Stroke by stroke, the great familiar monody of that incomparable curfew
rose and fell in the stillness.
Nothing of Oxford lingers more surely than it in the memory of Oxford
men; and to one revisiting these groves nothing is more eloquent of that
scrupulous historic economy whereby his own particular past is utilised
as the general present and future. “All’s as it was, all’s as it will
be,” says Great Tom; and that is what he stubbornly said on the evening
I here record.
Stroke by measured and leisured stroke, the old euphonious clangour
pervaded Oxford, spreading out over the meadows, along the river,
audible in Iffley. But to the dim groups gathering and dispersing on
either bank, and to the silent workers in the boats, the bell’s message
came softened, equivocal; came as a requiem for these dead.
Over the closed gates of Iffley lock, the water gushed down, eager for
the sacrament of the sea. Among the supine in the field hard by, there
was one whose breast bore a faint-gleaming star. And bending over him,
looking down at him with much love and pity in her eyes, was the shade
of Nellie O’Mora, that “fairest witch,” to whose memory he had to-day
atoned.
And yonder, “sitting upon the river-bank o’ergrown,” with questioning
eyes, was another shade, more habituated to these haunts--the shade
known so well to bathers “in the abandoned lasher,” and to dancers
“around the Fyfield elm in May.” At the bell’s final stroke, the Scholar
Gipsy rose, letting fall on the water his gathered wild-flowers, and
passed towards Cumnor.
And now, duly, throughout Oxford, the gates of the Colleges were closed,
and closed were the doors of the lodging-houses. Every night, for many
years, at this hour precisely, Mrs. Batch had come out from her kitchen,
to turn the key in the front-door. The function had long ago become
automatic. To-night, however, it was the cue for further tears. These
did not cease at her return to the kitchen, where she had gathered
about her some sympathetic neighbours--women of her own age and
kind, capacious of tragedy; women who might be relied on; founts of
ejaculation, wells of surmise, downpours of remembered premonitions.
With his elbows on the kitchen table, and his knuckles to his brow, sat
Clarence, intent on belated “prep.” Even an eye-witness of disaster may
pall if he repeat his story too often. Clarence had noted in the last
recital that he was losing his hold on his audience. So now he sat
committing to memory the names of the cantons of Switzerland, and waving
aside with a harsh gesture such questions as were still put to him by
the women.
Katie had sought refuge in the need for “putting the gentlemen’s rooms
straight,” against the arrival of the two families to-morrow. Duster
in hand, and by the light of a single candle that barely survived the
draught from the open window, she moved to and fro about the Duke’s
room, a wan and listless figure, casting queerest shadows on the
ceiling. There were other candles that she might have lit, but this
ambiguous gloom suited her sullen humour. Yes, I am sorry to say, Katie
was sullen. She had not ceased to mourn the Duke; but it was even more
anger than grief that she felt at his dying. She was as sure as ever
that he had not loved Miss Dobson; but this only made it the more
outrageous that he had died because of her. What was there in this woman
that men should so demean themselves for her? Katie, as you know, had at
first been unaffected by the death of the undergraduates at large. But,
because they too had died for Zuleika, she was bitterly incensed against
them now. What could they have admired in such a woman? She didn’t even
look like a lady. Katie caught the dim reflection of herself in the
mirror. She took the candle from the table, and examined the reflection
closely. She was sure she was just as pretty as Miss Dobson. It was only
the clothes that made the difference--the clothes and the behaviour.
Katie threw back her head, and smiled brilliantly, hand on hip. She
nodded reassuringly at herself; and the black pearl and the pink danced
a duet. She put the candle down, and undid her hair, roughly parting
it on one side, and letting it sweep down over the further eyebrow. She
fixed it in that fashion, and posed accordingly. Now! But gradually her
smile relaxed, and a mist came to her eyes. For she had to admit that
even so, after all, she hadn’t just that something which somehow Miss
Dobson had. She put away from her the hasty dream she had had of a whole
future generation of undergraduates drowning themselves, every one, in
honour of her. She went wearily on with her work.
