Lucy had not come into Pamela Gwatkin's room by choice. She had been sent with a message from one of the Dons, and she had come under protest.
She forgot all about the message when she saw Eric.
'You here?' she said.
There was no reason why he shouldn't be here, in his sister's room. She had just received that letter from Wyatt Edgell, and she was wondering how she should answer it, and the sight of Eric seemed to bring a feeling of relief to her mind.
'Oh, I have been wanting to see you so much!' she said eagerly; she was so afraid Pamela would come in and interrupt them. 'I want to know—how—how Mr. Edgell is going on—if—if anything has happened since——'
Eric understood what she meant, though shespoke incoherently; and he understood her agitation and reluctance.
'No,' he said slowly, looking at her with a strange pity in his eyes, 'nothing has happened in that way, thank God! He is working hard; I am afraid too hard.'
'Oh, I don't think work will hurt him!' she said scornfully. She remembered how the girls worked here. What the men called 'work' was only play to them. She wasn't at all afraid that her lover would work as hard as Pamela, for instance.
'I don't mean that,' he said; 'I'm not afraid of his breaking down. I'm only afraid that when the strain is over—he—he will feel it—he——'
He was a very awkward young man; he could only stand there stammering and stuttering, while the girl looked at him with dilating eyes.
'You mean,' she said with a shiver, 'that when the strain is over he will go back to his old way—that he will not be able to withstand——'
She could not finish the sentence; there was astrange sinking at her heart—a dreadful unutterable loathing and sickness that she could not overcome—and she sank down white and trembling in a chair and covered her face with her hands. The sight of Eric had brought back that awful scene, and she was thinking of that gap in his throat; she could never get it out of her mind.
'No, no, by heaven! not that!' he said almost fiercely. 'He will never, never fall away again in that way, please God; but it is you alone that can keep him. His salvation—heaven forgive me for saying it!—is in your hands.'
'My hands?' Lucy repeated feebly.
'Yes,' he said gravely, almost sternly, 'in your hands. Your love can hold him when nothing else can; it is to him a strong tower against the face of this enemy. You must not fail him in his need.'
'A strong tower!' Lucy moaned. 'Oh, you don't know what you say! I am such a poor littlething—you don't know how weak I am. Oh, why did he choose me?'
She sat with dilated eyes and white stricken face, moaning and wringing her hands. He was very sorry for the girl, but he couldn't spare her. He was thinking of that look on Edgell's face when he had said what a woman's love could do for him.
'Why do men choose women?' he said almost harshly; 'perhaps it is fate, who can say? He loved you, or he would not have chosen you. Oh, you don't know what it is to win the love of such a man!'
'No—o!' said Lucy meekly, with her little smile—her tiny white smile—'I'm afraid I don't. I'm such a little thing! I could not have a large soul like—like Pamela. Oh, why didn't he choose Pamela?'
'It is too late to ask that question now; he has chosen you. Are you going to be true, and loyal, and put yourself aside, as some women do, or are you going to fail him at the last moment?'
It was a hard question to answer; Lucy could not have answered it if she would. How could she tell—she who had never been tried—to what great occasion she might rise? She might be a heroine yet, though she didn't look like one, sitting there weeping and wringing her hands.
'You will not fail him now; remember his future is in your hands. He will do great things with a woman by his side to encourage him to noble aims, to fire him with noble ambitions. Oh, you do not know what your love will do for him! He will have a great future with you by his side.'
Still Lucy moaned and wrung her hands.
'I shall be always afraid,' she said; 'I shall never feel safe. I shall always be thinking day and night of—of what may happen.'
'It will be your own fault if it happens. It is only your love that will keep him; if that should fail, God help him!'
'I am such a poor little thing!' she moaned.
While she was sitting weeping there, Pamelacame in, and Lucy jumped up and brushed the tears from her eyes, and puckered her little level brows, and tried to look as if she hadn't been crying. She forgot all about the message she had to give Pamela, and when the sister and brother were talking she slipped out of the room.
'What's she crying about?' Pamela asked him as Lucy closed the door behind her. 'Has anything happened to that—that Mr. Edgell? or is the Master worse?'
'The Master is no worse; but Mrs. Rae is ill, very ill,' Eric answered. He was not at all disposed to talk of Wyatt Edgell's love for Lucy to his agnostic sister.
'And Mr. Edgell, has he been having another attack? Has he been attempting suicide again?'
'Hush, Pamela!' Eric Gwatkin exclaimed almost harshly. He could not bear to hear his sister speak of Edgell in that way. 'You don't know what you are saying. That was an accident,and he had been ill. If you only knew Edgell, you would not say such things. He is the best and noblest fellow in the world, and he is the dearest friend I have.'
'They say he is to head the list this year; that he is to be Senior Wrangler,' Pamela said in her cool, contemptuous way.
'Yes, he is sure to head the list. There is no one to touch him in the 'Varsity.'
Pamela smiled.
Eric had forgotten what rumour was saying about her—that it would be a neck-and-neck race.
'He is working hard, then?' she said indifferently.
What could it matter to her if he were reading hard or raving on his couch with delirium tremens?
'Yes; he's working like a horse—like a giant, rather. He can do six days' work in one every day. No one can have any chance with him.'
Pamela didn't ask Eric to have any tea, and he went away as he came. She didn't even go to thefront door with him. She said good-bye, and sat down to the eight-legged table among her books, and left him to find his way out by himself.
He knew his way pretty well. It was not the first time he had been there. When he was nearly at the end of the first passage a door opened and a girl came out and stopped him. It was Lucy.
'I have been thinking of what you said,' she whispered, with a little break in her voice, 'and I will do what I can. Tell him from me not to work too hard; to—to take care of himself—for my sake.'
Her voice broke down entirely, and she went into the room and shut the door.
He hadn't got to the end of the passage before another door opened, and another girl's head was put out—the head of a girl with red hair. It was Maria Stubbs. She watched him to the end of the passage, and then she sniffed in her unpleasant way and went into Lucy's room.
She went in without knocking, and found Lucy on her knees. She had flung herself on her kneesbeside her couch, and was wildly imploring Heaven to make her love strong enough and tender enough to keep this man safe who trusted in her.
She looked up when Maria came in, and stumbled up from her knees, pretending she had been looking for something under the couch, as she had been pretending just now she hadn't been crying; but she didn't take in Miss Stubbs.
