I
That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford
station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in
tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly
up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine,
they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood
on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique
station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to
the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.
At the door of the first-class waiting-room, aloof and venerable, stood
the Warden of Judas. An ebon pillar of tradition seemed he, in his garb
of old-fashioned cleric. Aloft, between the wide brim of his silk hat
and the white extent of his shirt-front, appeared those eyes which
hawks, that nose which eagles, had often envied. He supported his years
on an ebon stick. He alone was worthy of the background.
Came a whistle from the distance. The breast of an engine was descried,
and a long train curving after it, under a flight of smoke. It grew
and grew. Louder and louder, its noise foreran it. It became a furious,
enormous monster, and, with an instinct for safety, all men receded
from the platform’s margin. (Yet came there with it, unknown to them,
a danger far more terrible than itself.) Into the station it came
blustering, with cloud and clangour. Ere it had yet stopped, the door of
one carriage flew open, and from it, in a white travelling dress, in a
toque a-twinkle with fine diamonds, a lithe and radiant creature slipped
nimbly down to the platform.
A cynosure indeed! A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many
hearts lost to her. The Warden of Judas himself had mounted on his nose
a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Him espying, the nymph darted in his
direction. The throng made way for her. She was at his side.
“Grandpapa!” she cried, and kissed the old man on either cheek. (Not a
youth there but would have bartered fifty years of his future for that
salute.)
“My dear Zuleika,” he said, “welcome to Oxford! Have you no luggage?”
“Heaps!” she answered. “And a maid who will find it.”
“Then,” said the Warden, “let us drive straight to College.” He offered
her his arm, and they proceeded slowly to the entrance. She chatted
gaily, blushing not in the long avenue of eyes she passed through. All
the youths, under her spell, were now quite oblivious of the relatives
they had come to meet. Parents, sisters, cousins, ran unclaimed about
the platform. Undutiful, all the youths were forming a serried suite to
their enchantress. In silence they followed her. They saw her leap into
the Warden’s landau, they saw the Warden seat himself upon her left. Nor
was it until the landau was lost to sight that they turned--how slowly,
and with how bad a grace!--to look for their relatives.
Through those slums which connect Oxford with the world, the landau
rolled on towards Judas. Not many youths occurred, for nearly all--it
was the Monday of Eights Week--were down by the river, cheering the
crews. There did, however, come spurring by, on a polo-pony, a very
splendid youth. His straw hat was encircled with a riband of blue and
white, and he raised it to the Warden.
“That,” said the Warden, “is the Duke of Dorset, a member of my College.
He dines at my table to-night.”
Zuleika, turning to regard his Grace, saw that he had not reined in and
was not even glancing back at her over his shoulder. She gave a little
start of dismay, but scarcely had her lips pouted ere they curved to a
smile--a smile with no malice in its corners.
As the landau rolled into “the Corn,” another youth--a pedestrian, and
very different--saluted the Warden. He wore a black jacket, rusty and
amorphous. His trousers were too short, and he himself was too short:
almost a dwarf. His face was as plain as his gait was undistinguished.
He squinted behind spectacles.
“And who is that?” asked Zuleika.
A deep flush overspread the cheek of the Warden. “That,” he said, “is
also a member of Judas. His name, I believe, is Noaks.”
“Is he dining with us to-night?” asked Zuleika.
“Certainly not,” said the Warden. “Most decidedly not.”
Noaks, unlike the Duke, had stopped for an ardent retrospect. He gazed
till the landau was out of his short sight; then, sighing, resumed his
solitary walk.
The landau was rolling into “the Broad,” over that ground which had once
blackened under the fagots lit for Latimer and Ridley. It rolled past
the portals of Balliol and of Trinity, past the Ashmolean. From those
pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high
grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in
the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The
inanimate had little charm for her.
A moment later, a certain old don emerged from Blackwell’s, where he had
been buying books. Looking across the road, he saw, to his amazement,
great beads of perspiration glistening on the brows of those Emperors.
He trembled, and hurried away. That evening, in Common Room, he told
what he had seen; and no amount of polite scepticism would convince him
that it was but the hallucination of one who had been reading too much
Mommsen. He persisted that he had seen what he described. It was not
until two days had elapsed that some credence was accorded him.
Yes, as the landau rolled by, sweat started from the brows of the
Emperors. They, at least, foresaw the peril that was overhanging Oxford,
and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be remembered to
their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently of them. In their
lives we know, they were infamous, some of them--“nihil non commiserunt
stupri, saevitiae, impietatis.” But are they too little punished, after
all? Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to heat and frost,
to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they
are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty
and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants,
they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even
with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for
the Twelve Apostles. It is but a little way down the road that the two
Bishops perished for their faith, and even now we do never pass the spot
without a tear for them. Yet how quickly they died in the flames! To
these Emperors, for whom none weeps, time will give no surcease. Surely,
it is sign of some grace in them that they rejoiced not, this bright
afternoon, in the evil that was to befall the city of their penance.