrying down the road, and they looked at
him, and they looked at Lucy. Some of them blushed, and some turned
pale, and all were shocked. It was a dreadful precedent.
The atmosphere of Newnham revived Lucy, and she paused at the gate and
looked up into his face with a little white smile.
'I am very stupid,' she said, 'but the Master frightened me so much,
and I am not quite myself.'
He held her hand longer than he need have done, and he looked down into
the small white face with a smile of ownership and protection that was
quite new to Lucy. Nobody had ever looked in her eyes like that before,
and, instead of drawing her hand away, Lucy hung her head and blushed
like a poppy.
'Shall I bring you word how the Master is the first thing in the
morning?' he said, still holding her hand; 'how early will you be out
in the lane if I come?'
'Oh, as early as you like; seven o'clock!'
And so Lucy made her first appointment to meet Wyatt Edgell.
CHAPTER XIII.
SLIPPING AWAY.
When Lucy went out into the road outside the gates of the college,
before seven o'clock the next morning, Wyatt Edgell was already there
waiting for her. It is a short, narrow road, or lane, and it leads to
nowhere, unless Selwyn College be considered anywhere. It has been the
privilege of the students of Selwyn to use this road as a shortcut to
their college, but it will not be their privilege much longer.
The road is now the private property of the authorities of Newnham,
and a new wing connecting the old and the new halls will be built
across the road, and the jealous walls that shut out the grounds from
masculine eyes will be thrown down, and the old dusty lane will be
covered with smooth, green turf, and it will be a thoroughfare no
longer for the foot of man to pass over.
Perhaps they will restore again the old fortifications. There was
a Roman camp here once, and a battle ditch running all the way to
Grantchester. Every inch of ground here is classic, and strewn with
remains of those old Romans who brought us all the gentler arts.
Perhaps they brought the Muses with them and planted them at Newnham?
There was an old Roman dug up the other day, four feet beneath the
surface, a noble skeleton, six feet six in length. The whole earth
teems with ancient coins and pottery and Roman relics. They will have
to build a museum in the new wing to preserve the 'finds' that are
unearthed in digging its foundations.
Lucy was quite indifferent to the Romans. She would rather, if she had
had the choice, have met one of their old ghosts in the lane than one
of the Dons of Newnham taking her morning walk. She looked fearfully up
and down the road when she got outside the gate, but there were only
some Selwyn men going down to the bathing sheds; there was not a girl
in sight.
Wyatt Edgell was walking up and down the path flicking at the
sweetbriar hedge as he passed, and his eyes were looking down on the
ground. He was so lost in thought that he did not see Lucy till he
heard her little cry, and she ran to meet him.
'Oh!' she cried, a little pale and breathless, 'how is the Master? Is
he worse this morning?'
She augured badly from Edgell's downcast look.
'Not worse,' he said; 'at least, I hope not worse, but I fear not
better. When I inquired at the lodge when the gates were opened at six
o'clock, they told me the Master had had a very disturbed night, that
he had not slept at all, but that he did not appear to be in any pain.
Your cousin has been up with him all night, and Mrs. Rae.'
'I was sure she would not leave him,' said the girl, the tears filling
her eyes. She was thinking of the anguish in that kind old face when
the Master slipped through her feeble arms. 'I think I ought to go
over at once and relieve her; she must be worn out.'
Lucy didn't stay to think. She walked back to St. Benedict's with the
undergraduate who had brought her the news; she didn't even stay to
fetch her gloves. She walked down by his side in the morning sunshine,
just as she had hurried out of her room, with a ridiculous little
tennis-cap on her head and her ungloved hands. Two Newnham girls who
were returning from an early--a very early--walk looked shocked, as
well they might be, and some rude Selwyn men whistled as they passed.
They were only jealous that she was not taking a morning walk with them.