'Who was that man you were talking to in the passage?' Maria said bluntly. 'It didn't look like Mr. Edgell.'
'No,' Lucy said meekly; 'it wasn't Mr. Edgell. It was Pamela's brother.'
'And he brought you a message from your lover? Of course he is your lover. I like to call things by their right names. I prefer to call a spade a spade.'
'No, he didn't bring me a message,' Lucy said, with some spirit.
She wasn't always going to be trampled upon by Maria.
'But you sent a message by him. I heard you give him a message. Oh, it's no use trying to deceive me!'
'I couldn't help it—indeed I couldn't help it!' Lucy moaned; and then she sat down upon the couch beside which she had been kneeling, and began to cry.
She was feeling so dreadfully in need of sympathy and advice that she was bound to tell somebody. She couldn't bear all the burden of this terrible secret on her little weak shoulders. The great terror that haunted her would not be so dreadful to face if she could share it with another.
She told Maria Stubbs the whole story from the beginning; she kept nothing back.
Maria listened in silence to the end. Once or twice she was surprised into an exclamation, and her face grew pale beneath the freckles, and if Lucy had been looking at her she would have seen the tears gather in her eyes and Maria furtively brush them aside with the back of her hand. Shewould not have let Lucy see that she was crying for the world.
'What would you do if it were you, dear?' Lucy said with a little sob, when she had finished her tale.
'Do?' said Maria, and then she paused, and recalled the face of the man who had been waiting for Lucy in the long gallery of the lodge.
She had seen a good deal of him in those few minutes. She had seen quite enough of him to make up her mind what she should do if he were her lover instead of Lucy's.
'Do, dear?' she repeated, and her eyes beneath their pale lashes grew inexpressibly warm and tender, and her whole face softened and changed. It was plain and freckled no longer; at least, the freckles were there, but one did not notice them in that new wonderful beauty and exaltation that had come into her plain face that was plain no longer. 'I would be a strong tower to him against the face of his enemy!' And she meant it.
CHAPTER XX.
NO FOLLOWERS ALLOWED.
Lucyneglected those dear old people at the lodge shamefully. She was afraid to go to St. Benedict's lest she should meet Wyatt Edgell in the courts, or in the cloisters, or even in the gallery of the lodge itself.
They were well looked after in spite of her neglect. They would have been very badly off indeed if they had been dependent upon her. There was Cousin Mary, who was a tower of strength to everyone who trusted in her. Not a showy, pretentious tower with a flagstaff on the top, but a plain solid structure, against whose granite girth the storm of time and disaster would beat in vain.
Cousin Mary was the presiding genius at the lodge through all this sad time. She ruled the household, received the visitors—and there are always a good many callers at a college lodge in May term—and went from one sick-room to the other all day long, and often all night.
Nurse Brannan was still in attendance on the Master; it had been hard work to get the authorities of Addenbroke's to give her up so long, but the 'Heads' have a special claim upon the hospital staff.
The Master was gradually growing weaker day by day—weaker and more childish. He had forgotten already, in this short time, all that store of learning that had taken him years to collect. He had disencumbered his mind of a useless load of lumber—dry, musty old languages, Hebrew and Sanscrit and Syriac—which would be of no use where he was going. It had taken him a lifetime, a longer lifetime than most men, to accumulate it, and now, in a moment, it had been shot out in aload like useless rubbish. It had answered its purpose—it had advanced him in the world, it had won him repute and distinction, and it had made some money; and now, when its end was served, when it was only an encumbrance, it had all been shot down.
Perhaps other minds would pick it up, would select from the heap the things that were best worth preserving, and so the lamp of learning would be handed on to another generation.
Lucy came upon the Master once in one of her rare visits to the lodge—it was during the hours set apart for the Tripos Examination, when Wyatt Edgell would be away—and found Nurse Brannan reading to him.
She had opened the door softly and come in unobserved, and the curtains of the big, old-fashioned four-post bedstead concealed her from view. Nurse Brannan was reading the Bible to him. She was reading a parable; the words and the imagery took hold of him more than precept andpromise; he had been expounding them all his life, and they had dropped from him with those other things.
She was reading the parables of the Lost Piece of Silver and the Prodigal Son, and every now and then she would stop and explain. She had a good deal to say about them, and the old Master listened meekly.
It quite took Lucy's breath away to hear that little bit of a nurse explaining the parables to the Master of St. Benedict's. He had preached hundreds of sermons in the college chapel from that very chapter; it had always been a favourite subject with him. It had always had a fitting application to those fresh young minds in the benches beneath him that were perennially engaged in wasting their substance in riotous living. He had read it in every ancient tongue in which it had ever been written. And now a little nurse-girl, who couldn't even keep her hair tidy, was explaining it to him.
'Yes,' he was saying in his slow, quaveringvoice; it was weaker now than when Lucy last heard it faltering over those closing words in the Litany in the college chapel—'yes, I mind it quite well. I heard it when I was a boy standing at my mother's knee. She was a poor woman; she would have searched for it all night if she had lost a piece of silver, she would not have rested till she had found it. I was the youngest of all her sons, and when she read that chapter to me as a boy standing there, I used to think that I was the Prodigal, and that by-and-by, when I had wasted all my substance in a far country, I should come back like the Prodigal to my father's house, and ask to be taken in. I've been wanting to go back a long time, my dear; I'm getting tired and old, and I should like to go back. Do you think he would take me in?'
'We will see what the Prodigal's father did when he went back,' said the nurse; and then she read in her soft, slow, earnest voice the concluding words of the old, sweet story.
Nurse Brannan had a wonderful power in reading God's Word, giving by tone and accent a new bearing to the familiar words of Scripture. Lucy had heard the words hundreds of times before, and had hurried over them in her scrambling way of reading her morning portion; but to-day they seemed to convey a special message. She stood there, behind the curtain, while Nurse Brannan read and the old Master listened.
'It seems very clear,' he said, when she had finished. 'It seems just as my mother said. I will arise and go to my Father—I have nowhere else to go—I have changed a good deal in all these years, but—but He would not be likely to change——'
'No,' said Nurse Brannan; 'He has not changed!'
Lucy's tears were dropping fast; she could not trust herself to go in. She crept softly out of the room and shut the door, and went across the landing to Mrs. Rae's room.
The Master's wife was always glad to see Lucy; she gave her better accounts of the Master than anyone else in the household. She looked up when Lucy came in, and noted with her failing eyes, instinctively sharpened by love, that Lucy had been crying.