Presently, after a last look round, she went up the creaking stairs, to
do Mr. Noaks’ room.
She found on the table that screed which her mother had recited so often
this evening. She put it in the waste-paper basket.
Also on the table were a lexicon, a Thucydides, and some note-books.
These she took and shelved without a tear for the closed labours they
bore witness to.
The next disorder that met her eye was one that gave her pause--seemed,
indeed, to transfix her.
Mr. Noaks had never, since he came to lodge here, possessed more than
one pair of boots. This fact had been for her a lasting source of
annoyance; for it meant that she had to polish Mr. Noaks’ boots always
in the early morning, when there were so many other things to be done,
instead of choosing her own time. Her annoyance had been all the keener
because Mr. Noaks’ boots more than made up in size for what they lacked
in number. Either of them singly took more time and polish than any
other pair imaginable. She would have recognised them, at a glance,
anywhere. Even so now, it was at a glance that she recognised the toes
of them protruding from beneath the window-curtain. She dismissed the
theory that Mr. Noaks might have gone utterly unshod to the river. She
scouted the hypothesis that his ghost could be shod thus. By process
of elimination she arrived at the truth. “Mr. Noaks,” she said quietly,
“come out of there.”
There was a slight quiver of the curtain; no more. Katie repeated her
words. There was a pause, then a convulsion of the curtain. Noaks stood
forth.
Always, in polishing his boots, Katie had found herself thinking of him
as a man of prodigious stature, well though she knew him to be quite
tiny. Even so now, at recognition of his boots, she had fixed her eyes
to meet his, when he should emerge, a full yard too high. With a sharp
drop she focussed him.
“By what right,” he asked, “do you come prying about my room?”
This was a stroke so unexpected that it left Katie mute. It equally
surprised Noaks, who had been about to throw himself on his knees and
implore this girl not to betray him. He was quick, though, to clinch his
advantage.
“This,” he said, “is the first time I have caught you. Let it be the
last.”
Was this the little man she had so long despised, and so superciliously
served? His very smallness gave him an air of concentrated force. She
remembered having read that all the greatest men in history had been of
less than the middle height. And--oh, her heart leapt--here was the
one man who had scorned to die for Miss Dobson. He alone had held out
against the folly of his fellows. Sole and splendid survivor he stood,
rock-footed, before her. And impulsively she abased herself, kneeling at
his feet as at the great double altar of some dark new faith.
“You are great, sir, you are wonderful,” she said, gazing up to him,
rapt. It was the first time she had ever called him “sir.”
It is easier, as Michelet suggested, for a woman to change her opinion
of a man than for him to change his opinion of himself. Noaks, despite
the presence of mind he had shown a few moments ago, still saw himself
as he had seen himself during the past hours: that is, as an arrant
little coward--one who by his fear to die had put himself outside the
pale of decent manhood. He had meant to escape from the house at dead of
night and, under an assumed name, work his passage out to Australia--a
land which had always made strong appeal to his imagination. No one, he
had reflected, would suppose because his body was not retrieved from
the water that he had not perished with the rest. And he had looked to
Australia to make a man of him yet: in Encounter Bay, perhaps, or in the
Gulf of Carpentaria, he might yet end nobly.
Thus Katie’s behaviour was as much an embarrassment as a relief; and he
asked her in what way he was great and wonderful.
“Modest, like all heroes!” she cried, and, still kneeling, proceeded to
sing his praises with a so infectious fervour that Noaks did begin to
feel he had done a fine thing in not dying. After all, was it not moral
cowardice as much as love that had tempted him to die? He had wrestled
with it, thrown it. “Yes,” said he, when her rhapsody was over, “perhaps
I am modest.”
“And that is why you hid yourself just now?”
“Yes,” he gladly said. “I hid myself for the same reason,” he added,
“when I heard your mother’s footstep.”
“But,” she faltered, with a sudden doubt, “that bit of writing which
Mother found on the table--”
“That? Oh, that was only a general reflection, copied out of a book.”
“Oh, won’t poor Mother be glad when she knows!”
