'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 werenot 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. Butwomen 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 sodignified 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 camefrou-frouingdown 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, disdainfulway 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 downinto 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 ofthe 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 notsure 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 thattime 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 courtwatching 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 hadthe 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 dowhen 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 somebooks, 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 watchwomen. 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! Itmight 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 wereparticeps criminisin 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 Ihave 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 shecould 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. 'Ithink 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 thereand 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'tchoke 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; butIam 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 suchfaith 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; herfeet 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 andpoured 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 clingingarms 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, andshe 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 atable 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 asye 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 tookboth 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 reallythink 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 thedoctors 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 overthe 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 closeddoor 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 eyesthan 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.