'Have you seen the Master?' she asked, with a little catch in her voice.
'Yes, oh yes! he is better to-day, and giving the nurse quite a discourse upon the parables. You remember what lovely sermons he used to preach upon the parables?'
The Master's wife smiled; she remembered every word of them. They were her comfort and stay now, those old sermons of the Master's; they made the way quite clear before her; they removed all the difficulties. She would have been shocked if she had known that that nurse from Addenbroke's had been so presumptuous as to attempt to explain the parables he knew so much about to the Master.
'You must get me a volume of his sermons, mydear—his first sermons; I may have forgotten some of them; and Mary shall read them. It will not be like hearing his voice, but—it—it will bring back something of the old time.'
Lucy stayed longer than she had intended at the lodge. She had only reckoned to look in and pay a short visit to each sick-room, and have a chat with Cousin Mary, and go away; but she had to go to the Master's library and fetch that volume of sermons before she went.
The Senior Tutor was sitting down in the Master's place at the Master's writing-table, answering the Master's letters, when Lucy went into the library. It would be his own place soon. He usually came over to the lodge for an hour in the afternoon now, and attended to whatever college business there might be to attend to, and look through the Master's college correspondence. He used to go through it with Mary once, when she opened the Master's letters; now he went through it alone.
He rose when Lucy came in, and made her sit down in her old seat by the window. He wanted her to talk about herself. He was sure she missed his help; she would never be able to pass the Little-go without some more lessons.
They taught beautifully at Newnham. They teach conscientiously at women's colleges: they don't believe in tips and short-cuts, and mere getting up of likely passages; they plod industriously through the dull, dreary round. The Senior Tutor didn't believe in Lucy's plodding; he would have liked to give her a tip or two.
Lucy declined to talk about herself; she was full of the dear old people upstairs, and the affecting scene she had witnessed in the Master's room.
'He is getting weaker every day, in body as well as mind,' the Tutor said thoughtfully. 'He has not had nearly such good nights lately.'
Unconsciously he was keeping a barometric measure of the Master's increasing weakness. Itis not an ennobling thing to wait for dead men's shoes.
'No-o,' said Lucy, 'but I hope she will go first;' and then she burst into tears. 'Oh, I don't know how we shall tell her that he is gone!'
'Do you think at her age she would feel it so keenly? The separation could not be long.'
'Oh, you don't know what her love is. It seems only to have grown with the years.'
The Tutor sighed, and looked out of the window into the garden beneath, and his thoughts wandered away to a time long past, when such a love might have been his. Perhaps his fancy had gone back to a brown-haired girl, who had waited for him until her face had grown wan and her eyes sad with waiting, and who had not had Mrs. Rae's patience. Well, she would have been old and florid and stout now, and her sweet face—it was sweet once—would have been seamed and wrinkled with the cares of, oh, so many children!
Well, it was just as well as it was. The Tutorrecalled his wandering thoughts, and looked at Lucy.
She was quite worth looking at as she sat in the window-seat. Her face was graver and sadder, and her eyes were steadier, and her lips were not so loose as they once were. It is astonishing how girls' lips tighten after six months in a women's college. Perhaps this is due to their difficulties with mathematics, and to the anxiety that ethics and Latin prose give them, to say nothing of modern languages and natural science.
She had certainly grown more womanly since she had been at Newnham: that added seriousness supplied just the charm that was lacking. Perhaps it was quite as well that brown-haired girl had not waited.
'Do you think you could love anyone so long, Lucy?' he said presently.
It was not the words, but the voice in which he said them, that made Lucy look up and her face grow warm beneath his eyes. She was dreadfullyangry with herself for blushing. It was quite idiotic for a girl to turn as red as a poppy when a man old enough to be her father addressed her.
She shook her head.
'Not a man you loved very much, Lucy? Mrs. Rae must have loved the Master dearly for her love to have lasted so long. I'm afraid to say how many years she waited for him.' And again the Tutor sighed: that brown-haired girl had soon grown sick of waiting.
Again Lucy shook her head.
'I am not like the Master's wife,' she said.
She was thinking of Wyatt Edgell. Why would men make such large demands upon a woman? All women were not made on such large lines. Why would they not be content with a little reasonable love—the calm, steady flame that would burn very well if nothing happened to put it out? What more could they want?
'I think you would make quite as good a Master's wife,' he said, bending over her with that warmlight in his eyes that had brought the poppy-colour to her cheeks; and he had taken her hand. 'I think your love will be quite as well worth winning. I hope yours will be as happy a life, dear Lucy, as hers, and that it will be crowned with a fuller and more perfect joy——'
There is no knowing what would have happened if Lucy had not at that moment suddenly remembered that Mrs. Rae was waiting for the book of sermons she had sent her to fetch. She snatched her hand away from the Senior Tutor's just in time, and made a hurried excuse that Mrs. Rae was waiting for her to read to her; and she took the first volume of the Master's sermons she found on the shelf, and ran out of the room.
She could hardly trust herself to read to Mrs. Rae. She made a dreadful mess of her favourite sermon. Whatever other talents she had developed at Newnham, she had not developed a talent for reading sermons. It brought the tears into the dear woman's eyes to hear her; she thought of thekind voice that was so sweet to her ears, that she had last heard breathing those well-remembered words, and she turned her worn white face to the pillow to hide her tears.
'You are sure the Master is no worse to-day?' she said to Lucy as she came away.
'Oh yes, quite sure. He was preaching quite a sermon to nurse on the Prodigal's return.'
Lucy was just in time as she hurried out of the college gate to meet the men coming in from the examination.
They were looking worn and tired, and some were looking glum, and others had assumed an air of cheerfulness that sat ill on their anxious faces. One or two had the examination papers in their hands, and were adding up with their friends the questions they had scored off. The process did not seem to give them unmixed satisfaction.
Lucy thought that her lover must already have passed through the court, as he was not among the crowd at the gate, and she was congratulating herself on having escaped him, when she saw him coming across the road.
She couldn't run away; she was obliged to stop in the face of all those men at the college gate and shake hands with him. She wasn't at all sure he would not take her in his arms before them all. There was no saying what he would do. He never did anything like other men; he did not measure the world and its customs with the impulse of the moment. Was not the world made for him?
