AFTER CHAPEL.
The day succeeding the debate was Sunday, and Lucy went over to St.
Benedict's to morning chapel.
She was so glad to go. It was quite a relief to get outside Newnham
and shake from her skirts the atmosphere of so much learning. It was a
distinct relief to take her place in the stalls of St. Benedict's and
look down upon the men who took life so much more easily.
She was only just in time for the college chapel. The bell was going
as she crossed the court, and the men were hurrying in in their white
surplices. They were all smiling and debonair. There wasn't a single
cloud on the brow of one of them, except the cloud of last night's
tobacco. They were lusty and strong and fresh-coloured, and some of
them had frames like giants; and they came across the court with a
swinging stride, and health and life and vigour in every movement. Men
take things so much more easily than women.
The choir and the Master came in directly after Lucy had taken her
seat. The Master looked across his wife and Mary, who sat between them,
and nodded to Lucy.
'Very glad to see you, my dear,' he said in quite an audible voice.
It was a longer service than usual at St. Benedict's on Sunday
mornings. The Master read the Litany, and he took a long time in
reading it, and Lucy had plenty of opportunity of looking among the men
for Pamela Gwatkin's brother.
He was a twin brother, she had learned from Annabel Crewe, who knew all
about Pamela, and therefore he ought to be exactly like her. Tall and
fair and thin-lipped, with clear, steady eyes--blue ought to be the
colour, or gray, she was not sure which; but she could not mistake the
profile. There could be no doubt about that clear-cut face, without an
ounce of superfluous flesh upon it.
Lucy looked at the men eagerly one after the other; she looked at
every man in the chapel. The Senior Tutor from his stall on the other
side saw her looking down at the men. She didn't look at him, and he
wondered at the change in her. Her eyes were not wont to rove over the
faces of the men sitting below in that eager way; they might have all
been sticks and stones for the notice Lucy had hitherto vouchsafed them.
Was this the outcome of a week at Newnham? Had she seen so much--so
very, very much--of women in her new developments that she was
thirsting for the sight of man?
Cousin Mary saw her looking down at the undergraduates in the seat
below, too, and sighed. She remembered the time when she used to look
across the benches. She had seen so many generations of undergraduates
come and go in fifteen years. She may have looked more than once in all
that time to see if among them there was that one face that was to be
her beacon through life; she had ceased to look for it now.
Lucy had decided before she left the chapel that the man in the third
row near the top was Pamela's brother. A tall man with a thin, fair,
fresh-coloured face and firm lips--a capable face, a face quite worthy
of the brother of Pamela Gwatkin.
Lucy watched the men file out of chapel, and the man in the last seat
of the last row naturally came out last. She refused to go into the
lodge with Mary. She let the old Master and his wife toddle off down
the cloisters together, and she stood holding Mary back and begging her
to wait 'just a minute.'
The man in the back seat came out at last and took off his cap to the
Master's nieces as he passed.
'There!' said Lucy breathlessly, 'this is the man I waited for. Is he
Eric Gwatkin?'
'Eric Gwatkin!' Mary repeated impatiently; she objected to being kept
standing in the court watching the men come out of chapel; she could
see them every day--twice a day if she liked--and she had seen them for
fifteen years. 'Eric Gwatkin?' she repeated. 'The man who has just come
out is Wyatt Edgell, the best man of the year. He will take a very high
place in the Tripos--perhaps the highest--and Eric Gwatkin is only a
Poll man. He is taking the theological Special, I believe, and I dare
say he will be plucked.'
'Oh, I am sure there is some mistake!' Lucy said hotly; 'Pamela's
brother never could be plucked. She is awfully clever, and--and he is a
twin.'
Cousin Mary didn't take the least interest in Pamela's brother; even
the fact of his being a twin didn't move her. She went into the lodge
and looked after the table that was spread for lunch. She altered the
arrangement of the flowers, and put some finishing touches to it, and
Lucy stood beside the window that overlooked the court watching her.
She couldn't help pitying Mary for being interested in such small
things, for being taken up with such petty cares. She had lived in the
midst of culture for fifteen years, and yet she could potter about that
dinner-table and be absorbed in the arrangement of the flowers.
'I am very glad to see you, my dear,' the old Master said to Lucy when
she had dutifully kissed him and whispered to her aunt how well he was
looking--the sure key to that dear, kind, simple heart was to tell
her how well the Master was looking. It would be a sad day when those
welcome words could no longer be said.