“I don’t want her to know,” said Noaks, with a return of nervousness.
“You mustn’t tell any one. I--the fact is--”
“Ah, that is so like you!” the girl said tenderly. “I suppose it was
your modesty that all this while blinded me. Please, sir, I have a
confession to make to you. Never till to-night have I loved you.”
Exquisite was the shock of these words to one who, not without reason,
had always assumed that no woman would ever love him. Before he knew
what he was doing, he had bent down and kissed the sweet upturned face.
It was the first kiss he had ever given outside his family circle. It
was an artless and a resounding kiss.
He started back, dazed. What manner of man, he wondered, was he? A
coward, piling profligacy on poltroonery? Or a hero, claiming exemption
from moral law? What was done could not be undone; but it could be
righted. He drew off from the little finger of his left hand that iron
ring which, after a twinge of rheumatism, he had to-day resumed.
“Wear it,” he said.
“You mean--?” She leapt to her feet.
“That we are engaged. I hope you don’t think we have any choice?”
She clapped her hands, like the child she was, and adjusted the ring.
“It is very pretty,” she said.
“It is very simple,” he answered lightly. “But,” he added, with a change
of tone, “it is very durable. And that is the important thing. For I
shall not be in a position to marry before I am forty.”
A shadow of disappointment hovered over Katie’s clear young brow, but
was instantly chased away by the thought that to be engaged was almost
as splendid as to be married.
“Recently,” said her lover, “I meditated leaving Oxford for Australia.
But now that you have come into my life, I am compelled to drop that
notion, and to carve out the career I had first set for myself. A year
hence, if I get a Second in Greats--and I SHALL” he said, with a
fierce look that entranced her--“I shall have a very good chance of an
assistant-mastership in a good private school. In eighteen years, if I
am careful--and, with you waiting for me, I SHALL be careful--my savings
will enable me to start a small school of my own, and to take a wife.
Even then it would be more prudent to wait another five years, no doubt.
But there was always a streak of madness in the Noakses. I say ‘Prudence
to the winds!’”
“Ah, don’t say that!” exclaimed Katie, laying a hand on his sleeve.
“You are right. Never hesitate to curb me. And,” he said, touching the
ring, “an idea has just occurred to me. When the time comes, let this
be the wedding-ring. Gold is gaudy--not at all the thing for a
schoolmaster’s bride. It is a pity,” he muttered, examining her through
his spectacles, “that your hair is so golden. A schoolmaster’s bride
should--Good heavens! Those ear-rings! Where did you get THEM?”
“They were given to me to-day,” Katie faltered. “The Duke gave me them.”
“Indeed?”
“Please, sir, he gave me them as a memento.”
“And that memento shall immediately be handed over to his executors.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I should think so!” was on the tip of Noaks’ tongue, but suddenly he
ceased to see the pearls as trinkets finite and inapposite--saw them,
in a flash, as things transmutable by sale hereafter into desks, forms,
black-boards, maps, lockers, cubicles, gravel soil, diet unlimited, and
special attention to backward pupils. Simultaneously, he saw how mean
had been his motive for repudiating the gift. What more despicable than
jealousy of a man deceased? What sillier than to cast pearls before
executors? Sped by nothing but the pulse of his hot youth, he had wooed
and won this girl. Why flinch from her unsought dowry?
He told her his vision. Her eyes opened wide to it. “And oh,” she cried,
“then we can be married as soon as you take your degree!”
He bade her not be so foolish. Who ever heard of a head-master aged
three-and-twenty? What parent or guardian would trust a stripling? The
engagement must run its course. “And,” he said, fidgeting, “do you know
that I have hardly done any reading to-day?”
“You want to read NOW--TO-NIGHT?”
“I must put in a good two hours. Where are the books that were on my
table?”
Reverently--he was indeed a king of men--she took the books down from
the shelf, and placed them where she had found them. And she knew not
which thrilled her the more--the kiss he gave her at parting, or the
tone in which he told her that the one thing he could not and would not
stand was having his books disturbed.
