CHAPTER VIIIThis little scene with Sorell, described in the last chapter, was of great importance to Connie’s after history. It had placed her suddenly on a footing of intimacy with a man of poetic and lofty character, and had transformed her old childish relation to him—which had alone made the scene possible—into something entirely different. It produced a singular effect upon her that such a man should care enough what befell her to dare to say what he had said to her. It had been—she admitted it—a lesson in scrupulousness, in high delicacy of feeling, in magnanimity. “You are trifling with what may be the life of another—just to amuse yourself—or to pay off a moment’s offence. Only the stupid or cruel souls do such things—or think lightly of them. But not you—your mother’s daughter!”That had been the meaning of his sudden incursion. The more Connie thought of it, the more it thrilled her. It was both her charm and her weakness, at this moment, that she was so plastic, so responsive both for good and evil. She said to herself that she was fortunate to have such a friend; and she was conscious of a new and eager wish to win his praise, or to avoid his blame.At the same time it did not occur to her to tell him anything of her escapade with Douglas Falloden. But the more closely she kept this to herself, the more eager she was to appease her conscience and satisfy Sorell, in the matter of Alice and Herbert Pryce. Her instinct showed her what to do, and Sorell watched her struggling with the results of her evening’s flirtation with much secret amusement and applause. Herbert Pryce having been whistled on, had to be whistled off, and Alice had to be gently and gradually reassured; yet without any obvious penitence on Connie’s part, which would only have inflicted additional wounds on Alice’s sore spirit.And Connie did it, broadly speaking, during the week of Falloden’s schools. Sorell himself was busy every day and all day as one of the Greats examiners. He scarcely saw her for more than two half-hours during a hideously strenuous week, through which he sat immersed in the logic and philosophy papers of the disappearing generation of Honour men. Among the papers of the twenty or thirty men who were the certain Firsts of the year, he could not help paying a special attention to Douglas Falloden’s. What a hard and glittering mind the fellow had!—extraordinarily competent and well-trained; extraordinarily lacking, as it seemed to Sorell, in width or pliancy, or humanity. One of the ablest essays sent in, however, was a paper by Falloden on the “Sentimentalisms of Democracy”—in which a reasoned and fierce contempt for the popular voice, and a brilliant glorification of war and of a military aristocracy, made very lively reading.On the later occasion, when Sorell and Constance met during the week, he found Radowitz in the Hoopers’ drawing-room. Sorell had gone in after dinner to consult with Ewen Hooper, one of his fellow examiners, over some doubtful papers, and their business done, the two men allowed themselves an interval of talk and music with the ladies before beginning work again till the small hours.Constance, in diaphanous black, was at the piano, trying to recall, for Radowitz’s benefit, some of the Italian folk-songs that had delighted the river-party. The room was full of a soft mingled light from the still uncurtained windows and the lamp which had been just brought in. It seemed to be specially concentrated on the hair, “golden like ripe corn,” of the young musician, and on Connie’s white neck and arms. Radowitz lay back in a low chair gazing at her with all his eyes.On the further side of the room Nora was reading, Mrs. Hooper was busy with the newspaper, and Alice and Herbert Pryce were talking with the air of people who are, rather uncomfortably, making up a quarrel.Sorell spent his half-hour mostly in conversation with Mrs. Hooper and Nora, while his inner mind wondered about the others. He stood with his back to the mantelpiece, his handsome pensive face, with its intensely human eyes, bent towards Nora, who was pouring out to him some grievances of the “home-students,” to which he was courteously giving a jaded man’s attention.When he left the room Radowitz broke out—“Isn’t he like a god?”Connie opened astonished eyes.“Who?”“My tutor—Mr. Sorell. Ah, you didn’t notice—but you should. He is like the Hermes—only grown older, and with a soul. But there is no Greek sculptor who could have done him justice. It would have wanted a Praxiteles; but with the mind of Euripides!”The boy’s passionate enthusiasm pleased her. But she could think of nothing less conventional in reply than to ask if Sorell were popular in college.“Oh, they like him well enough. They know what trouble he takes for them, and there’s nobody dares cheek him. But they don’t understand him. He’s too shy. Wasn’t it good fortune for me that he happens to be my friend?”And he began to talk at headlong speed, and with considerable eloquence, of Sorell’s virtues and accomplishments. Constance, who had been brought up in a southern country, liked the eloquence. Something in her was already tired of the slangy brevities that do duty in England for conversation. At the same time she thought she understood why Falloden, and Meyrick, and others called the youth aposeur, and angrily wished to snub him. He possessed besides, in-bred, all the foreign aids to the mere voice—gesticulation of hands and head, movements that to the Englishman are unexpected and therefore disagreeable. Also there, undeniably, was the frilled dress-shirt, and the two diamond studs, much larger and more conspicuous than Oxford taste allowed, which added to its criminality. And it was easy to see too that the youth was inordinately proud of his Polish ancestry, and inclined to rate all Englishmen asparvenusand shopkeepers.“Was it in Paris you first made friends with Mr. Sorell?” Connie asked him.Radowitz nodded.“I was nineteen. My uncle had just died. I had nobody. You understand, my father was exiled twenty years ago. We belong to German Poland; though there has always been a branch of the family in Cracow. For more than a hundred years these vile Germans have been crushing and tormenting us. They have taken our land, they have tried to kill our language and our religion. But they can not. Our soul lives. Poland lives. And some day there will be a great war—and then Poland will rise again. From the East and the West and the South they will come—and the body that was hewn asunder will be young and glorious again.” His blue eyes shone. “Some day, I will play you that in music. Chopin is full of it—the death of Poland—and then her soul, her songs, her hopes, her rising again. Ah, but Sorell!—I will explain. I saw him one night at a house of kind people—the master of it was the Directeur of the Ecole des Sciences Politiques—and his wife. She was so beautiful, though she was not young; and gentle, like a child; and so good. I was nothing to them—but I went to some lectures at the school, while I was still at the Conservatoire, and I used to go and play to them sometimes. So when my uncle died, they said, ‘Come and stay with us.’ I had really nobody. My father and mother died years ago. My mother, you understand, was half English; I always spoke English with her. She knew I must be a musician. That was settled when I was a child. Music is my life. But if I took it for a profession, she made me promise to see some other kinds of life first. She often said she would like me to go to Oxford. She had some old engravings of the colleges she used to show me. I am not a pauper, you see,—not at all. My family was once a very great family; and I have some money—not very much, but enough. So then Mr. Sorell and I began to talk. And I had suddenly the feeling—‘If this man will tell me what to do, I will do it.’ And then he found I was thinking of Oxford, and he said, if I came, he would be my friend, and look after me. And so he advised me to go to Marmion, because some of the tutors there were great friends of his. And that is why I went. And I have been there nearly a year.”“And you like it?” Connie, sitting hunched on the music-stool, her chin on her hand, was thinking of Falloden’s outburst, and her own rebuff in Lathom Woods.The boy shrugged his shoulders. He looked at Connie with his brilliant eyes, and she seemed to see that he was on the point of confiding in her, of complaining of his treatment, and then proudly checked himself.