Wyatt Edgell didn't take her in his arms, and he didn't kiss her in the face of all the men assembled at the college gate, but he walked back by her side to Newnham.
'Well,' she said eagerly, 'and how have you done?'
He was glad to see she was flushed and eager; he didn't know it was the fear of what he was going to do that had moved her and heightened her colour.
'I have been thinking about you every day,' hesaid. 'If I have not done well it will be your fault, not mine.'
She would much rather he had been thinking about his work, but she did not say so.
'It is nearly over,' she said, with a little catch in her voice; 'only one day more. What will you do when it is over, when you have nothing more to work for?'
'I shall come to you for my reward.' His eyes were blazing down upon her with a sudden heat of passion that made her tremble. 'I shall come to-morrow night, after the exam. is finished. I shall come to the old place in the lane.'
He did not tell her that he had been there every morning of the week.
'It is so hard to get out of nights,' she said. 'We are not expected to go out after Hall.'
He stopped in the middle of the path and laughed.
'Ah!' he said. 'No lovers allowed, and all that sort of thing; no whispering beneath the moon.Never mind, my dear; if they won't let you whisper beneath the moon, I've no objection to lamplight. If you must not meet me in the lane, Lucy, I shall come up to the front-door.'
'Oh, I'm sure that will never do!' she said, almost tearfully; she was dreadfully afraid he would keep his word. 'They wouldn't let you come in, I'm sure. You are not a brother—or—or a cousin——'
'No, my dear, thank God! I am neither of these undesirable things. I am a lover—my darling's own true lover!'
'Then I'm quite sure they won't admit you!' Lucy said very decidedly. 'Lovers are not even mentioned in the rules.'
'Well,' he said, shrugging his shoulders. They were such handsome, manly shoulders. They didn't stoop, or droop, they were not round or misshapen, or one an inch higher than the other, like so many scholars' shoulders. They were broad, and square, and manly, and they had the strength of a giant.He rowed five in his college boat, and was the best 'forward' in the 'Varsity football team. 'Well,' he said, looking down at the girl's dainty profile, and the curve of her soft cheek, and the dimple in her chin—he had looked at them afar off across the benches in the college chapel every Sunday since Lucy had first come up—'well, my dear, if they won't admit me at the front-door, I must find some other way. "Love laughs at locksmiths."'
He was still looking down at her profile—it was not very far off now, it was very near his shoulder—and he had possessed himself of her hand, when three girls came slowly up to the gate where they were standing.
Lucy saw Pamela's face a long way off, and her heart sank within her. She remembered suddenly that she was late for tea, and she snatched her hand away, and ran hurriedly down the path, and left him standing there to meet Pamela, and Maria Stubbs, and one of the younger Dons who had a deeply-rooted prejudice against lovers.
CHAPTER XXI.
A BLOW TO NEWNHAM.
Lucysaw no more of Pamela until after Hall. She thought she had escaped—quite escaped. After all, Pamela had not seen much; she had only seen Wyatt Edgell talking to her at the gate. Other girls talked to men at the gate—brothers, cousins, even coaches sometimes—when they had anything particular to say that couldn't wait for the proper opportunity, but lovers never.
It had gone so far that Lucy was obliged to admit that he was a lover. She admitted with a sigh what other girls—what Pamela Gwatkin, what Maria Stubbs—would have given anything—everything, even renounced the higher culture—to have been able to admit.
Capability Stubbs was walking with Pamela when they came across the lovers at the gate of Newnham. Capability took in the whole scene in a moment: perhaps she took in rather more. She coloured it with her own vivid imagination; she surrounded it with an atmosphere entirely her own. There was not a detail in the picture that was not brought out distinctly by this mental process and stamped upon her memory.
She was thinking about it all the time she was at Hall. She had no appetite for her dinner. She couldn't get the picture of the lovers parting at the gate out of her eyes. She sat staring across the soup, and the entrée, and the gooseberry-tart, at the white wall opposite. Perhaps it was all photographed there: the manly figure with the great square shoulders; they were stooping now, and the head was bent—it was almost touching Lucy's hair—and his eyes were looking into hers,and his lips were smiling——Pah! what is the use of describing the lips of another girl's lover?
Miss Stubbs broke off abruptly, and began to press the gooseberry-tart upon her neighbour. She had quite forgotten until now that it was her duty to look after Pamela. All the girls who go in for a Tripos are under special surveillance during the time of their examination, and a keeper is deputed to watch over them and see that they take their food properly and go to bed at ten o'clock. It was Maria Stubbs' duty to look after Pamela. The soup had gone by and the meat, and she had never once thought about her charge. Perhaps she hadn't eaten a morsel. She was looking white and hollow-eyed, and had that starved appearance peculiar to scholars whose brains absorb all the material intended for the body. She did not look as if she had eaten a good dinner, as if she had gone conscientiously through themenu. In point of fact, Pamela had only trifled with her plate, and finding that her keeper was not watching, hadnot eaten a morsel, and now there was only the gooseberry-pie left.
Maria Stubbs pressed the pie upon her with tears in her eyes. She entreated her, if she valued her place in the Tripos, if the honour of Newnham was dear to her, to partake of that pie; but Pamela was not to be persuaded.
Conscience-stricken, Maria got up from the table and retired to her room. Half an hour later she emerged from it with a tray, and hurried down the corridor to Pamela's door. She didn't find her working as she expected—it was the very last night for work; to-morrow the examination would be over. She found her sitting at the window looking out at the sunset.
Pamela was not generally fond of sunsets, and she never sat at the window like other girls. She had no time to spare for sunsets, and she preferred the Windsor chair at her writing-table to any other chair in the room. It was empty now, and her books were closed, and her papers were all puttidily away. She had quite done with them, and she was looking out of the window.
Maria put down the cup of cocoa and the cake she had brought on a little table by Pamela's side, and watched her while she took it. She took it obediently. It was less trouble to take it than refuse it, but she didn't put any heart in it.
'It will all be over soon, dear,' Maria said by way of encouragement.
'Yes,' Pamela said wearily, and she looked out at the white gate which someone had left open. Perhaps she was thinking that she would soon pass through it, and her life here would be ended.
Maria looked in the same direction; but the gate brought something else to her mind, and she forgot all about Pamela and the cocoa.
'Oh, the pity of it!' she murmured; and her eyes lingered on the spot where Wyatt Edgell had last stood.
'The pity of what?' Pamela said impatiently.She was nervous, irritable, over-strung, and everything jarred upon her.