Lucy found the watchers still up when they reached the lodge. Mrs. Rae
would not be persuaded to lie down, and she was looking dreadfully
tired and worn out. She looked ten years older, Lucy thought, this
morning, and her poor face was as white as her hair. Mary looked pale,
too. Perhaps it was the air of that close room that was still darkened;
and there was a shade of anxiety under her eyes, but she would not own
to being tired. She could stay up a week, if necessary.
The Master had fallen into a doze; but Lucy's light footstep or the
whisper of their voices reached him, and he woke up when she came in.
Lucy went over to him and laid her warm, moist hand on his, and the
touch seemed to revive him.
'Is the milking over?' he asked, turning upon her his pale-blue eyes
with that strange brightness in them that is peculiar to the very old.
'I have heard the cows lowing all night for the calves. You have taken
the calves away?'
'It is Lucy, uncle,' she said, stroking his hand softly--'little Lucy,
not Lucy's mother----' She was going to say 'grandmother,' but she
thought 'mother' would humour his fancy best.
'Yes, yes: I know you, my dear. I have been watching for you all the
night. You must not go away again for so long; they don't understand me
here as you do. Where's Dick?'
'He is gone, uncle,' she said softly. She did not like to say that he
was dead.
'Gone? Where is he gone? He was here just now. Is he in the field or in
the barn? Send him to me when he comes in, my dear.'
Lucy turned away pale and trembling. She could not bear it; he did not
recognise her in the least.
The Tutor came in while she was there, and went over to the bed; but
the Master took him for Dick--the brother who had died fifty years ago.
His eyes lighted up when the Tutor came in, and with a strange, eager
interest he asked him questions about the crops and the farm. All the
later associations of his life had quite faded from his memory, and he
had gone back to the scenes and faces of his youth.
The Tutor turned away from the bed with a sigh. He had waited for this
half his life. He had looked forward so long as he could remember to
being Master of St. Benedict's, and now, when it seemed within his
grasp, he turned from it with a sigh. What was it, after all, this
shadow he was grasping? Wealth, honour, position, it would all slip
through his hands by-and-by, as it had slipped through the hands of the
old scholar on the bed: all, everything, that had taken a lifetime--a
long lifetime--to gain, would slip away, and there would be nothing
left but old memories. Everything would fail; and he would go back to
the old humble time, and the dear faces--if happily he had dear faces
to go back to. There would be nothing left--nothing that he could carry
away with him--but those old tender memories.
The Tutor turned away from the bed and went out of the room. On the
landing outside he saw Lucy sitting in the window-seat weeping. The
tears were in his own eyes, and he could not trust himself to speak. He
went over, and took Lucy's hand, and drew her towards him.
'Oh,' she murmured through her tears, 'he does not know me the least
bit. He thinks I am his brother Dick's wife.'
'And he takes me for Dick,' said the Tutor, with an involuntary smile,
pressing the little warm hand he held. 'We shall all come to it, my
dear, some day--to the vanishing-point, where everything slips away
from us but the memories of our youth. Well for us at that time if we
have nothing but innocent memories of kindly deeds and loving faces--if
we have no regrets, no sorrow, no remorse! Perhaps it is the happiest
lot to have the slate wiped clean of all the storms and passions of
later years, and to go back at the last, and to take away with us only
the memory of the old innocent early days.'
He was a good deal moved. He might have committed dreadful crimes
since the days of his innocent youth, instead of being a grave, sober,
reverend Tutor of a college.
'You don't think he will ever be better?' Lucy sobbed.
'I don't think, even if his life is prolonged, that his mind will ever
be clear again. I fear it has gone, quite gone. Perhaps it is better
so: he will pass away happier; he will have no regrets; he will leave
nothing behind.'
Lucy sat sobbing in the window-seat. If she had been older she would
not have wept so freely: the young have so many tears to spare.
'There is nothing to regret,' he said tenderly, bending over the hand
he still held. 'The dear Master has lived his life--a good life, and, I
think, a happy one--and he will exchange it for a better and a happier.