“Oh, I like it well enough,” he said carelessly. “I am reading classics. I love Greek. There is a soul in Greek. Latin—and Rome—that is too like the Germans! Now let me play to you—something from Poland.”He took her seat at the piano, and began to play—first in a dreamy and quiet way, passing from one plaintive folk-song to another; then gradually rising into passion, defiance, tragedy. Constance stood listening to him in amazement—entranced. Music was a natural language to her as it was to Radowitz, though her gift was so small and slight compared to his. But she understood and followed him; and there sprang up in her, as she sat turning her delicate face to the musician, that sudden, impassioned delight, that sense of fellowship with things vast and incommunicable—“exultations, agonies, and love, and man’s unconquerable mind”—which it is the glorious function of music to kindle in the human spirit.[Illustration: ]Lady Connie had stood entranced by the playing of RadowitzThe twilight darkened. Every sound in the room but Radowitz’s playing had ceased; even Mrs. Hooper had put down her newspaper. Nora, on the further side of the room, was absorbed in watching the two beautiful figures under the lamplight, the golden-haired musician and the listening girl.Suddenly there was a noise of voices in the hall outside. The drawing-room door was thrown open, and the parlourmaid announced:“Mr. Falloden.”Mrs. Hooper rose hastily. Radowitz wavered in a march finale he was improvising, and looked round.“Oh, go on!” cried Constance.But Radowitz ceased playing. He got up, with an angry shake of his wave of hair, muttered something about “another couple of hours’ work” and closed the piano.Constance remained sitting, as though unaware of the new arrival in the room.“That was wonderful!” she said, with a long breath, her eyes raised to Radowitz. “Now I shall go and read Polish history!”A resonant voice said:“Hullo—Radowitz! Good-evening, Lady Connie. Isn’t this a scandalous time to call? But I came about the ball-tickets for next Wednesday—to ask how many your aunt wants. There seems to be an unholy rush on them.”Connie put out a careless hand.“How do you do? We’ve been having the most divine music! Next Wednesday? Oh, yes, I remember!” And as she recovered her hand from Falloden, she drew it across her eyes, as though trying to dispel the dream in which Radowitz’s playing had wrapped her. Then the hand dropped, and she saw the drawing-room door closing on the player.Falloden looked down upon her with a sarcastic mouth, which, however, worked nervously.“I’m extremely sorry to bring you down to earth. I suppose he’s awfully good.”“It’s genius,” said Connie, breathlessly—“just that—genius! I had no idea he had such a gift.” Falloden shrugged his shoulders without reply. He threw himself into a chair beside her, his knees crossed, his hands on the topmost knee, with the finger-tips lightly touching, an attitude characteristic of him. The lamp which had been brought in to light the piano shone full upon him, and Constance perceived that, in spite of his self-confident ease of bearing, he looked haggard and pale with the long strain of the schools. Her own manner relaxed.“Have you really done?” she asked, more graciously.“I was in for my last paper this afternoon. I am now a free man.”“And you’ve got your First?”He laughed.“That only the gods know. I may just squeak into it.”“And now you’ve finished with Oxford?”“Oh, dear, no! There’s a fortnight more. One keeps the best—for the last.”“Then your people are coming up again for Commem.?” The innocence of the tone was perfect.His sparkling eyes met hers.“I have no domestic prospects of that sort,” he said drily. “What I shall do with this fortnight depends entirely—on one person.”The rest of the room seemed full of a buzz of conversation which left them unobserved. Connie had taken up her large lace fan and was slowly opening and closing it. The warm pallor of her face and throat, the golden brown of her hair, the grace of her neck and shoulders, enchanted the man beside her. For three weeks he had been holding desire in check with a strong hand. The tide of it rushed back upon him, with the joy of a released force. But he knew that he must walk warily.“Will you please give me some orders?” he went on, smiling, seeing that she did not reply. “How has the mare been behaving?”“She is rather tame—a little too much of the sheep in her composition.”“She wants a companion. So do I—badly. There is a little village beyond the Lathom Woods—which has a cottage—for tea—and a strawberry garden. Shall we sample it?”Constance shook her head laughing.“We haven’t an hour. Everybody asks us to parties, all day and all night long. London is a joke to Oxford.”“Don’t go!” said Falloden impatiently. “I have been asked to meet you—three times—at very dull houses. But I shall go, of course, unless I can persuade you to do something more amusing.”“Oh, dear, no! We’re in for it. But I thought people came here to read books?”“They do read a few; but when one has done with them one feels towards them like enemies whom one has defeated—and insults. I chucked my Greek lexicon under the sofa, first thing, when I got back from the schools this afternoon.”“Wasn’t that childish—rather? I am appalled to think how much you know.”He laughed impatiently.“Now one may begin to learn something. Oxford is precious little use. But it’s not worth while being beaten—in anything. Shall we say Thursday, then?—for our ride?”Constance opened her eyes in pretended astonishment.“After the ball? Shall I be awake? Let’s settle it on Wednesday!”He could get no more definite promise from her, and must needs take his leave. Before he went, he asked her to keep the first four dances for him at the Marmion ball, and two supper-dances. But Constance evaded a direct assent. She would do her best. But she had promised some to Mr. Pryce, and some to Mr. Radowitz.Falloden’s look darkened.“You should not allow him to dance with you,” he said imperiously. “He is too eccentric. He doesn’t know how to behave; and he makes his partners conspicuous.”Constance too had risen, and they confronted each other—she all wilfulness.“I shall certainly dance with him!” she said, with a little determined air. “You see, I like foreign ways!”He said good night abruptly. As he stood a few minutes on the further side of the room, making a few last arrangements as to the ball with Mrs. Hooper and Alice, Constance, still standing by the piano, and apparently chatting with Herbert Pryce, was really aware of Falloden’s every movement. His manner to her aunt was brusque and careless; and he forgot, apparently, to say good night either to Alice or Nora. Nobody in the room, as she well knew, except herself, found any pleasure in his society. Nora’s hostile face in the background was a comic study. And yet, so long as he was there, nobody could forget or overlook him; so splendid was the physical presence of the man, and so strong the impression of his personality—even in trivial things.Meanwhile, everybody in the house had gone to bed, except Nora and her father. She had lit a little fire in his study, as the night had grown chilly; she had put a little tray with tea on it by his side, and helped him to arrange the Greats papers, in which he was still immersed, under his hand. And finally she brought his pipe and filled it for him.“Must you sit up long, father?”“An hour or two,” said Ewen Hooper wearily. “I wish I didn’t get so limp. But these Honour exams take it out of one. And I have to go to Winchester to-morrow.”“For the scholarship?”He nodded.“Father! you work a great deal too hard—you look dog-tired!” cried Nora in distress. “Why do you do so much?”He shook his head sadly.“You know, darling.”Nora did know. She knew that every pound was of importance to the household, that the temporary respite caused by the legacy from Lord Risborough and by Connie’s prepayment would very soon come to an end, and that her father seemed to be more acutely aware of the position than he had yet been. Her own cleverness, and the higher education she was steadily getting for herself enabled her to appreciate, as no one else in the family could or did, her father’s delicate scholarly gifts, which had won him his reputation in Oxford and outside. But the reputation might have been higher, if so much time had not been claimed year after year by the sheer pressure of the family creditors. With every year, Nora had grown up into a fuller understanding of her father’s tragedy; a more bitter, a more indignant understanding. They might worry through; one way or another she supposed they would worry through. But her father’s strength and genius were being sacrificed. And this child of seventeen did not see how to stop it.After she had brought him his pipe, and he was drawing at it contentedly over the fire, she stood silent beside him, bursting with something she could not make up her mind to say. He put out an arm, as she stood beside his chair, and drew her to him.“Dear little Trotty Veck!” It had been his pet name for her as a child. Nora, for answer, bent her head, and kissed him.“Father”—she broke out—“I’ve got my first job!”He looked up enquiringly.