'Nothing, dear, nothing,' Maria said soothingly. 'I was only thinking of the man that girl is fooling. Oh, what idiots men are! Fancy a man—a real man, not a fool—throwing himself away upon that pink-and-white baby!'
Pamela was listening with an abstracted air, but the colour crept up under her skin, and her lip curled.
'You mean the St. Benedict's man?' she said, smiling with a sort of contempt.
'Yes; the man that was talking to her at the gate. Oh, Pamela, did you see his face?'
'Ye—e—s; I saw his face. I have often seen him before. He is Eric's friend. I have known him ever since he has been up.'
'He has known you—you, Pamela—for years, and yet he has chosen her?'
'There is no accounting for taste—at least, for men's taste,' Pamela said scornfully; but she didnot look at the girl she was speaking to; she looked out at the sunset.
'I tell you what it is,' Miss Stubbs said with an air of conviction. 'He has been dreaming all his life about the ideal woman, and what his fancy has painted her; and with this myth, this creation of his own heated imagination in his mind, he has met this—this baby, and he has invested her with all the attributes of his ideal. It isn't Lucy Rae he's in love with; it's the ideal woman that he has been all his life imagining.'
Pamela smiled in a dreary way, but she still watched the sunset.
'Perhaps the circumstances—the very unusual circumstances—under which he first met her had something to do with it,' Maria went on in a lower voice. She was thinking of that scene in St. Benedict's that Lucy had described to her. 'Oh, you don't know what a meeting it was, Pam!'
'Yes,' said Pamela, with a little break in hervoice, 'I know what it must have been to her; but no one can tell what it was to him.'
'You have heard, then! How did you hear?' Maria asked breathlessly.
'She told me. She told me the first night; she could not sleep, and I found her wandering about the corridor in a panic of fear.'
'Did she tell you all—quite all?'
'She told me everything,' Pamela said; and again her lips quivered.
'Has she told you she has promised to marry him?'
'No, she has not told me that,' Pamela said with that rising tell-tale colour in her cheeks, and a hard steely light in her gray-blue eyes, which were no longer watching the sunset; 'but I don't think she will marry him.'
'I am sure she will not marry him,' said Maria hotly; 'she will fool him and ruin his life. She is too great a coward to marry him!'
'She would be a brave woman to marry him,knowing what she knows,' Pamela said with the hot blood in her face again; 'but I don't think she will spoil his life.'
'Oh, you don't know! How should you know, you who are made on such large lines? He has placed the keeping of his life—think of it: of his life, body and soul!—in her hands. He believes that nothing but the love of a woman can save him; and he has implored her—that poor thing—to be a tower of strength to him.'
'Her!' Pamela murmured with her scornful lips, and the rising colour in her face.
'Yes, dear, he has askedher. He has made the mistake that men always do make: he has asked the wrong woman. He ought to have asked you or me. I don't think we should have failed him, Pam. We should not stop at the tower; we should have gone down—down into the mud and the mire. There is no depth so deep where our love would not have followed him, and we should have lifted him up. I am quite sure we should have lifted him up; weshould have dragged him out of the very jaws of death and hell itself, if we had perished in doing it. Oh, I am sure that our love would have saved him! We should not have stopped at the tower.'
Maria stopped, not at the tower, but for want of breath. The red sunset light had quite faded out of the sky, and the gray night was closing in, and already the shadows were filling the silent room.
Pamela drew back from the window into the shadow.
'No,' she said hoarsely, 'we should not have stopped at the tower.'
The next day was the last, the very last, day of the examination for the Mathematical Tripos. It was the last, the very last, opportunity of making up for all the failures and mistakes of the past week. The front place of the year was to be won or lost on that last day. Its result would be final, quite final.
No wonder Maria Stubbs' conscience smote her when she remembered how she had neglectedPamela at Hall the previous day. She tried to make up for it at breakfast. She plied her with eggs and ham and porridge, but Pamela had no appetite for these dainties; she implored her with tears in her eyes to consume at least a spoonful of porridge, but Pamela was not to be moved. She went fasting to the exam., and Maria went with her so far as the door. She went quite early—girls always do go earlier than the men; they are always in their places, calm and collected, five minutes before the time, when the men generally arrive breathless at the door just as the hour is striking.
As Pamela walked up King's Parade in the sweet June sunshine, Wyatt Edgell passed her on the way from St. Benedict's to the Senate House. He was swinging along at a great pace, with the bearing of a man who was assured of an easy victory. His eyes were shining and his lips were smiling as they had smiled at Lucy. He had no eyes for any other woman; he passed the Newnham girlswithout seeing them. His mind was full of the ideal woman who had promised to meet him in the lane when the exam. was over.
Maria Stubbs remembered the tower, and flushed scarlet; but Pamela shivered. She was looking dreadfully pale when Maria left her at the door. She would have liked to have gone in with her and sat by her side and held her pens, or picked up the blotting-paper, or collected her papers; but the examiners were inexorable, and Maria came sadly away.
Pamela pulled off her gloves and glanced over her paper; it was about as nice a paper as the last day's paper of the Mathematical Tripos usually is. There were several questions that Pamela had got at her fingers' ends; they would have puzzled the men, doubtless, but to a Newnham girl, who had worked for her Tripos as conscientiously as Pamela had worked, they were a mere bagatelle. She pulled off her gloves and glanced over her paper, and began work in the quiet, methodical way inwhich the students of women's colleges take their examinations. There was no heat, no excitement, no hurry whatever, nothing to disturb or bewilder.
She ought to have done uncommonly well with those nicely fitting questions; but instead of working she sat staring at her paper. The examiner, walking up and down the room, between the tables, noticed her abstraction. Once he paused and asked her if she was not feeling well; and then suddenly it dawned upon her that the time was going on, and that she had not yet begun. She had never felt it so hard to begin before; she had never felt that strange reluctance, like a clog upon her memory, that made the wheels of that fine bit of machinery drag heavily.
The reluctance—it was nothing more—grew and grew upon her. The questions were quite easy; she could have answered them with the smallest effort, but her mind refused to grapple with them.
It was like bringing a horse to the water; the water was cool and delightful, and it had only tostoop and drink; but it would not stoop. Pamela could do nothing as she sat there with the time slipping by but think of the man she had met in King's Parade, and wonder how he was getting on at the Senate House over the way with the paper that lay before her. She followed his progress question by question, and when she had come to the end of the paper she gave a sigh of relief—a big sigh, for the examiner who was at the other end of the room heard it, and the girls sitting opposite heard it and looked up.