'And how is the Greek getting on, my dear? Who would have thought of my
brother Dick's daughter learning Greek? She didn't get the taste for it
from her father, for he was no scholar. He was good only for his own
work, none better. There was not a man in the parish who could drive
a straighter furrow than my brother Dick, and his wife was famous for
her poultry. I remember her carrying her butter and eggs to market. She
had the corner stall in the old butter market, my dear. I mind the
very spot.'
'It was my grandmother, or great-grandmother, rather,' said Lucy,
feebly trying to set him right. 'Mamma never kept a stall in the butter
market.'
'Never mind which it was,' said the Senior Tutor, who had just come in,
and was shaking hands with Lucy; 'a generation or two doesn't matter.'
It didn't matter to him, who knew all the homely details of the
Master's humble history; but suppose he were to go maundering about
that stall in the butter market to Pamela Gwatkin, it would be all over
Newnham that it was Lucy's mother, and that Lucy herself used to milk
the cows. With such a pedigree there was no excuse for her tumbling off
a milking-stool.
If Lucy hadn't been so full of her own concerns that she had no eyes
for others, she would have seen the reason for Cousin Mary's anxiety
about the dinner-table. The Senior Tutor was coming to dinner.
The lunch, or rather the dinner--for it was a real dinner; except on
state occasions, the old Master dined in the middle of the day--was
spread in the dining-room of the lodge--an old, old room panelled up
to the ceiling with dark oak, with a delightful carved frieze running
round the top, and a big oriel window with diamond panes and stained
glass coats-of-arms of the old Masters who had occupied the lodge since
it was first built, centuries ago.
There were portraits of some of them in their scarlet gowns on the
walls, looking down upon them as they sat at meat. It was a ghostly
company, so many old Masters, and soon there would be another to hang
among them. He was painted already, and hanging in the gallery outside;
he would come in here soon, and take his place, not at the table, but
on the walls with the rest.
Perhaps the Senior Tutor was thinking of that not far-off time as he
lay back in his chair glancing up at the dingy old walls that wanted
beeswaxing dreadfully. There would be plenty for him to do when his
time came. There had been nothing done here for years. He would have to
go right through the house; he hardly knew where he should begin.
And then Lucy broke in upon his pleasant reverie, and asked him about
Eric Gwatkin.
'Gwatkin?' said the Tutor absently. He was just considering whether he
should have the oak varnished or beeswaxed. 'Ye--e--s; he's going in
for his Special, but I don't think he'll get through.'
'Only his Special!' Lucy hadn't got through her Little-go yet, but she
regarded the Special from the Newnham standpoint. No woman has ever
yet descended so low as a Special. 'His sister is one of the cleverest
girls at Newnham. She has already taken a first in one Tripos, and now
she is working for another. She is sure to take a double-first. He is
her twin brother, and I'm sure she expects great things of him.'
'Then I'm very sorry for Miss Gwatkin,' the Tutor said with a laugh.
'If he gets through it's as much as he will do.'
He declined to have anything more to say about Pamela's unpromising
brother; and he talked to Lucy until the ladies left the table about
her life at Newnham, and the progress she was making with her work.
The old Master did not sit long over his wine; it had come to one glass
now after dinner--one glass of that old, old wine that had already lain
a dozen years in the darkness of the college cellar when he had come
up a raw scholar to St. Benedict's. It did him quite as much good as a
dozen glasses of a less generous vintage. It brought a warm flush into
his wrinkled cheeks, and a light into his dim eyes, and stirred the
slow blood circling round his heart, and it sent him to sleep to dream
again of the old time, and to win afresh the laurels of his youth.
While the Master sat nodding in his big chair on one side of the wide
fireplace, where a fire was still burning, and his faithful partner sat
nodding on the other side, Lucy slipped out of the room.
She was only going to the old study to find some books, but she had to
pass through the picture-gallery to reach it. The gallery of the lodge
of St. Benedict's was very much like the galleries of most college
lodges, only it was narrower--a long, low, narrow old room extending
the length of one side of the cloistered court. It had been built
when the cloisters beneath had been built, and it had suffered few
changes since. The walls were panelled to the ceiling with oak, and
it was lighted with deep, old-fashioned bay-windows; not particularly
well lighted, as the diamond panes were darkened with painted arms of
founders and benefactors, and old, dead and forgotten Fellows. The
walls of the long gallery were hung with portraits from end to end.