“Mr. Hurst”—she named her English Literature tutor, a fellow of Marmion—“has got it for me. I’ve been doing some Norman-French with him; and there’s a German professor has asked him to get part of a romance copied that’s in the Bodleian—the only manuscript. And Mr. Hurst says he’ll coach me—I can easily do it—and I shall get ten pounds!”“Well done, Trotty Veck!” Ewen Hooper smiled at her affectionately. “But won’t it interfere with your work?”“Not a bit. It will help it. Father!—I’m going to earn a lot before long. If it only didn’t take such a long time to grow up!” said Nora impatiently. “One ought to be as old as one feels—and I feel quite twenty-one!”Ewen Hooper shook his head.“That’s all wrong. One should be young—and taste being young, every moment, every day that one can. I wish I’d done it—now that I’m getting old.”“You’re not old!” cried Nora. “You’re not, father! You’re not to say it!”And kneeling down by him, she laid her cheek against his shoulder, and put one of his long gaunt hands to her lips.Her affection was very sweet to him, but it could not comfort him. There are few things, indeed, in which the old can be comforted by the young—the old, who know too much, both of life and themselves.But he pulled himself together.“Dear Trotty Veck, you must go to bed, and let me do my work. But—one moment!” He laid a hand on her shoulder, and abruptly asked her whether she thought her Cousin Constance was in love with Douglas Falloden. “Your mother’s always talking to me about it,” he said, with a wearied perplexity.“I don’t know,” said Nora, frowning. “But I shouldn’t wonder.”“Then I shall have to make some enquiries,” said Connie’s guardian, with resignation. “She’s a masterful young woman. But she can be very sweet when she likes. Do you see what she gave me to-day?”He pointed to a beautiful Viennese edition of Aeschylus, in three sumptuous volumes, which had just appeared and was now lying on the Reader’s table.Nora took it up with a cry of pleasure. She had her father’s passion for books.“She heard me say to Sorell, apparently, that I would give my eyes for it, and couldn’t afford it. That was a week ago. And to-day, after luncheon, she stole in here like a mouse—you none of you saw or heard her—holding the books behind her—and looking as meek as milk. You would have thought she was a child, coming to say she was sorry! And she gave me the books in the prettiest way—just like her mother!—as though all the favour came from me. I’m beginning to be very fond of her. She’s so nice to your old father. I say, Nora!”—he held her again—“you and I have got to prevent her from marrying the wrong man!”Nora shook her head, with an air of middle-aged wisdom.“Connie will marry whomever she has a mind to!” she said firmly. “And it’s no good, father, you imagining anything else.”Ewen Hooper laughed, released her, and sent her to bed.The days that followed represented the latter part of the interval between the Eights and Commemoration, before Oxford plunged once more into high festival.It was to be a brilliant Commem.; for an ex-Viceroy of India, a retired Ambassador, England’s best General, and five or six foreign men of science and letters, of rather exceptional eminence, were coming to get their honorary degrees. When Mrs. Hooper,Timesin hand, read out at the breakfast-table the names of Oxford’s expected guests, Constance Bledlow looked up in surprised amusement. It seemed the Ambassador and she were old friends; that she had sat on his knee as a baby through various Carnival processions in the Corso, showing him how to throwconfetti; and that he and Lady F. had given a dance at the Embassy for her coming-out, when Connie, at seventeen, and His Excellency—still the handsomest man in the room, despite years and gout—had danced the first waltz together, and a subsequent minuet; which—though Connie did not say so—had been the talk of Rome.As to the ex-Viceroy, he was her father’s first cousin, and had passed through Rome on his way east, staying three or four days at the Palazzo Barberini. Constance, however, could not be induced to trouble her head about him. “He bored Mamma and me dreadfully,” she said—“he had seven pokers up his back, and was never human for a minute. I don’t want to see him at all.” Oxford, however, seemed to be of the opinion that ex-viceroys do want to see their cousins; for the Hooper party found themselves asked as a matter of course to the All Souls’ luncheon, the Vice-Chancellor’s garden-party, and to a private dinner-party in Christ Church on the day of the Encænia, at which all the new-made doctors were to be present. As for the ball-tickets for Commem. week, they poured in; and meanwhile there were endless dinner-parties, and every afternoon had its river picnic, now on the upper, now on the lower river.It was clear, indeed, both to her relations and to Oxford in general, that Constance Bledlow was to be the heroine of the moment. She would be the “star” of Commem., as so many other pretty or charming girls had been before her. But in her case, it was no mere undergraduate success. Old and young alike agreed to praise her. Her rank inevitably gave her precedence at almost every dinner-party, Oxford society not being rich in the peerage. The host, who was often the head of a college and grey-haired, took her in; and some other University big-wig, equally mature, flanked her on the right. When she was undressing in her little room after these entertainments, she would give Annette a yawning or plaintive account of them. “You know, Annette, I never talk to anybody under fifty now!” But at the time she never failed to play her part. She was born with the wish to please, which, as every one knows, makes three parts of the art of pleasing.Meanwhile Sorell, who was at all times a very popular man, in great request, accepted many more invitations than usual in order to see as much as he could of this triumphal progress of Lady Risborough’s daughter. Oxford society was then much more limited than now, and he and she met often. It seemed to him whenever he came across Douglas Falloden in Connie’s company during these days, that the young man’s pursuit of Constance, if it was a pursuit, was making no progress at all, and that his temper suffered accordingly. Connie’s endless engagements were constantly in the way. Sorell thought he detected once or twice that Falloden had taken steps to procure invitations to houses where Constance was expected; but when they did meet it was evident that he got but a small share of her attention.Once Sorell saw them in what appeared intimate conversation at a Christ Church party. Falloden—who was flushed and frowning—was talking rapidly in a low voice; and Constance was listening to him with a look half soft, half mocking. Her replies seemed to irritate her companion, for they parted abruptly, Constance looking back to smile a sarcastic good-bye.Again, on the Sunday before the Encænia, a famous high churchman preached in the University church. The church was densely crowded, and Sorell, sitting in the masters’ seats under the pulpit, saw Constance dimly, in the pews reserved for wives and families of the University doctors and masters, beneath the gallery. Immediately to her right, in the very front of the undergraduates’ gallery, he perceived the tall form and striking head of Douglas Falloden; and when the sermon was over he saw that the young man was one of the first to push his way out.“He hopes to waylay her,” thought Sorell.If so, he was unsuccessful. Sorell emerging with the stream into the High Street saw Connie’s black and white parasol a little ahead. Falloden was on the point of overtaking her, when Radowitz, the golden-haired, the conspicuous, crossed his path. Constance looked round, smiled, shook hands with Radowitz, and apparently not seeing Falloden in her rear, walked on, in merry talk with the beaming musician. Sorell, perhaps, was the only person who noticed the look of pale fury with which Falloden dropped out of the crowded pathway, crossed the street, and entered a smart club opposite, exclusively frequented by “bloods.”Commem. week itself, however, would give a man in love plenty of chances. Sorell was well aware of it. Monday dawned with misty sunshine after much rain. In the Turl after luncheon, Sorell met Nora Hooper hurrying along with note-books under her arm. They turned down Brasenose Lane together, and she explained that she was on her way to the Bodleian where she was already at work on her first paid job. Her pleasure in it, and the childish airs she gave herself in regard to it, touched and amused Sorell, with whom—through the Greek lessons—she had become a great favourite.As they parted at the doorway leading to the Bodleian, she said with a mischievous look—“Did you know Mr. Falloden’s party is off?”And she explained that for the following day, Falloden had arranged the most elaborate and exclusive of river-parties, with tea in the private gardens of a famous house, ten miles from Oxford. His mother and sister had been coming down for it, and he had asked other people from London.