LUCY'S SECRET.
Lucy felt dreadfully guilty all through that wretched evening. If she
had assisted in a murder she couldn't have felt worse.
She had no appetite for dinner, and when she went back to her room,
what was still more unusual, she had no appetite for her work. A
Newnham girl is a gourmand where work is concerned; she may leave her
meals untasted, but that terrible craving within creates an appetite
that is akin to ravenous where work is concerned. When that craving
ceases she goes down--or breaks down.
It had ceased quite suddenly with Lucy; she hated the very thought
of work; she loathed with an unutterable loathing the sight of those
mathematical books she had brought back from St. Benedict's. She
shrank from them with a dreadful sense of faintness and sickness when
she attempted to open them. They smelt of blood, or else she fancied
they did.
The air was full of fancies. It was a stormy night, and the wind was
wailing round her corner of the building, and every now and then a
sharp blast of driving rain would strike upon her window. She heard the
rain distinctly dropping down the pane like tears, and she fancied--oh,
it was a dreadful fancy!--that it was drops of blood.
She bore it in that lonely room as long as she could, and then she got
up and went out into the passage. The lights were out, and the place
was quite still; everybody had gone to bed. Dark and deserted as the
corridor was, it was not so lonely as her own room. There were girls
sleeping behind every one of those closed doors. She heard them--for
the ventilators of most were open--breathing audibly, and some were
moaning in their sleep.
Lucy walked up and down the long corridor; her feet were bare, and she
had thrown nothing over her shoulders. Cousin Mary would have scolded
her dreadfully if she had seen her, with her white garments trailing on
the stone floor.
She never thought of the draughts or the cold stones; she only thought
of getting away from that everlasting drip, drip of the window-pane,
that brought the scene of the afternoon so vividly before her. She was
nervous and overwrought, and she was burdened with a secret she ought
never to have bound herself to keep.
Wild horses shouldn't tear it from her, she told herself, as she paced
up and down that draughty passage. Whatever happened, she would be
true to her word. It would be hard if a girl couldn't be trusted as
well as a man. What was the use of coming to Newnham if gossip and
emptiness--the habits of the slave--still had dominion over her?
It was all very fine and high-sounding; but she would have given the
world to have told somebody, to have eased her overburdened mind and
poured out the dreadful story on some soft feminine, sympathetic bosom.
And then, while she was telling herself all these fine things, and
repeating Lord Tennyson's nice verses about that open fountain that was
to wash away all those silly human things and make woman perfect--quite
perfect--a strange thing happened.
She heard the voice of the man praying. He was praying now; she heard
him quite distinctly, but she could not catch the words. She was quite
sure it was the voice; it had sunk down so deep into her ears that she
could never forget it. Lucy paused in the darkness and listened. The
voice came from a room at the door of which she was standing. She had
no idea, in the darkness, whose room it was; she was only sure--quite
sure--of the voice.
An overpowering desire to see the speaker--perhaps to get her
release--seized her, and she opened the door of the room.
There was no man there praying; there was only a girl sitting reading
by the light of a shaded lamp, and she was reading aloud. It was
Pamela Gwatkin, and she was reading a Greek play.
Lucy went a few paces into the room and stood there as if spellbound,
listening to the girlish voice, in low solemn accents, mouthing the
rhythmic Greek. She didn't read it as if it were Wordsworth, or Cowper,
or Keats, or even Tennyson; she mouthed it; and the noble words,
falling in noble cadence, brought back the voice of the man wrestling
with God for his friend.
Pamela heard the door open, and she looked up. She didn't divide the
shuddering night with a shrill-edged shriek, and bring all Newnham
about her, as she might have done at the sight of the white-robed
figure standing in the doorway. She thought it was a girl walking in
her sleep, and she got up softly and went towards her.
For a moment, as she came forward, she saw the figure swaying in
the doorway, and as she came nearer Lucy tottered forward with her
arms out-stretched like one walking in a dream, and fell upon her
bosom--literally fell, with her clinging arms around her, and her head
pillowed on Pamela's bosom.
'Oh, it is Eric Gwatkin!' she sobbed, 'it is Eric Gwatkin!'
Pamela got her over to the couch--it was a bed now, not a couch; the
serge rug had been removed, and a snowy coverlet was in its place,
and a real pillow, not a sham roundabout bolster covered with an
embroidered dragon.
Pamela Gwatkin laid the girl down on her own bed and covered her up.
She was shaking dreadfully, and her hands and feet were like ice, and
she was sobbing hysterically.