Still less than before attuned to the lugubrious session downstairs, she
went straight up to her attic, and did a little dance there in the
dark. She threw open the lattice of the dormer-window, and leaned out,
smiling, throbbing.
The Emperors, gazing up, saw her happy, and wondered; saw Noaks’ ring on
her finger, and would fain have shaken their grey heads.
Presently she was aware of a protrusion from the window beneath hers.
The head of her beloved! Fondly she watched it, wished she could reach
down to stroke it. She loved him for having, after all, left his books.
It was sweet to be his excuse. Should she call softly to him? No, it
might shame him to be caught truant. He had already chidden her for
prying. So she did but gaze down on his head silently, wondering whether
in eighteen years it would be bald, wondering whether her own hair would
still have the fault of being golden. Most of all, she wondered whether
he loved her half so much as she loved him.
This happened to be precisely what he himself was wondering. Not that
he wished himself free. He was one of those in whom the will does not,
except under very great pressure, oppose the conscience. What pressure
here? Miss Batch was a superior girl; she would grace any station in
life. He had always been rather in awe of her. It was a fine thing to be
suddenly loved by her, to be in a position to over-rule her every whim.
Plighting his troth, he had feared she would be an encumbrance, only to
find she was a lever. But--was he deeply in love with her? How was it
that he could not at this moment recall her features, or the tone of her
voice, while of deplorable Miss Dobson, every lineament, every accent,
so vividly haunted him? Try as he would to beat off these memories, he
failed, and--some very great pressure here!--was glad he failed; glad
though he found himself relapsing to the self-contempt from which Miss
Batch had raised him. He scorned himself for being alive. And again, he
scorned himself for his infidelity. Yet he was glad he could not forget
that face, that voice--that queen. She had smiled at him when she
borrowed the ring. She had said “Thank you.” Oh, and now, at this very
moment, sleeping or waking, actually she was somewhere--she! herself!
This was an incredible, an indubitable, an all-magical fact for the
little fellow.
From the street below came a faint cry that was as the cry of his own
heart, uttered by her own lips. Quaking, he peered down, and dimly saw,
over the way, a cloaked woman.
She--yes, it was she herself--came gliding to the middle of the road,
gazing up at him.
“At last!” he heard her say. His instinct was to hide himself from the
queen he had not died for. Yet he could not move.
“Or,” she quavered, “are you a phantom sent to mock me? Speak!”
“Good evening,” he said huskily.
“I knew,” she murmured, “I knew the gods were not so cruel. Oh man of my
need,” she cried, stretching out her arms to him, “oh heaven-sent, I see
you only as a dark outline against the light of your room. But I know
you. Your name is Noaks, isn’t it? Dobson is mine. I am your Warden’s
grand-daughter. I am faint and foot-sore. I have ranged this desert city
in search of--of YOU. Let me hear from your own lips that you love me.
Tell me in your own words--” She broke off with a little scream, and did
not stand with forefinger pointed at him, gazing, gasping.
“Listen, Miss Dobson,” he stammered, writhing under what he took to be
the lash of her irony. “Give me time to explain. You see me here--”
“Hush,” she cried, “man of my greater, my deeper and nobler need!
Oh hush, ideal which not consciously I was out for to-night--ideal
vouchsafed to me by a crowning mercy! I sought a lover, I find a master.
I sought but a live youth, was blind to what his survival would betoken.
Oh master, you think me light and wicked. You stare coldly down at me
through your spectacles, whose glint I faintly discern now that the moon
peeps forth. You would be readier to forgive me the havoc I have wrought
if you could for the life of you understand what charm your friends
found in me. You marvel, as at the skull of Helen of Troy. No, you don’t
think me hideous: you simply think me plain. There was a time when I
thought YOU plain--you whose face, now that the moon shines full on it,
is seen to be of a beauty that is flawless without being insipid. Oh
that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek! You
shudder at the notion of such contact. My voice grates on you. You try
to silence me with frantic though exquisite gestures, and with noises
inarticulate but divine. I bow to your will, master. Chasten me with
your tongue.”