“It was all for Connie—and Connie’s had to scratch! And Mr. Falloden has put it all off. He says his mother, Lady Laura, has a chill and can’t come, but every one knows—it’s Connie!”She and Sorell smiled at each other. They had never had many words on the subject, but they understood each other perfectly.“What made her scratch?” asked Sorell, wondering.“Royalties,” said Nora shortly, with a democratic nose in air.It appeared that a certain travelled and artistic Princess had been spending the week-end in a ducal house in the neighbourhood. So, too, had the ex-Viceroy. And hearing from him that the only daughter “of those dear Risboroughs” was at Oxford, twelve miles off, her Royal Highness, through him, had “commanded” Constance for tea under the ducal roof on Tuesday. A carriage was to be sent for her, and the ex-Viceroy undertook to convey her back to Oxford afterwards, he being due himself to dine and sleep at the Vice-Chancellor’s the night before the Encænia.“Constance didn’t want to go a bit. She was dreadfully annoyed. But father and mother made her. So she sent a note to Mr. Falloden, and he came round. She was out, but Alice saw him. Alice says he scarcely said a word, but you could feel he was in a towering rage.”“Poor Falloden!” said Sorell.Nora’s eyes twinkled.“Yes, but so good for him! I’m sure he’s always throwing over other people. Now he knows“‘Golden lads and lasses mustLike chimney-sweepers come to dust.’”“Vandal!” cried Sorell—“to twist such a verse!”Nora laughed, threw him a friendly nod, and vanished up the steps of the Bodleian.But Falloden’s hour came!The Encænia went off magnificently. Connie, sitting beside Mrs. Hooper in the semicircle of the Sheldonian Theatre, drew the eyes of the crowd of graduates as they surged into the arena, and tantalised the undergraduates in the gallery, above the semicircle, who were well aware that the “star” was there, but could not see her. As the new doctors’ procession entered through the lane made for it by the bedells, as the whole assembly rose, and as the organ struck up, amid the clapping and shouting of the gods in the gallery, Connie and the grey-haired Ambassador, who was walking second in the red and yellow line, grinned openly at each other, while the ex-Viceroy in front, who had been agreeably flattered by the effect produced by his girl-cousin in the august circles of the day before, nodded and smiled at the young lady in the white plumes and pale mauve dress.“Do you know my cousin, Lady Constance Bledlow?—the girl in mauve there?” he said, complacently in the ear of the Public Orator, as they stood waiting till the mingled din from the organ and the undergraduates’ gallery overhead should subside sufficiently to allow that official to begin his arduous task of introducing the doctors-elect.The Public Orator, in a panic lest one of the Latin puns in his forthcoming address should escape him, said hurriedly—“Yes!”—and then “No”—being quite uncertain to which girl in mauve the great man referred, and far too nervous to find out. The great man smiled, and looked up blandly at the shrieking gallery overhead, wondering—as all persons in his position do wonder in each succeeding generation—whether the undergraduates were allowed to make quite such an infernal noise when he was “up.”Meanwhile, Constance herself was only conscious of one face and figure in the crowded theatre. Falloden had borrowed a master’s gown, and as the general throng closed up behind the doctors’ procession, he took up a position in the rear, just in front of the great doors under the organ loft, which, as the day was very hot, remained unclosed. His dark head and athlete’s figure, scarcely disguised by the ampler folds of the borrowed gown, showed in picturesque relief against the grey and sunlit background of the beautiful Divinity School, which could be seen through the doorway. Constance knew that his eyes were on her; and she guessed that he was only conscious of her, as she at that moment was only conscious of him. And again that tremor, that premonition of some coming attack upon her will which she half dreaded, and half desired, swept over her. What was there in the grave and slightly frowning face that drew her through all repulsion? She studied it. Surely the brow and eyes were beautiful—shaped for high thought, and generous feeling? It was the disdainful sulky mouth, the haughty carriage of the head, that spoilt a noble aspect. Yet she had seen the mouth quiver into softness; and those broad shoulders had once stood between her and danger—possibly death. Her heart trembled. “What do you want of me?” it was asking—helplessly—of the distant man; “and can I—dare I—give it?”Then her thoughts flew onward to the ball of the evening, for it was the night of the Marmion ball. No more escape! If she went—and nothing should prevent her from going—it would be Falloden’s evening, Falloden’s chance. She had been perfectly conscious of evading and thwarting him during the previous week. There had been some girlish mischief, but more excitement in it. Now, would he take his revenge?Her heart beat fast. She had never yet danced with him. To-night she would feel his arm round her in the convention of the waltz. And she knew that for her it would be no convention; but something either to be passionately accepted—or impatiently endured.Oxford went early to the Marmion ball. It was a very popular gathering. So that before ten o’clock the green quadrangle was crowded with guests waiting to see other guests come in; while the lights from the Gothic hall, and the notes of the “Blue Danube,” then in its first prime, flung out their call to youth and sex.In they thronged—young men and maidens—a gay procession through the lawns and quadrangles, feeling the world born anew for them, and for them only, as their fathers and mothers had felt before them.Falloden and Meyrick, with half a dozen other chosen spirits, met Constance at the entrance and while Mrs. Hooper and Alice followed, pleased against their will by the reflected fame which had fallen upon them also, the young men formed a body-guard round Constance, and escorted her like a queen to the hall.Sorell, eagerly waiting, watched her entrance into the beautiful and spacious room, with its throng of dancers. She came in, radiant, with that aureole of popular favour floating round her, which has so much to do with the loveliness of the young. All the world smiled on her; she smiled in return; and that sarcastic self behind the smile, which Nora’s quick sense was so often conscious of, seemed to have vanished. She carried, Sorell saw, a glorious bunch of pale roses. Were they Falloden’s gift?That Douglas Falloden danced with her repeatedly, that they sat out together through most of the supper-dances, that there was a sheltered corner in the illuminated quad, beside the Græco-Roman fountain which an archæological warden had given to the college, where, involuntarily, his troubled eyes discovered them more than once:—this at least Sorell knew, and could not help knowing. He saw that she danced twice with Radowitz, and that Falloden stood meanwhile in the doorway of the hall, twisting his black moustache, and chaffing Meyrick, yet all the time with an eye on the ballroom. And during one long disappearance, he found himself guessing that Falloden had taken her to the library for greater seclusion. Only a very few people seemed to know that the fine old room was open.“Where is Connie?” said poor Mrs. Hooper fretfully—when three o’clock had long struck. “I can’t keep awake!”And now a midsummer sun was rising over Oxford. The last carriage had rumbled through the streets; the last merry group of black-coated men, and girls in thin shoes and opera-cloaks had vanished. The summer dawn held the whole beautiful and silenced city in its peace.Constance, in her dressing-gown, sat at the open window, looking out over the dewy garden, and vaguely conscious of its scents as one final touch of sweetness in a whole of pleasure which was still sending its thrill through all her pulses.At last, she found pen and paper on her writing-table, and wrote an instruction for Annette upon it.“Please send early for the horses. They should be here at a quarter to nine. Call me at eight. Tell Aunt Ellen that I have gone for a ride, and shall be back by eleven. It was quite a nice ball.”Then, with a silent laugh at the last words, she took the sheet of paper, stole noiselessly out of her room, and up the stairs to Annette’s room, where she pushed the message under the door. Annette had not been well the day before, and Connie had peremptorily forbidden her to sit up.