When Pamela had covered her up, she shut the door of the room; it
was no good making a scene and arousing everybody, because a girl--a
little weak-minded fresher--had broken down under the strain and got
hysterical. All girls get hysterical at times, only the stronger ones
lock the door and wrestle with the enemy in secret.
'Oh, Eric Gwatkin!' moaned the girl on the bed. 'I can't keep it any
longer; I must tell!'
'What have you got to do with Eric Gwatkin?' Pamela asked severely.
'I am sure he is nothing to you; he is never likely to be anything to
anybody.'
'Oh yes, he is! He is everything to--to Wyatt Edgell. He has saved his
life. Oh, you don't know what he is to him!'
'Saved his life? What are you talking about? What has Wyatt Edgell got
to do with you, and with Eric?'
'_He sewed it up_--the wound--the dreadful gaping wound!'
Lucy covered her eyes with her hands to shut out the dreadful sight,
and she was trembling so dreadfully that the bed shook with her.
Clearly the girl was in a fever, and her mind was wandering. The name
of Wyatt Edgell was familiar to Pamela; it was familiar to everybody in
Cambridge. He was the coming Senior Wrangler. What could Eric have to
do with him--poor Eric, who was grinding for his 'Special'?
'What wound?' said Pamela impatiently; 'and who sewed it up?'
'Eric sewed it up, and I helped him. I drew the edges together, while
he put the needle in the quivering flesh. Oh, it was horrible!'
Lucy sank back on the couch, and her lips grew pale, and her cheeks
gray, and Pamela thought she was going to faint. She hadn't got
anything but eau-de-Cologne to give her--not a nip of brandy for the
world; not even a pocket flask is allowed at Newnham. She went to the
water-jug and poured out some water in a basin, and dabbed it over the
girl's face and hands, and made her own bed streaming. Perhaps there
was something in the girl's story, after all! She couldn't have dreamed
these hideous details.
'Where was the wound? how had he hurt himself?' she asked presently.
'He had cut his throat.'
Pamela let the basin of water she was holding fall on the floor. She
didn't scream as any less well-regulated mind would have done, but she
let the basin slip out of her hands, and the water made a dreadful mess
on the floor.
'Cut his throat?' she repeated faintly--she was nearly as white as
Lucy--'and Eric----'
'Eric sewed it up.'
'Is--is he dead?'
She asked the question hoarsely, in a voice Lucy couldn't have
recognised for Pamela's, but she was past noticing voices.
'No--o; Eric has asked God to give him back his life, that he may begin
it afresh.'
'What use is that?' said Pamela bitterly.
'I am sure God heard him--we were praying for him when the nurse came
in. He was asking that the nurse might be sent quickly, and she came
while the words were on his lips.'
'Of course the nurse would be sent; you can get a nurse at any moment
from Addenbroke's without praying for one.'
'Oh, you don't understand!' Lucy moaned; 'you don't know the worst. It
had to be done secretly: no one must know. It would ruin him for life
if it were known.'
'You don't mean that they haven't told anyone? that they are trying to
hush it up, and not let the tutors know?'
Lucy moaned.
'Oh, what folly is this! I am sure Eric is at the bottom of it.'
'Yes; it was Eric made me promise I wouldn't tell, and I have told
you,' Lucy murmured helplessly.
'Of course you have told me. Having told me so much, you must tell me
all--you must keep nothing back.'
And so Lucy sat up in the bed with her arms round Pamela--she couldn't
have told her without having something to cling to--and told her her
wretched little story, and how she had pledged herself to keep this
young man's secret.
'What do you think I ought to do?' she asked weakly, when the recital
was finished.
'Do?' said Pamela, but she didn't answer the girl's question. She
disengaged herself from her clinging arms, and she paced up and down
the room, her feet dabbling in the water on the floor. She stopped
presently in her walk, her chin up, and her face set with the light of
a high resolve upon it towards the light that was breaking in at the
east window; she might have been reciting that Greek play. 'Do?' she
repeated, and her face was hard and cold and tired. The old weary look
had come back to it--no wonder; it was three o'clock in the morning.
'Do? Why, go to bed, of course!'
She refused to say another word about Lucy's secret. She helped her
back to her room, and put her to bed, and tucked her in, and drew back
the curtains, that the light of the new day might drive away the ghosts
of the night.
Pamela did all this without speaking a word; but when she got to the
door of Lucy's room she stopped and looked back. She could see from the
tremulous motion of the clothes that the girl was weeping, and she went
over to the bed and put her cool lips to Lucy's forehead.
'Good-night, dear!' she said softly. 'I think you have behaved
beautifully!'