We have only to concern ourselves about those who are left--Mrs. Rae
and your cousin. They must stay with us, Lucy; they must make the lodge
their home. You must let them understand, dear'--here the Senior Tutor
really pressed Lucy's hand, that he had held all the time he had been
talking to her, and she had never once thought of drawing it away: he
would have taken her in his arms, but the servants were coming up and
down stairs--'you must let them quite understand,' he went on, 'that
their home is here with us. I am sure we shall do everything to make
them happy.'
Lucy hadn't the least idea what he meant.
She would have stayed at the lodge and taken her share of the nursing
night and day, but the Tutor would not hear of it.
'You have got your work to do, my dear,' he said. He called her 'my
dear' now quite naturally. 'You have all your work cut out before you
to be ready for the examinations in June. You can't afford to risk
breaking down for the sake of doing work that any woman can do. A
trained nurse from Addenbroke's will do all, and more than all, you
three dear anxious women together.'
He sent in a nurse from Addenbroke's during the morning, and Cousin
Mary and the Master's wife were turned out of the room. It was quite
time the Master's wife was turned out of the room, or there would have
been two to nurse instead of one.
The nurse who had been sent from Addenbroke's Hospital to nurse the
Master was the little fluffy nurse that had been brought by her brother
to Wyatt Edgell's rooms after that miserable folly, and had kept his
secret.
If Lucy didn't like trusting a foolish young man she knew nothing
about to this flighty nurse, she was much more unwilling to trust
this valuable life in her hands. She watched with mistrust, and a
certain dull glow of impatience, this little bit of a creature turn the
Master's wife out of the room, and reverse everything that had been
done under Cousin Mary's directions.
The nurse from Addenbroke's pulled up the blinds and threw open the
windows, and let in the balmy air of the sweet May morning, that
everybody had been so anxious to keep out; and she threw off the heavy
quilts, and took away the pillows, and did everything according to the
latest fashion in nursing. If people do not choose to get well when all
this is done for them, it is their own fault, and not the fault of the
system.
Before Lucy went back to Newnham she went into the little room--her own
room till she had left it for Newnham--where the Master's wife had gone
to lie down to rest. She had chosen this room because it was near the
Master's, and she would be within call.
Lucy insisted on undressing her and putting her to bed, and perjuring
herself with fibs of the deepest dye to set her mind at rest.
'I never thought he would go before me,' the dear old soul murmured,
when Lucy was undressing her. 'I always thought I should go first; and
it has been such a comfort to me to think that Mary could fill my place
so well. And now to think that he should be called away first!'
'Who said he would go first?' Lucy said in her reassuring manner. 'He
is not at all likely to go before you, you poor dear! If you had been
yourself, he would not have fallen. You had no strength left, so he
slipped through your poor arms. You hadn't the strength of a baby.
Anyone can see how you have been failing lately, and you think it is
the Master.'
'And you think it was my fault he fell--that the weakness was not in
him?' the poor trembling old creature asked eagerly. She was so anxious
to believe Lucy, and the faint colour flushed up under her white skin.
'Of course it was. The doctor will not tell you it was, because he
doesn't want to frighten you. Anyone can see that you are much weaker
than the Master.'
There really seemed some truth in what Lucy said. The Master's wife was
trembling all over like a leaf--she couldn't have got into bed without
Lucy's help; but she was trembling with joy.
'God bless you, my dear!' she said, when the girl went away. 'You have
made me so happy!'
Lucy went back to Newnham with a heavy heart. It seemed as if
everything were slipping away from her. It is so hard for the young to
realize the great change. She felt dimly that it was not far off--that
this was, indeed, the beginning of the end. Anyone could have seen that.
But it was not the personal sorrow of it that moved her; there was a
deeper pathos than death in the fidelity of the dear woman who clung
to the old Master with a love stronger than death itself. She could
not but think of the look of relief on the old tired face as she walked
back to Newnham.