This little scene with Sorell, described in the last chapter, was of great importance to Connie’s after history. It had placed her suddenly on a footing of intimacy with a man of poetic and lofty character, and had transformed her old childish relation to him—which had alone made the scene possible—into something entirely different. It produced a singular effect upon her that such a man should care enough what befell her to dare to say what he had said to her. It had been—she admitted it—a lesson in scrupulousness, in high delicacy of feeling, in magnanimity. “You are trifling with what may be the life of another—just to amuse yourself—or to pay off a moment’s offence. Only the stupid or cruel souls do such things—or think lightly of them. But not you—your mother’s daughter!”
That had been the meaning of his sudden incursion. The more Connie thought of it, the more it thrilled her. It was both her charm and her weakness, at this moment, that she was so plastic, so responsive both for good and evil. She said to herself that she was fortunate to have such a friend; and she was conscious of a new and eager wish to win his praise, or to avoid his blame.
At the same time it did not occur to her to tell him anything of her escapade with Douglas Falloden. But the more closely she kept this to herself, the more eager she was to appease her conscience and satisfy Sorell, in the matter of Alice and Herbert Pryce. Her instinct showed her what to do, and Sorell watched her struggling with the results of her evening’s flirtation with much secret amusement and applause. Herbert Pryce having been whistled on, had to be whistled off, and Alice had to be gently and gradually reassured; yet without any obvious penitence on Connie’s part, which would only have inflicted additional wounds on Alice’s sore spirit.
And Connie did it, broadly speaking, during the week of Falloden’s schools. Sorell himself was busy every day and all day as one of the Greats examiners. He scarcely saw her for more than two half-hours during a hideously strenuous week, through which he sat immersed in the logic and philosophy papers of the disappearing generation of Honour men. Among the papers of the twenty or thirty men who were the certain Firsts of the year, he could not help paying a special attention to Douglas Falloden’s. What a hard and glittering mind the fellow had!—extraordinarily competent and well-trained; extraordinarily lacking, as it seemed to Sorell, in width or pliancy, or humanity. One of the ablest essays sent in, however, was a paper by Falloden on the “Sentimentalisms of Democracy”—in which a reasoned and fierce contempt for the popular voice, and a brilliant glorification of war and of a military aristocracy, made very lively reading.
On the later occasion, when Sorell and Constance met during the week, he found Radowitz in the Hoopers’ drawing-room. Sorell had gone in after dinner to consult with Ewen Hooper, one of his fellow examiners, over some doubtful papers, and their business done, the two men allowed themselves an interval of talk and music with the ladies before beginning work again till the small hours.
Constance, in diaphanous black, was at the piano, trying to recall, for Radowitz’s benefit, some of the Italian folk-songs that had delighted the river-party. The room was full of a soft mingled light from the still uncurtained windows and the lamp which had been just brought in. It seemed to be specially concentrated on the hair, “golden like ripe corn,” of the young musician, and on Connie’s white neck and arms. Radowitz lay back in a low chair gazing at her with all his eyes.
On the further side of the room Nora was reading, Mrs. Hooper was busy with the newspaper, and Alice and Herbert Pryce were talking with the air of people who are, rather uncomfortably, making up a quarrel.
Sorell spent his half-hour mostly in conversation with Mrs. Hooper and Nora, while his inner mind wondered about the others. He stood with his back to the mantelpiece, his handsome pensive face, with its intensely human eyes, bent towards Nora, who was pouring out to him some grievances of the “home-students,” to which he was courteously giving a jaded man’s attention.
When he left the room Radowitz broke out—
“Isn’t he like a god?”
Connie opened astonished eyes.
“Who?”
“My tutor—Mr. Sorell. Ah, you didn’t notice—but you should. He is like the Hermes—only grown older, and with a soul. But there is no Greek sculptor who could have done him justice. It would have wanted a Praxiteles; but with the mind of Euripides!”
The boy’s passionate enthusiasm pleased her. But she could think of nothing less conventional in reply than to ask if Sorell were popular in college.
“Oh, they like him well enough. They know what trouble he takes for them, and there’s nobody dares cheek him. But they don’t understand him. He’s too shy. Wasn’t it good fortune for me that he happens to be my friend?”
And he began to talk at headlong speed, and with considerable eloquence, of Sorell’s virtues and accomplishments. Constance, who had been brought up in a southern country, liked the eloquence. Something in her was already tired of the slangy brevities that do duty in England for conversation. At the same time she thought she understood why Falloden, and Meyrick, and others called the youth aposeur, and angrily wished to snub him. He possessed besides, in-bred, all the foreign aids to the mere voice—gesticulation of hands and head, movements that to the Englishman are unexpected and therefore disagreeable. Also there, undeniably, was the frilled dress-shirt, and the two diamond studs, much larger and more conspicuous than Oxford taste allowed, which added to its criminality. And it was easy to see too that the youth was inordinately proud of his Polish ancestry, and inclined to rate all Englishmen asparvenusand shopkeepers.
“Was it in Paris you first made friends with Mr. Sorell?” Connie asked him.
Radowitz nodded.
“I was nineteen. My uncle had just died. I had nobody. You understand, my father was exiled twenty years ago. We belong to German Poland; though there has always been a branch of the family in Cracow. For more than a hundred years these vile Germans have been crushing and tormenting us. They have taken our land, they have tried to kill our language and our religion. But they can not. Our soul lives. Poland lives. And some day there will be a great war—and then Poland will rise again. From the East and the West and the South they will come—and the body that was hewn asunder will be young and glorious again.” His blue eyes shone. “Some day, I will play you that in music. Chopin is full of it—the death of Poland—and then her soul, her songs, her hopes, her rising again. Ah, but Sorell!—I will explain. I saw him one night at a house of kind people—the master of it was the Directeur of the Ecole des Sciences Politiques—and his wife. She was so beautiful, though she was not young; and gentle, like a child; and so good. I was nothing to them—but I went to some lectures at the school, while I was still at the Conservatoire, and I used to go and play to them sometimes. So when my uncle died, they said, ‘Come and stay with us.’ I had really nobody. My father and mother died years ago. My mother, you understand, was half English; I always spoke English with her. She knew I must be a musician. That was settled when I was a child. Music is my life. But if I took it for a profession, she made me promise to see some other kinds of life first. She often said she would like me to go to Oxford. She had some old engravings of the colleges she used to show me. I am not a pauper, you see,—not at all. My family was once a very great family; and I have some money—not very much, but enough. So then Mr. Sorell and I began to talk. And I had suddenly the feeling—‘If this man will tell me what to do, I will do it.’ And then he found I was thinking of Oxford, and he said, if I came, he would be my friend, and look after me. And so he advised me to go to Marmion, because some of the tutors there were great friends of his. And that is why I went. And I have been there nearly a year.”
“And you like it?” Connie, sitting hunched on the music-stool, her chin on her hand, was thinking of Falloden’s outburst, and her own rebuff in Lathom Woods.
The boy shrugged his shoulders. He looked at Connie with his brilliant eyes, and she seemed to see that he was on the point of confiding in her, of complaining of his treatment, and then proudly checked himself.
“Oh, I like it well enough,” he said carelessly. “I am reading classics. I love Greek. There is a soul in Greek. Latin—and Rome—that is too like the Germans! Now let me play to you—something from Poland.”
He took her seat at the piano, and began to play—first in a dreamy and quiet way, passing from one plaintive folk-song to another; then gradually rising into passion, defiance, tragedy. Constance stood listening to him in amazement—entranced. Music was a natural language to her as it was to Radowitz, though her gift was so small and slight compared to his. But she understood and followed him; and there sprang up in her, as she sat turning her delicate face to the musician, that sudden, impassioned delight, that sense of fellowship with things vast and incommunicable—“exultations, agonies, and love, and man’s unconquerable mind”—which it is the glorious function of music to kindle in the human spirit.