They saw a very common sight in an examination-room—a girl with a gray dead face slipping off a chair to the floor. Pamela had fainted.
They brought her to, somehow, though everybody was begrudging the time she spent upon her; and then somebody took her back in a fly to Newnham.
It was an awful blow to Newnham. Everybody reproached Maria Stubbs. She hadn't half looked after her. Nothing that anybody said hurt poorMaria like the prickings of her own conscience. She was guilty in the matter of that last Hall. She had forgotten all about her charge until the gooseberry-pie!
She nursed Pamela tenderly all through that wretched day. She did what she could to atone for her past neglect. She brought her little messes of Liebig and arrowroot every hour; she watched beside her with the patient fidelity of a dog, while Pamela would have given worlds to be left alone in her darkened room. She locked the door against her officious nurse once, when she had gone out to fetch the everlasting beef-tea, and Maria made such a ridiculous noise outside, that threatened to bring all the Dons upon her, that she was obliged to get up and open it again. There was nothing to be done but to turn her face to the wall, and let the faithful creature potter about her to her heart's content.
CHAPTER XXII.
READING THE LISTS.
Itwas the oddest state of things that can be imagined at Newnham all through that next week. The order of everything was reversed. It had been all work—real, desperate work—now it was all play.
It was hard work enough to get through the days. The exams. were all over. There was nothing for the girls to do but to wait with what patience Heaven had given them for the lists to be out. Some of them were already quite indifferent to the lists, and when the strain was over had gone to bed, like Pamela, and turned their faces to the wall. Others had locked their doors and gonethrough their papers over and over again, and had made up their minds exactly where they should be placed when the lists came out. Some, more wise than the rest, had put their papers in the fire, and relieved their overburdened minds with large doses of fiction.
There was not a book opened in Newnham through all that week but yellow-backs. Annabel Crewe declared that she had read eleven before the week was half out, and a Natural Science girl had discovered that an infallible method for distracting one's thoughts from 'ologies' was to keep three sensational novels going at once.
One by one the Tripos lists came out, and the girls who had gone to bed for good thought better of it, and got up again, and came down to be congratulated, and admired, and made much of. The foolish virgins who had burnt their papers, and behaved with corresponding frivolity through all their University career, received the due reward of their folly, and were snubbed and condoled with inthe most approved fashion. If one is down one must expect to be sat upon, or what would be the advantage of success?
The women's colleges had nothing to complain of. They had more than one first-class in every Tripos. They had beaten the men on their own ground; they had not only kept their place, but they were coming more and more to the front every year. They will win their degrees soon. Already the opinion of the Senate is equally divided; very soon the balance will be in their favour, and then all things will be possible.
The list of the Mathematical Tripos is read out last of all. It is not read until May Week has well begun, when the boat-races are half over, and the college concerts are in full swing, and picnics on the river and luncheons in college rooms are the order of the day.
The list is read out inside the Senate House, as befits the dignity of the occasion; but this particular year it was rumoured that the lists wouldbe read out from the steps. Some distinguished visitors were expected at noon, and the Senate, in their zeal for the encouragement of learning and other virtues, were about to confer upon them Degrees of Honour, and the Senate House was full of carpenters preparing for the auspicious occasion.
Half an hour before the appointed time for reading the list the girls of Girton and Newnham and the men from every college in Cambridge assembled on the clean-shaven lawn before the south door of the Senate House. It was a glorious June morning, and the crowd could afford to wait. Having waited so long, they could wait a few minutes longer. To some those few minutes were a boon; the delay enabled them to pull themselves together, and bear with what courage and resignation they could call to their aid the fateful verdict they would presently hear read out.
The girls were more impatient than the men. They had reached the spot a quarter of an hour earlier, and had secured all the front places.They crowded the steps of the Senate House to the very doors, and they filled the broad path beneath the windows. A cool, compact, delightful crowd—a bevy, one might almost say—a bit of bright refreshing colour amid the rusty gowns and limp, disreputable caps of the undergraduates.
But the lists were not read out from the steps, and the girls crowded round the Senate House doors in vain. When it wanted a few minutes to the hour a window was opened just above the heads of the girls on the path, and a man looked out. He wore an M.A. hood, and there was a Proctor hiding away behind him in a white tie. The men sent up a shout and a howl—a shout for the examiner and a howl for the Proctor, who happened to be unpopular. The faces of the girls who had crowded up the steps and round the doors fell. They had expected to be in the very best place, and they were quite out of it. They could look on the eager faces of the men below them and the girls in the crowd, if this was any compensation. They could see how vainly the men strove to hide their anxiety beneath a veil of indifference or careless hilarity, and how the girls made no pretence at all of concealing their feelings, but looked as if they would like to tear that bland little examiner at the window limb from limb.
Among the girls who thirsted for his blood was Maria Stubbs. She had come quite early—one of the first—and she had settled herself on the top step just outside the Senate House door, and she awaited with devouring anxiety the reading of the list. It was not her list; it was Pamela Gwatkin's list. She had left her at Newnham in bed, with the curtains drawn to keep out the daylight, and she had taken away her watch, that the dreaded hour should not disturb her, and she had gone in at the last moment, and found her broad awake, with her weary eyes watching the door. She need not have troubled herself to take away the watch. Pamela knew the time to a second. She had beencounting the hours all the night, and now she was counting the minutes.
'You are going to the Senate House?' she said, looking up. 'You needn't hurry back. I know exactly where I am.'
'We all know where you ought to be,' Maria said, hanging her head. 'The men would have been nowhere if it hadn't been for my wicked neglect!'
She was so angry with Lucy for being the innocent cause of her preoccupation that she wouldn't let her walk with her to the Senate House. She would hardly let her stand on the steps beside her, but Lucy wasn't to be pushed aside. She had as much interest in the list that was about to be read as Miss Stubbs.
There were a great many mothers and fathers and sisters and cousins there of the men whose names would presently be read out, and there might have been some sweethearts present; but there was not a single girl in all that crowd ofsweet young English womanhood that did not envy Lucy.
'Time, sir, time!' the men shouted, and the examiner smiled benignly down on the crowd beneath.
'Time! time!'
How eager the men were! They couldn't all be Senior Wranglers!