The girls remarked that Lucy looked pale at Hall--that is, those who
took any interest in her. Pamela Gwatkin never looked her way. She sat
at the 'High,' among the Dons; she never condescended to look down the
hall to the table where the freshers sat.
Capability Stubbs came into her room after Hall, as she sat trying
to work, and brought her in a cup of tea. The tea was very grateful
to Lucy's overwrought nerves: it was the only thing that was nice
about Miss Stubbs. Pamela Gwatkin had given her a cup of tea once or
twice, but it tasted of tooth-powder. She had packed the tea and the
tooth-powder in a biscuit-tin when she came up, and the lid had got off
the tooth-powder box, and it had got mixed up with the tea. It would
not have been political economy to have thrown it away.
'Nice scandal you've been making in the college!' observed Miss Stubbs
cheerfully, as she handed Lucy the teacup. She had only brought a
teacup; she considered saucers superfluous, unless one happened to be
a kitten.
'Scandal!' said Lucy, aghast. 'What scandal have I been making?'
'Oh! it was rumoured you had eloped with a Selwyn man. Somebody saw you
going off.'
'With a Selwyn man!' said Lucy with fine scorn. 'As if I should elope
with a Selwyn man! If it had been St. Benedict's it would have been
different.'
'Or Hall?' suggested Miss Stubbs, who was rumoured to have a cousin at
Trinity Hall, or to know a girl who had.
'Ye--es; even Hall would have been better. Who set the ball
rolling--Newnham Assurance?'
Lucy was much too angry with Pamela to call her by her name.
'No, it wasn't Assurance. She took the other side. She said if you were
going to run away with--with a man, you would have had the self-respect
to stop and put your gloves on first.'
CHAPTER XIV.
WYATT EDGELL.
Late on the evening of the day when Lucy was supposed by the students
of Newnham to have eloped, the man she was said to have eloped with sat
working in his college-room.
It was not a Selwyn man. The crest on the pocket of the blazer he was
wearing was the crest of St. Benedict's. It was nearly the eve of the
Mathematical Tripos; there were only a few days more, and, having lost
all the early part of the term, Wyatt Edgell was sitting down now at
the last minute to recover by a tremendous effort the ground he had
lost. He had always been sure of a first; he had never yet taken a
second class in any examination at school or college, and his name had
generally stood first in the lists. The authorities of St. Benedict's
had predicted that it would stand first now in the coming Tripos.
There would have been no doubt about it but for that ugly
'accident'--he called it an 'accident'--in the beginning of the term.
He had not been himself since he came up this May term. He had been
moody and taciturn, and subject to fits of depression. He had given up
his wine-parties, and his club suppers and breakfasts, and he had shut
himself up in his rooms and sported his oak. Everybody, Tutors and all,
said he was working hard, and they 'let him alone'; but his bed-maker
knew better! Bed-makers know so much more about a man than anyone else.
She fetched Gwatkin to him one morning, when she had come in and found
him lying on the floor in a fit of delirium tremens. They kept the
matter quiet between them and put him to bed, and the bed-maker gave
out to all the men on her staircase that 'he was a-readin' hisself to
death.'
It was not a very bad attack--it was not the first, but Gwatkin didn't
know that at the time--there were no violent ravings, only mutterings
and depression--dreadful depression. Gwatkin and the bed-maker looked
after him during the morning, and towards noon he fell into a deep
sleep. It didn't seem at all likely that he would wake for hours. The
bed-maker had had some experience of such cases, and she knew that the
fever would take eight or ten hours' sleep to spend itself, and then
he would awake with shaking hands and a splitting headache, and have a
fine time of it for a week.
Leaving him as she thought sleeping soundly, she went about her work.
She had to clear the tables of the other men on the staircase, but
before she went she took the precaution to fasten his oak, and to take
the key to Gwatkin's rooms.