[Illustration: ]Lady Connie had stood entranced by the playing of Radowitz
Lady Connie had stood entranced by the playing of Radowitz
The twilight darkened. Every sound in the room but Radowitz’s playing had ceased; even Mrs. Hooper had put down her newspaper. Nora, on the further side of the room, was absorbed in watching the two beautiful figures under the lamplight, the golden-haired musician and the listening girl.
Suddenly there was a noise of voices in the hall outside. The drawing-room door was thrown open, and the parlourmaid announced:
“Mr. Falloden.”
Mrs. Hooper rose hastily. Radowitz wavered in a march finale he was improvising, and looked round.
“Oh, go on!” cried Constance.
But Radowitz ceased playing. He got up, with an angry shake of his wave of hair, muttered something about “another couple of hours’ work” and closed the piano.
Constance remained sitting, as though unaware of the new arrival in the room.
“That was wonderful!” she said, with a long breath, her eyes raised to Radowitz. “Now I shall go and read Polish history!”
A resonant voice said:
“Hullo—Radowitz! Good-evening, Lady Connie. Isn’t this a scandalous time to call? But I came about the ball-tickets for next Wednesday—to ask how many your aunt wants. There seems to be an unholy rush on them.”
Connie put out a careless hand.
“How do you do? We’ve been having the most divine music! Next Wednesday? Oh, yes, I remember!” And as she recovered her hand from Falloden, she drew it across her eyes, as though trying to dispel the dream in which Radowitz’s playing had wrapped her. Then the hand dropped, and she saw the drawing-room door closing on the player.
Falloden looked down upon her with a sarcastic mouth, which, however, worked nervously.
“I’m extremely sorry to bring you down to earth. I suppose he’s awfully good.”
“It’s genius,” said Connie, breathlessly—“just that—genius! I had no idea he had such a gift.” Falloden shrugged his shoulders without reply. He threw himself into a chair beside her, his knees crossed, his hands on the topmost knee, with the finger-tips lightly touching, an attitude characteristic of him. The lamp which had been brought in to light the piano shone full upon him, and Constance perceived that, in spite of his self-confident ease of bearing, he looked haggard and pale with the long strain of the schools. Her own manner relaxed.
“Have you really done?” she asked, more graciously.
“I was in for my last paper this afternoon. I am now a free man.”
“And you’ve got your First?”
He laughed.
“That only the gods know. I may just squeak into it.”
“And now you’ve finished with Oxford?”
“Oh, dear, no! There’s a fortnight more. One keeps the best—for the last.”
“Then your people are coming up again for Commem.?” The innocence of the tone was perfect.
His sparkling eyes met hers.
“I have no domestic prospects of that sort,” he said drily. “What I shall do with this fortnight depends entirely—on one person.”
The rest of the room seemed full of a buzz of conversation which left them unobserved. Connie had taken up her large lace fan and was slowly opening and closing it. The warm pallor of her face and throat, the golden brown of her hair, the grace of her neck and shoulders, enchanted the man beside her. For three weeks he had been holding desire in check with a strong hand. The tide of it rushed back upon him, with the joy of a released force. But he knew that he must walk warily.
“Will you please give me some orders?” he went on, smiling, seeing that she did not reply. “How has the mare been behaving?”
“She is rather tame—a little too much of the sheep in her composition.”
“She wants a companion. So do I—badly. There is a little village beyond the Lathom Woods—which has a cottage—for tea—and a strawberry garden. Shall we sample it?”
Constance shook her head laughing.
“We haven’t an hour. Everybody asks us to parties, all day and all night long. London is a joke to Oxford.”
“Don’t go!” said Falloden impatiently. “I have been asked to meet you—three times—at very dull houses. But I shall go, of course, unless I can persuade you to do something more amusing.”
“Oh, dear, no! We’re in for it. But I thought people came here to read books?”
“They do read a few; but when one has done with them one feels towards them like enemies whom one has defeated—and insults. I chucked my Greek lexicon under the sofa, first thing, when I got back from the schools this afternoon.”
“Wasn’t that childish—rather? I am appalled to think how much you know.”
He laughed impatiently.
“Now one may begin to learn something. Oxford is precious little use. But it’s not worth while being beaten—in anything. Shall we say Thursday, then?—for our ride?”
Constance opened her eyes in pretended astonishment.
“After the ball? Shall I be awake? Let’s settle it on Wednesday!”
He could get no more definite promise from her, and must needs take his leave. Before he went, he asked her to keep the first four dances for him at the Marmion ball, and two supper-dances. But Constance evaded a direct assent. She would do her best. But she had promised some to Mr. Pryce, and some to Mr. Radowitz.
Falloden’s look darkened.
“You should not allow him to dance with you,” he said imperiously. “He is too eccentric. He doesn’t know how to behave; and he makes his partners conspicuous.”
Constance too had risen, and they confronted each other—she all wilfulness.
“I shall certainly dance with him!” she said, with a little determined air. “You see, I like foreign ways!”
He said good night abruptly. As he stood a few minutes on the further side of the room, making a few last arrangements as to the ball with Mrs. Hooper and Alice, Constance, still standing by the piano, and apparently chatting with Herbert Pryce, was really aware of Falloden’s every movement. His manner to her aunt was brusque and careless; and he forgot, apparently, to say good night either to Alice or Nora. Nobody in the room, as she well knew, except herself, found any pleasure in his society. Nora’s hostile face in the background was a comic study. And yet, so long as he was there, nobody could forget or overlook him; so splendid was the physical presence of the man, and so strong the impression of his personality—even in trivial things.
Meanwhile, everybody in the house had gone to bed, except Nora and her father. She had lit a little fire in his study, as the night had grown chilly; she had put a little tray with tea on it by his side, and helped him to arrange the Greats papers, in which he was still immersed, under his hand. And finally she brought his pipe and filled it for him.
“Must you sit up long, father?”
“An hour or two,” said Ewen Hooper wearily. “I wish I didn’t get so limp. But these Honour exams take it out of one. And I have to go to Winchester to-morrow.”
“For the scholarship?”
He nodded.
“Father! you work a great deal too hard—you look dog-tired!” cried Nora in distress. “Why do you do so much?”
He shook his head sadly.
“You know, darling.”
Nora did know. She knew that every pound was of importance to the household, that the temporary respite caused by the legacy from Lord Risborough and by Connie’s prepayment would very soon come to an end, and that her father seemed to be more acutely aware of the position than he had yet been. Her own cleverness, and the higher education she was steadily getting for herself enabled her to appreciate, as no one else in the family could or did, her father’s delicate scholarly gifts, which had won him his reputation in Oxford and outside. But the reputation might have been higher, if so much time had not been claimed year after year by the sheer pressure of the family creditors. With every year, Nora had grown up into a fuller understanding of her father’s tragedy; a more bitter, a more indignant understanding. They might worry through; one way or another she supposed they would worry through. But her father’s strength and genius were being sacrificed. And this child of seventeen did not see how to stop it.
After she had brought him his pipe, and he was drawing at it contentedly over the fire, she stood silent beside him, bursting with something she could not make up her mind to say. He put out an arm, as she stood beside his chair, and drew her to him.
“Dear little Trotty Veck!” It had been his pet name for her as a child. Nora, for answer, bent her head, and kissed him.
“Father”—she broke out—“I’ve got my first job!”
He looked up enquiringly.
