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