Gwatkin ran over as fast as he could to Edgell's rooms. He had given
such strict injunctions that he was not to be left alone on any
pretence. Run as fast as he could, he was only just in time. Had he
been a minute later he would have been too late. He took the razor
from the poor fellow's hand, and he bound up the wound he had made with
it as he best could without assistance. He had not the heart to call
for help, to reveal his miserable secret to the whole college. He did
for him as he would have wished others to have done for himself if he
had been in his place. He kept his secret.
There was a man on his own staircase who had a sister a nurse at
Addenbroke's, and when he had done all he could for Edgell, and
fastened his arms down to the bed, Gwatkin ran across the court and
brought Brannan over. He had to let him into the secret; there was no
help for it. He saw exactly how matters stood. He was in his third
year, and it was not the first time that he had helped to cover up an
act of undergraduate folly. Brannan went away to fetch his sister. He
could promise her silence. Phyllis Brannan was as true as steel; but in
his haste and agitation he had left the outer oak open, and Lucy came
in.
Wyatt Edgell's secret had been faithfully kept by these men and women.
Only one of them had committed a breach of trust--Lucy had told Pamela.
She couldn't help it, she explained, if she had had to die for it the
next day; but Pamela had held her tongue. Not a soul in the college
guessed his secret--his dreadful secret. Everybody looked up to him,
and praised him, and expected great things of him--everybody but his
bed-maker.
She knew something about that last orgie. She had helped to put him to
bed, and she had cleared away the small sodas the next morning. She
smiled when she saw him settling down to work on the evening of the day
when he had brought Lucy to the lodge from Newnham. 'A lot of readin'
'e'll get through,' she said, shaking her head as she went down the
stairs with her basket under her shawl. ''E'll be under the table, I
reckon, when I come in in the mornin'.'
Eric Gwatkin was doubtful about him, too. He was more anxious about
Edgell's Tripos than he was about his own Special. He couldn't rest
before he went to bed without coming over and seeing if he was all
right. He found his oak sported, and he had to knock a good many times
before Edgell would let him in.
'Confound it----' he began, and then he saw Eric and stopped. 'Oh, it's
you, Wattles!'
He didn't say it very graciously, and Eric was sorry he had disturbed
him. He really looked in working trim. He had thrown off his coat, and
he was sitting in his shirt-sleeves. He wore a flannel shirt, and the
collar was open and showed his white throat and chest, as it had showed
it that day when Lucy leaned over the bed and put on the wet bandage.
It showed, too, what it had not shown on that day, when a scarf was
thrown over the throat--an ugly scar extending for some inches beneath
the left ear. It was still purple and red and discoloured--a hideous
livid mark on the beautiful white skin.
Eric shuddered when he saw it. The sight of it always made him shudder
to think what a near thing it was--what _might_ have been! He could
not understand how Edgell could bear to see it in the glass, could bear
to uncover it, that others coming in might see it.
'I am sorry to disturb you, old man,' he said, looking round at the
work on the table, and the books lying open before Edgell. 'I only
looked round to see--if--if you were all right.'
'To see if I had cut my throat again,' said Edgell calmly.
There was a shade of bitterness in his voice, and his lips curled
slightly with amusement or scorn, or both. They were beautiful
clear-cut lips, full and tender as a woman's, and they had a way of
curving when he spoke. They never quivered, they curved; and his
nostrils dilated. It was a strong face, with a massive square jaw, but
it had these nervous tricks.
'Very kind of you, Wattles,' he went on with a laugh; 'but I'm not
going to repeat that performance again--at least, not for the present.
I'm going in for my Trip--and--and I'm going to marry Miss Lucy.'
Gwatkin's face fell.
'I don't think this is a time to talk of marrying,' he said, with a
certain hesitation in his voice, and the cloud on his plain, homely
face deepening. 'The poor old Master is dying.'