They began in the right-hand corner by the door in the fourteenth
century--flat, angular, awful presentments of men and women whose
names are household words in Cambridge, and they went on and on until
it seemed that they would never cease. The walls were so full that it
would be difficult to find room for another Fellow.
Lucy paused on her way to the study, and looked round with quite a new
feeling on these old painted faces. They represented something to her
to-day that they had not represented before.
She began dimly to understand what had made Cambridge the power it
is in the land. It was these still faces looking down from the walls
who had built up this great Cambridge. It was the men, after all, the
patient men of old, whose toil had accomplished so much; and now the
women were entering into their labours.
There were not many portraits at Newnham; it was only in its infancy.
There would be plenty by-and-by. Lucy ran over in her mind the women
whose portraits would hang upon those white walls between the windows.
She could not in that brief retrospect think of any who were doing such
great work that they would earn that distinction, only Pamela Gwatkin.
She was sure Pamela would one day hang on the walls. She would be an
old woman then, most likely, a lean, wrinkled, hard-visaged old woman,
with gray hair and spectacles, and she would have a big book beside
her--a book she had written or explained--and she would wear--what
would she wear?
She would have gone quite bald by that time, like the old Fellows
on the walls; her head would be bald and shining. She would wear it
covered, of course, with--with a scholar's cap, with a long tassel
depending over her nose, or a velvet Doctor's cap, which would be more
becoming, and she would wear a scarlet Doctor's gown and hood. The
picture would look lovely on the white walls of Newnham.
Lucy had just settled to her satisfaction how Pamela Gwatkin was to be
handed down by a future Herkomer to another generation, when the Senior
Tutor entered the gallery.
He, too, had been thinking. He hadn't been paying any attention to what
Mary Rae had been talking about while the Master took his after-dinner
nap; his thoughts were with Lucy in the gallery. He had watched her
narrowly at dinner, and he had detected a change in her. He was used
to watching men, and now he had begun to watch women. He remarked
that her eyes were no longer soft; they were hard and eager, and had a
hunted look in them. He knew the look; he had seen it in boys come up
fresh from school--not brilliant boys from the sixth form of big public
schools, but frank, fresh-faced fellows who had come up from country
parsonages. He had seen the look on their faces when the work was new
to them and the strain had begun to tell upon them. They lost it after
a term or two when they bossed their lectures, and drifted away with
the stream, or broke down, and went back to the country parsonages, and
never came up again.
He had seen this hunted look on boys' faces, but he had never seen it
on a girl's face before. He wasn't sure if it wouldn't be well to take
Lucy away before she broke down. She would never want the mathematics
she was getting up with such labour for the Little-go; she would be
able to add up the butcher's book quite as well without. As the future
mistress of the lodge--it had really come to that; he had ceased to
think about Mary, and he had almost unconsciously put Lucy in her
place--he would have liked her to have the prestige of Newnham, and,
considering her humble antecedents, it was quite as well that she
should win her spurs. She had pluck enough, if her strength would only
hold out. She was a brave little thing; he had never seen a girl so
brave. The Little-go examinations would soon be over, and then, if the
result was satisfactory, he would speak. She would have quite culture
enough after the Little-go--quite enough to condone even the stall in
the butter market.
'I think you had better let me coach you for the exam.,' he said, as
they talked about her mathematics; 'for the Additionals, at any rate,
you'll find the dynamics and the statics rather stiff.'
'Ye--es,' Lucy said with a sigh; 'they are dreadfully stiff.'
'When will you come to me? Will you come here, or shall I come up to
Newnham?'
'Oh no, no! It would never do to come to Newnham!'
Lucy turned quite pale at the suggestion.
'You have male lecturers,' said the college Don with a laugh. 'The
difference would be that I should only be lecturing one girl instead of
six.'
'I'm sure it wouldn't do; I'm sure Miss Wrayburne would object. I would
rather, if you don't mind, come to you,' Lucy said meekly.
'Come, by all means. You had better come to my rooms; there will be
less interruption than at the lodge. I can give you four hours a week,
but it must be in the afternoon. When will you begin?'
Lucy was quite ready to begin at once. She settled to go to the Tutor's
rooms the very next day. She didn't even think of consulting Cousin
Mary about the arrangement, or the Master, or the Master's wife. She
had already made a distinct advance; she had decided for herself; she
had engaged a University coach, and arranged to spend four hours a week
alone with him in his college rooms. The woman of the future could not
do more.