Perhaps there were not many expectant Senior Wranglers there. It is not often that a man whose name is on every lip has the courage to face the ordeal. There is always a chance of disappointment. Wyatt Edgell was not among the crowd. Lucy must have seen him from her elevated place on the steps as she looked down at the upturned faces of the men, had he been there. Eric Gwatkin was close beneath the window among a crowd of St. Benedict's men, but Edgell was not among them.
'Time! time!' the men shouted, but the examiner only smiled and looked at his watch.
The minute-hand of the clock of great St. Mary's had travelled round to within a few seconds of the hour. A Proctor who was standing near the examiner, with the list in his hand, looked down at the crowd of undergraduates beneath with an eye to business, and took down the names of the men who were making a row.
It was the unpopular Proctor, and at the sight of his unwelcome face at the window the crowd beneath set up a groan, and in the midst of the groan the clock of the University church struck nine.
'Time!'
It was time indeed. The examiner opened the list, and held up his hand for silence. The men were still groaning as he read out the first name on the list:
'Senior Wrangler—Wyatt Edgell, St. Benedict's.'
The St. Benedict's men set up a great shout, and Eric Gwatkin waved his cap in a ridiculous manner. Lucy would have liked to wave her hat, too, shewas so absurdly elated. She hadn't thought what a great thing it was to be Senior Wrangler until she saw how the crowd applauded. She quite flushed with triumph; it was her victory—hers! If it had not been for her, her lover would not have thought the prize worth winning. He had won it for her sake!
She was so proud and happy she did not hear another name in the list. What did the disappointment of others matter to her? Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were dancing with triumph. Oh, it was a proud thing to have a lover a Senior Wrangler!
Pamela Gwatkin was only equal to fifth—fifth Wrangler—and when Maria Stubbs went down the steps of the Senate House Lucy saw she had tears in her eyes. Of course, she was crying for Pamela's defeat. As if Pamela could have had any chance against her lover!
Lucy ran nearly all the way back to St. Benedict's. She wanted to be the first to congratulateher lover. Fast as she ran, Eric Gwatkin was there before her.
There was a strange hush in the outer court as she entered the college gate. There was no shouting like she had heard in the street and in the Senate House yard. There was a strange, ominous silence. The men were standing about the court in knots, and the porter was talking to a little group of men at the gate.
Lucy's heart sank within her. Had anything happened to the Master or Mrs. Rae? She thought the men looked at her with a strange kind of pity as she passed through the court, and they took off their caps as she passed. It was quite an ovation. Her lover was Senior Wrangler. She was quite in a flutter of pride and expectation; still, her heart sank within her.
Eric Gwatkin met her in the cloister; he was hurrying across to the lodge. She thought he was coming to tell her. What else should he come to the lodge for? The Master was past telling.
'Oh!' she cried, running to meet him, 'how does he bear it? You have told him——'
She paused, and her voice faltered with the question on her lips. Eric's face was white and anxious, and he was not smiling. He was not the least like the man who was waving his cap under the window of the Senate House.
'You have not heard——' he said.
'Heard what?' she cried impatiently. 'Is the Master——'
'No—no,' he interrupted; 'it is not that—it is not the Master.'
'It is Mrs. Rae?' she said, with a chill feeling at her heart. She was sure something had happened.
'No, it is not Mrs. Rae. Oh, Miss Lucy! how can I tell you?'
'It ishe!' she said in a stricken voice, and with that dreadful feeling at her heart. 'Oh! what has he done?'
She was standing wringing her hands in themiddle of the cloisters, and the men were passing through, and everyone could see her.
'Hush!' Eric said almost harshly; 'he has not done anything—at least, he has only done what others do at this time. There was a bump supper last night, and—and Wyatt was there; and when Mr. Colville went in this morning to tell him of his great success, he was on the floor in one of his old attacks. It is all over the college, and everybody is dreadfully shocked—that is all!'
'All!' Lucy said bitterly. 'You speak as if the shame and exposure were nothing. Oh, I shall never be able to face it!' She only thought of herself.
Eric Gwatkin was very sorry for her. He would have spared her if he could. It was better for her to hear it from his lips than from others.
'He has done great things,' he said. 'It was enough to turn anybody's head. He will go down in a day or two, and the temptation will not occur again. You do not know—how should you?—howgreat the temptation is—what a supreme moment this is in a man's life!'
'No,' Lucy said, with a shiver, 'I do not know.'
They had reached the door of the lodge while they were talking together, and Eric had rung the bell.
'Why do you ring?' she said sharply.
He hung his head.
'I came over to see if Nurse Brannan can be spared for a few minutes,' he said guiltily.
'Is he so bad as that?' Lucy asked; but she did not offer to go to him.
'Ye—es; he is very bad. Mr. Colville is with him, and he thought that the nurse ought to be with him until the doctor comes.'
'You have sent for a doctor?'
'Yes; the Tutor has sent for a doctor, and—and he has noticed that scar.'
'And you have told him?'
'Yes; I have told him. How could I help it?'
Lucy went into the lodge covered with shame and humiliation. She was so proud and happywhen she entered the college gate. She had made up her mind to tell Cousin Mary all about her engagement. She was going to her to be congratulated—to be envied and congratulated by everybody in Cambridge. Now she wouldn't have owned it for the world. How lucky she hadn't told Mary!
CHAPTER XXIII.
'GOING DOWN.'
Itwas rather hard to spare Nurse Brannan on this particular morning; harder than usual. The Master had passed a bad night; he had not slept at all, and he was decidedly weaker. He had been wandering all through the night, and he was still wandering feebly when Lucy came into his room in the morning. He had been going over the old scenes of his youth; he had been travelling back to the sweet green fields and the hills and valleys of his earliest recollections.
When Lucy came into the room he was propped up in bed, babbling about the old scenes and the oldplaces. The blind was drawn up, and the June sunshine poured into the room. Nurse Brannan never denied her patients sunshine. 'Let them have it while they may,' she used to say; 'they will have no need of it by-and-by.' The sun was shining into the room now, and on to the bed, and on to the face of the old Master.
Lucy had not seen him for several days; she had been busy with her examinations, and she was struck with the change in him—an indefinable change that sharpened his rugged features as if a chisel had been passed over them. They were rugged still, but with an added nobleness, and there was a light upon them that Lucy had not seen there before. His dim blue eyes were looking up at the window, and he did not see her come in the room. They were looking with that shining light in them above the gray battlements of the old court to the bright bit of blue sky beyond.