'So much the more reason to talk about it. Lucy will want a home. She
won't be able to stay up at Newnham, she tells me; she will have no one
but her cousin Mary when the Master is dead, and the old lady. I think
I shall ask her to-morrow. I should like her to feel that she will not
be left friendless when the end comes.'
'I should wait till after the exam., if I were you. I shouldn't let
anything interfere with the exam. You will have all your life to marry
in.'
Edgell lay back in his chair and laughed good-naturedly at his Mentor.
'Anyone would think, Wattles, that you wanted to marry her yourself.'
There was no occasion for that very common-place-looking young man to
blush so dreadfully.
'I only meant to advise you for your good,' he said awkwardly, and then
he went over to the door and said good-night; but when he reached the
door, and he had the handle in his hand, he paused irresolutely, and
looked across the room at the man with the scar in his throat leaning
back in the chair. The scar was dreadfully visible in that light. It
seemed to have a charm for Gwatkin. He couldn't keep his eyes off it.
'What's up?' said Edgell, seeing that he paused by the door.
Eric came back to the table where Edgell was seated, and laid his hand
on his shoulder, a friendly, unmistakable grip.
'Dear old man,' he said in a broken voice, and the other could see that
his foolish weak lips were quivering, 'you won't mind my speaking my
mind to you; you will forgive what I say?'
'Fire away!' said Edgell; but he didn't look at Gwatkin, he looked at
the opposite wall.
'Before you go any farther--before you ask Lucy Rae to marry you--pause
and consider----'
'I've already considered,' Edgell interrupted impatiently, and with his
face still averted.
'You have not considered everything. You have thought only of yourself.
You have not thought of her.'
'I have thought of her!'
'No, no; you have not thought of her in the way I mean. Bear with me,
dear fellow. God knows I am saying this for your sake and hers. You
have not thought of her as orphaned and friendless, having no one but
you in the world, being bound up in you, having all her happiness
dependent upon you. A little, tender, delicate creature, with no
spirit of her own, who would suffer, and break her heart, and never
complain----'
'What would she have to complain of?' Edgell interrupted savagely.
'God only knows!'
'You--you think I shall go over the old thing again--that----'
'Hush! For heaven's sake don't let us even suppose it! You haven't got
to consider yourself in this matter, you have to consider her. Do you
think it fair to ask her--to--to--forgive me, dear fellow--to ask her
to risk it?'
Wyatt Edgell bowed his head.
'You have no faith in me,' he said moodily, with his head upon his
breast and his brows knitted.
'I have every faith in you, dear fellow; but I want you to think of
her. It is the chivalrous thing to do. Forgive me for saying it. Unless
you felt that you could make her happier than any other man in the
world--and--and ensure her happiness, you have no right to ask her to
marry you!'
Eric Gwatkin was quite astonished at his own temerity--astonished and
frightened. He was a weak, nervous, emotional fellow; he couldn't
trust himself to say another word. His voice broke, and his eyes were
clouded, and he was afraid he had said too much, and with a grip of
Edgell's great muscular shoulder he went away and left him sitting in
his chair, with his head on his breast, and that ugly scar gleaming
like the dark blade of a knife across his white throat.
END OF VOL. I.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.
THE IVORY GATE. By Walter Besant, Author of 'All Sorts and
Conditions of Men,' etc. 3 vols.
THE MARQUIS OF CARABAS. By Aaron Watson and Lillias
Wassermann. 3 vols.
TRUST-MONEY. By William Westall. 3 vols.
A FAMILY LIKENESS. By Mrs. B.M. Croker. 3 vols.
THE MASTER OF ST. BENEDICT'S. By Alan St. Aubyn. 2 vols.
MRS. JULIET. By Mrs. Alfred Hunt. 3 vols.
BARBARA DERING. By Amélie Rives. 2 vols.
GEOFFORY HAMILTON. By Edward H. Cooper. 2 vols.
TREASON-FELONY. By John Hill. 2 vols.
London: CHATTO & WINDUS, 214, Piccadilly, W.
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