“Mr. Hurst”—she named her English Literature tutor, a fellow of Marmion—“has got it for me. I’ve been doing some Norman-French with him; and there’s a German professor has asked him to get part of a romance copied that’s in the Bodleian—the only manuscript. And Mr. Hurst says he’ll coach me—I can easily do it—and I shall get ten pounds!”
“Well done, Trotty Veck!” Ewen Hooper smiled at her affectionately. “But won’t it interfere with your work?”
“Not a bit. It will help it. Father!—I’m going to earn a lot before long. If it only didn’t take such a long time to grow up!” said Nora impatiently. “One ought to be as old as one feels—and I feel quite twenty-one!”
Ewen Hooper shook his head.
“That’s all wrong. One should be young—and taste being young, every moment, every day that one can. I wish I’d done it—now that I’m getting old.”
“You’re not old!” cried Nora. “You’re not, father! You’re not to say it!”
And kneeling down by him, she laid her cheek against his shoulder, and put one of his long gaunt hands to her lips.
Her affection was very sweet to him, but it could not comfort him. There are few things, indeed, in which the old can be comforted by the young—the old, who know too much, both of life and themselves.
But he pulled himself together.
“Dear Trotty Veck, you must go to bed, and let me do my work. But—one moment!” He laid a hand on her shoulder, and abruptly asked her whether she thought her Cousin Constance was in love with Douglas Falloden. “Your mother’s always talking to me about it,” he said, with a wearied perplexity.
“I don’t know,” said Nora, frowning. “But I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Then I shall have to make some enquiries,” said Connie’s guardian, with resignation. “She’s a masterful young woman. But she can be very sweet when she likes. Do you see what she gave me to-day?”
He pointed to a beautiful Viennese edition of Aeschylus, in three sumptuous volumes, which had just appeared and was now lying on the Reader’s table.
Nora took it up with a cry of pleasure. She had her father’s passion for books.
“She heard me say to Sorell, apparently, that I would give my eyes for it, and couldn’t afford it. That was a week ago. And to-day, after luncheon, she stole in here like a mouse—you none of you saw or heard her—holding the books behind her—and looking as meek as milk. You would have thought she was a child, coming to say she was sorry! And she gave me the books in the prettiest way—just like her mother!—as though all the favour came from me. I’m beginning to be very fond of her. She’s so nice to your old father. I say, Nora!”—he held her again—“you and I have got to prevent her from marrying the wrong man!”
Nora shook her head, with an air of middle-aged wisdom.
“Connie will marry whomever she has a mind to!” she said firmly. “And it’s no good, father, you imagining anything else.”
Ewen Hooper laughed, released her, and sent her to bed.
The days that followed represented the latter part of the interval between the Eights and Commemoration, before Oxford plunged once more into high festival.
It was to be a brilliant Commem.; for an ex-Viceroy of India, a retired Ambassador, England’s best General, and five or six foreign men of science and letters, of rather exceptional eminence, were coming to get their honorary degrees. When Mrs. Hooper,Timesin hand, read out at the breakfast-table the names of Oxford’s expected guests, Constance Bledlow looked up in surprised amusement. It seemed the Ambassador and she were old friends; that she had sat on his knee as a baby through various Carnival processions in the Corso, showing him how to throwconfetti; and that he and Lady F. had given a dance at the Embassy for her coming-out, when Connie, at seventeen, and His Excellency—still the handsomest man in the room, despite years and gout—had danced the first waltz together, and a subsequent minuet; which—though Connie did not say so—had been the talk of Rome.
As to the ex-Viceroy, he was her father’s first cousin, and had passed through Rome on his way east, staying three or four days at the Palazzo Barberini. Constance, however, could not be induced to trouble her head about him. “He bored Mamma and me dreadfully,” she said—“he had seven pokers up his back, and was never human for a minute. I don’t want to see him at all.” Oxford, however, seemed to be of the opinion that ex-viceroys do want to see their cousins; for the Hooper party found themselves asked as a matter of course to the All Souls’ luncheon, the Vice-Chancellor’s garden-party, and to a private dinner-party in Christ Church on the day of the Encænia, at which all the new-made doctors were to be present. As for the ball-tickets for Commem. week, they poured in; and meanwhile there were endless dinner-parties, and every afternoon had its river picnic, now on the upper, now on the lower river.
It was clear, indeed, both to her relations and to Oxford in general, that Constance Bledlow was to be the heroine of the moment. She would be the “star” of Commem., as so many other pretty or charming girls had been before her. But in her case, it was no mere undergraduate success. Old and young alike agreed to praise her. Her rank inevitably gave her precedence at almost every dinner-party, Oxford society not being rich in the peerage. The host, who was often the head of a college and grey-haired, took her in; and some other University big-wig, equally mature, flanked her on the right. When she was undressing in her little room after these entertainments, she would give Annette a yawning or plaintive account of them. “You know, Annette, I never talk to anybody under fifty now!” But at the time she never failed to play her part. She was born with the wish to please, which, as every one knows, makes three parts of the art of pleasing.
Meanwhile Sorell, who was at all times a very popular man, in great request, accepted many more invitations than usual in order to see as much as he could of this triumphal progress of Lady Risborough’s daughter. Oxford society was then much more limited than now, and he and she met often. It seemed to him whenever he came across Douglas Falloden in Connie’s company during these days, that the young man’s pursuit of Constance, if it was a pursuit, was making no progress at all, and that his temper suffered accordingly. Connie’s endless engagements were constantly in the way. Sorell thought he detected once or twice that Falloden had taken steps to procure invitations to houses where Constance was expected; but when they did meet it was evident that he got but a small share of her attention.
Once Sorell saw them in what appeared intimate conversation at a Christ Church party. Falloden—who was flushed and frowning—was talking rapidly in a low voice; and Constance was listening to him with a look half soft, half mocking. Her replies seemed to irritate her companion, for they parted abruptly, Constance looking back to smile a sarcastic good-bye.
Again, on the Sunday before the Encænia, a famous high churchman preached in the University church. The church was densely crowded, and Sorell, sitting in the masters’ seats under the pulpit, saw Constance dimly, in the pews reserved for wives and families of the University doctors and masters, beneath the gallery. Immediately to her right, in the very front of the undergraduates’ gallery, he perceived the tall form and striking head of Douglas Falloden; and when the sermon was over he saw that the young man was one of the first to push his way out.
“He hopes to waylay her,” thought Sorell.
If so, he was unsuccessful. Sorell emerging with the stream into the High Street saw Connie’s black and white parasol a little ahead. Falloden was on the point of overtaking her, when Radowitz, the golden-haired, the conspicuous, crossed his path. Constance looked round, smiled, shook hands with Radowitz, and apparently not seeing Falloden in her rear, walked on, in merry talk with the beaming musician. Sorell, perhaps, was the only person who noticed the look of pale fury with which Falloden dropped out of the crowded pathway, crossed the street, and entered a smart club opposite, exclusively frequented by “bloods.”
Commem. week itself, however, would give a man in love plenty of chances. Sorell was well aware of it. Monday dawned with misty sunshine after much rain. In the Turl after luncheon, Sorell met Nora Hooper hurrying along with note-books under her arm. They turned down Brasenose Lane together, and she explained that she was on her way to the Bodleian where she was already at work on her first paid job. Her pleasure in it, and the childish airs she gave herself in regard to it, touched and amused Sorell, with whom—through the Greek lessons—she had become a great favourite.
As they parted at the doorway leading to the Bodleian, she said with a mischievous look—
“Did you know Mr. Falloden’s party is off?”