'I think he can be safely left,' Lucy said; 'he isvery quiet. I will stay with him till you come back. You must not be long; I have an examination at ten o'clock. You must not stay more than half an hour.'
Nurse Brannan promised to come back within the half-hour, and Lucy took her place beside the bed. She had a dim idea that she ought to have gone herself to Wyatt Edgell in his humiliation, not have sent a hired nurse, but she put the thought away from her. It was not a real engagement, she told herself. She had only consented to it to give him a motive for work. He could not hold her to it now; no one could expect her to be bound by a promise given under such conditions. How lucky it was that no one at St. Benedict's knew of her engagement!
The Master would not let her thoughts wander long. His hands were feebly groping about the coverlet of the bed, and Lucy saw that he was making an effort to get up.
'No, dear Master,' she said; 'no, I wouldn't getup yet. I would wait till nurse comes back; she will be here soon.'
'I was going to meet her, my dear,' he said; 'I have been travelling all night. I came by the coach to the cross-roads; it is a long journey from Cambridge, and I am very tired. I thought it would never end, and the morning was slow in breaking. It broke at last; I never saw a finer sunrise, a higher dawn. The coach put me down at the cross-roads; I had nothing to carry—I had left everything behind—and I have been walking over the hills since daybreak. It's wonderful how little they have changed: I knew every field and hedge on the way; and the old trees and the mile-stones in the road, I knew them every one; and the broken cross in the churchyard, and the old gray tower. The tower looks taller now than it used to, and the vane was shining in the sunlight as I came along; I could see it a long way off, gleaming like gold, and pointing the way.'
The old Master paused for want of breath; hehad worn himself quite out. He lay back on the pillow, with the sunshine streaming on his worn face. Lucy could not help noticing how shining it was—shining like the old vane.
'Strange,' he went on presently, talking to himself in a lower tone—'strange! the cross was there, and the church, and the tower, and the old elms in the yard, and the rooks cawing in the branches—I knew the cawing of those old rooks again—but I could not find the Vicarage gate.'
Lucy was beginning to get impatient. Nurse Brannan ought to be back by this time. Her examination would begin in a quarter of an hour. She didn't care anything about that Vicarage gate; there was nobody waiting for her at the gate.
The Senior Tutor came in while she was fuming and fretting about the time.
'I thought you would want to get away,' he said to Lucy, 'so I came over to sit with the Master. We can't spare Nurse Brannan just yet.'
Cousin Mary came in, too, just after him; shegenerally came into the room a minute or two after the Senior Tutor. She had not been able to come in before, she was in such close attendance on the Master's wife. Mrs. Rae had had a restless night, but had just fallen asleep, so Mary had stolen away.
'This is a dreadful thing about Mr. Edgell,' she said. 'The college was so proud of him; it will be a terrible blow.'
'Yes,' said the Tutor; 'it will be a great blow. It is unfortunate it should have happened just now; it will get so talked about.'
He was thinking of the credit of the college, not of Wyatt Edgell.
'What will he do?'
'Oh, he will go down with his friends. I have telegraphed for them; they will be here by noon; and when he can be moved they will take him away. It appears this is not the first time. He attempted suicide the other day; I saw the mark on his throat——'
Lucy did not wait to hear any more. She ran away as fast as she could, and left Cousin Mary and the Tutor talking by the Master's bedside.
They took no notice of her. They did not even look at her. Oh, if they had only known!
Wyatt Edgell's people came at noon. Lucy saw them crossing the old court when she came back from her examination—an elderly man with a striking resemblance to her lover, and a tall stately woman with a pale beautiful patrician face.
They ought to have been proud and happy people. This should have been a red-letter day in their lives—a day of thankfulness and congratulations and unutterable joy; a day when the tears come with the smiles, and the glad words falter on the lip, and there is a strange catch in the voice, and a dimness before the eyes, when the most eloquent speech begins and ends with a 'God bless you, my boy!' uttered in a very shaky voice.
There were no congratulations to-day and nosmiles. If there were tears no one saw them—only a hard break in the voice when Wyatt Edgell's mother thanked the Tutor for his interest in her son. She didn't even look at Lucy as she passed. Something in the rustle of her rich trailing skirts as they swept over the stones of the court brought to the mind of the Master's niece those old stories the Master was so fond of telling—of the stall in the butter-market, and the meeting of her grandfather with her high-spirited ancestress in the dancing-booth at the fair.
It was quite as well that nobody knew about that engagement.
Lucy had another examination in the afternoon—her last. She hastily swallowed some cold luncheon that was laid for her at the end of the long dining-table at the lodge. There was no one present but herself. Mrs. Rae was not so well, and Cousin Mary had a tray carried up into her room, and Nurse Brannan could not leave the Master.
Lucy had no appetite for the solitary meal. Something was choking in her throat all the time she sat at the table, and she could not swallow anything.
She looked in at the Master's room before she went off to her exam. He was still searching for the Vicarage gate. Mrs. Rae was asleep or dozing; she did not appear to notice her when Lucy opened the door of her room. Cousin Mary was still with her—she seldom left her now—and she was looking tired and worn out for want of rest. It did not occur to Lucy to offer to take her place; besides, she had to go to her exam.
'I can "go down" to-night, dear, if you like,' she said to Mary, before she went away, 'if I can be of any use here. A lot of the girls have "gone down" to-day. Term is quite over. I can either come home to-day or Monday, which you think best.'
'Nurse Brannan has not been to bed for a week,' Cousin Mary said wearily, 'and—and I'm afraid Iam getting worn out; but you must do as you like.'
Lucy went off to her exam.; but for all the good she did she might just as well have stayed away. She was very sorry for those old people at the lodge, but what else could be expected at their age? She was more distressed about her lover. Nurse Brannan had stayed with him until the paroxysm had abated, and he had sunk into a deep sleep.
He would probably awake from it, the doctor who had been called in said, not very much the worse for the carouse, and unconscious—quite unconscious—of what had happened.
What would he do when he awoke? Lucy was pondering this question in her mind all the time she was in for her exam., when she ought to have been occupied with the questions on the paper before her. She hadn't answered it when she got back to Newnham. She had only gone back to pick up some things she needed and to get herexeat, or go through the ceremony that takes the place of anexeatat a college for women.