And she explained that for the following day, Falloden had arranged the most elaborate and exclusive of river-parties, with tea in the private gardens of a famous house, ten miles from Oxford. His mother and sister had been coming down for it, and he had asked other people from London.
“It was all for Connie—and Connie’s had to scratch! And Mr. Falloden has put it all off. He says his mother, Lady Laura, has a chill and can’t come, but every one knows—it’s Connie!”
She and Sorell smiled at each other. They had never had many words on the subject, but they understood each other perfectly.
“What made her scratch?” asked Sorell, wondering.
“Royalties,” said Nora shortly, with a democratic nose in air.
It appeared that a certain travelled and artistic Princess had been spending the week-end in a ducal house in the neighbourhood. So, too, had the ex-Viceroy. And hearing from him that the only daughter “of those dear Risboroughs” was at Oxford, twelve miles off, her Royal Highness, through him, had “commanded” Constance for tea under the ducal roof on Tuesday. A carriage was to be sent for her, and the ex-Viceroy undertook to convey her back to Oxford afterwards, he being due himself to dine and sleep at the Vice-Chancellor’s the night before the Encænia.
“Constance didn’t want to go a bit. She was dreadfully annoyed. But father and mother made her. So she sent a note to Mr. Falloden, and he came round. She was out, but Alice saw him. Alice says he scarcely said a word, but you could feel he was in a towering rage.”
“Poor Falloden!” said Sorell.
Nora’s eyes twinkled.
“Yes, but so good for him! I’m sure he’s always throwing over other people. Now he knows
“‘Golden lads and lasses mustLike chimney-sweepers come to dust.’”
“Vandal!” cried Sorell—“to twist such a verse!”
Nora laughed, threw him a friendly nod, and vanished up the steps of the Bodleian.
But Falloden’s hour came!
The Encænia went off magnificently. Connie, sitting beside Mrs. Hooper in the semicircle of the Sheldonian Theatre, drew the eyes of the crowd of graduates as they surged into the arena, and tantalised the undergraduates in the gallery, above the semicircle, who were well aware that the “star” was there, but could not see her. As the new doctors’ procession entered through the lane made for it by the bedells, as the whole assembly rose, and as the organ struck up, amid the clapping and shouting of the gods in the gallery, Connie and the grey-haired Ambassador, who was walking second in the red and yellow line, grinned openly at each other, while the ex-Viceroy in front, who had been agreeably flattered by the effect produced by his girl-cousin in the august circles of the day before, nodded and smiled at the young lady in the white plumes and pale mauve dress.
“Do you know my cousin, Lady Constance Bledlow?—the girl in mauve there?” he said, complacently in the ear of the Public Orator, as they stood waiting till the mingled din from the organ and the undergraduates’ gallery overhead should subside sufficiently to allow that official to begin his arduous task of introducing the doctors-elect.
The Public Orator, in a panic lest one of the Latin puns in his forthcoming address should escape him, said hurriedly—“Yes!”—and then “No”—being quite uncertain to which girl in mauve the great man referred, and far too nervous to find out. The great man smiled, and looked up blandly at the shrieking gallery overhead, wondering—as all persons in his position do wonder in each succeeding generation—whether the undergraduates were allowed to make quite such an infernal noise when he was “up.”
Meanwhile, Constance herself was only conscious of one face and figure in the crowded theatre. Falloden had borrowed a master’s gown, and as the general throng closed up behind the doctors’ procession, he took up a position in the rear, just in front of the great doors under the organ loft, which, as the day was very hot, remained unclosed. His dark head and athlete’s figure, scarcely disguised by the ampler folds of the borrowed gown, showed in picturesque relief against the grey and sunlit background of the beautiful Divinity School, which could be seen through the doorway. Constance knew that his eyes were on her; and she guessed that he was only conscious of her, as she at that moment was only conscious of him. And again that tremor, that premonition of some coming attack upon her will which she half dreaded, and half desired, swept over her. What was there in the grave and slightly frowning face that drew her through all repulsion? She studied it. Surely the brow and eyes were beautiful—shaped for high thought, and generous feeling? It was the disdainful sulky mouth, the haughty carriage of the head, that spoilt a noble aspect. Yet she had seen the mouth quiver into softness; and those broad shoulders had once stood between her and danger—possibly death. Her heart trembled. “What do you want of me?” it was asking—helplessly—of the distant man; “and can I—dare I—give it?”
Then her thoughts flew onward to the ball of the evening, for it was the night of the Marmion ball. No more escape! If she went—and nothing should prevent her from going—it would be Falloden’s evening, Falloden’s chance. She had been perfectly conscious of evading and thwarting him during the previous week. There had been some girlish mischief, but more excitement in it. Now, would he take his revenge?
Her heart beat fast. She had never yet danced with him. To-night she would feel his arm round her in the convention of the waltz. And she knew that for her it would be no convention; but something either to be passionately accepted—or impatiently endured.
Oxford went early to the Marmion ball. It was a very popular gathering. So that before ten o’clock the green quadrangle was crowded with guests waiting to see other guests come in; while the lights from the Gothic hall, and the notes of the “Blue Danube,” then in its first prime, flung out their call to youth and sex.
In they thronged—young men and maidens—a gay procession through the lawns and quadrangles, feeling the world born anew for them, and for them only, as their fathers and mothers had felt before them.
Falloden and Meyrick, with half a dozen other chosen spirits, met Constance at the entrance and while Mrs. Hooper and Alice followed, pleased against their will by the reflected fame which had fallen upon them also, the young men formed a body-guard round Constance, and escorted her like a queen to the hall.
Sorell, eagerly waiting, watched her entrance into the beautiful and spacious room, with its throng of dancers. She came in, radiant, with that aureole of popular favour floating round her, which has so much to do with the loveliness of the young. All the world smiled on her; she smiled in return; and that sarcastic self behind the smile, which Nora’s quick sense was so often conscious of, seemed to have vanished. She carried, Sorell saw, a glorious bunch of pale roses. Were they Falloden’s gift?
That Douglas Falloden danced with her repeatedly, that they sat out together through most of the supper-dances, that there was a sheltered corner in the illuminated quad, beside the Græco-Roman fountain which an archæological warden had given to the college, where, involuntarily, his troubled eyes discovered them more than once:—this at least Sorell knew, and could not help knowing. He saw that she danced twice with Radowitz, and that Falloden stood meanwhile in the doorway of the hall, twisting his black moustache, and chaffing Meyrick, yet all the time with an eye on the ballroom. And during one long disappearance, he found himself guessing that Falloden had taken her to the library for greater seclusion. Only a very few people seemed to know that the fine old room was open.
“Where is Connie?” said poor Mrs. Hooper fretfully—when three o’clock had long struck. “I can’t keep awake!”
And now a midsummer sun was rising over Oxford. The last carriage had rumbled through the streets; the last merry group of black-coated men, and girls in thin shoes and opera-cloaks had vanished. The summer dawn held the whole beautiful and silenced city in its peace.
Constance, in her dressing-gown, sat at the open window, looking out over the dewy garden, and vaguely conscious of its scents as one final touch of sweetness in a whole of pleasure which was still sending its thrill through all her pulses.
At last, she found pen and paper on her writing-table, and wrote an instruction for Annette upon it.
“Please send early for the horses. They should be here at a quarter to nine. Call me at eight. Tell Aunt Ellen that I have gone for a ride, and shall be back by eleven. It was quite a nice ball.”
Then, with a silent laugh at the last words, she took the sheet of paper, stole noiselessly out of her room, and up the stairs to Annette’s room, where she pushed the message under the door. Annette had not been well the day before, and Connie had peremptorily forbidden her to sit up.