“I am not what you think me,” gibbered Noaks. “I was not afraid to die
for you. I love you. I was on my way to the river this afternoon, but
I--I tripped and sprained my ankle, and--and jarred my spine. They
carried me back here. I am still very weak. I can’t put my foot to the
ground. As soon as I can--”
Just then Zuleika heard a little sharp sound which, for the fraction of
an instant, before she knew it to be a clink of metal on the pavement,
she thought was the breaking of the heart within her. Looking quickly
down, she heard a shrill girlish laugh aloft. Looking quickly up,
she descried at the unlit window above her lover’s a face which she
remembered as that of the land-lady’s daughter.
“Find it, Miss Dobson,” laughed the girl. “Crawl for it. It can’t have
rolled far, and it’s the only engagement-ring you’ll get from HIM,” she
said, pointing to the livid face twisted painfully up at her from the
lower window. “Grovel for it, Miss Dobson. Ask him to step down and help
you. Oh, he can! That was all lies about his spine and ankle. Afraid,
that’s what he was--I see it all now--afraid of the water. I wish you’d
found him as I did--skulking behind the curtain. Oh, you’re welcome to
him.”
“Don’t listen,” Noaks cried down. “Don’t listen to that person. I admit
I have trifled with her affections. This is her revenge--these wicked
untruths--these--these--”
Zuleika silenced him with a gesture. “Your tone to me,” she said up to
Katie, “is not without offence; but the stamp of truth is on what you
tell me. We have both been deceived in this man, and are, in some sort,
sisters.”
“Sisters?” cried Katie. “Your sisters are the snake and the spider,
though neither of them wishes it known. I loathe you. And the Duke
loathed you, too.”
“What’s that?” gasped Zuleika.
“Didn’t he tell you? He told me. And I warrant he told you, too.”
“He died for love of me: d’you hear?”
“Ah, you’d like people to think so, wouldn’t you? Does a man who loves a
woman give away the keepsake she gave him? Look!” Katie leaned forward,
pointing to her ear-rings. “He loved ME,” she cried. “He put them in with
his own hands--told me to wear them always. And he kissed me--kissed me
good-bye in the street, where every one could see. He kissed me,” she
sobbed. “No other man shall ever do that.”
“Ah, that he did!” said a voice level with Zuleika. It was the voice of
Mrs. Batch, who a few moments ago had opened the door for her departing
guests.
“Ah, that he did!” echoed the guests.
“Never mind them, Miss Dobson,” cried Noaks, and at the sound of his
voice Mrs. Batch rushed into the middle of the road, to gaze up. “_I_
love you. Think what you will of me. I--”
“You!” flashed Zuleika. “As for you, little Sir Lily Liver, leaning
out there, and, I frankly tell you, looking like nothing so much as a
gargoyle hewn by a drunken stone-mason for the adornment of a Methodist
Chapel in one of the vilest suburbs of Leeds or Wigan, I do but
felicitate the river-god and his nymphs that their water was saved
to-day by your cowardice from the contamination of your plunge.”
“Shame on you, Mr. Noaks,” said Mrs. Batch, “making believe you were
dead--”
“Shame!” screamed Clarence, who had darted out into the fray.
“I found him hiding behind the curtain,” chimed in Katie.
“And I a mother to him!” said Mrs. Batch, shaking her fist. “‘What is
life without love?’ indeed! Oh, the cowardly, underhand--”
“Wretch,” prompted her cronies.
“Let’s kick him out of the house!” suggested Clarence, dancing for joy.
Zuleika, smiling brilliantly down at the boy, said “Just you run up and
fight him!”
“Right you are,” he answered, with a look of knightly devotion, and
darted back into the house.
“No escape!” she cried up to Noaks. “You’ve got to fight him now. He and
you are just about evenly matched, I fancy.”
But, grimly enough, Zuleika’s estimate was never put to the test. Is
it harder for a coward to fight with his fists than to kill himself? Or
again, is it easier for him to die than to endure a prolonged cross-fire
of women’s wrath and scorn? This I know: that in the life of even the
least and meanest of us there is somewhere one fine moment--one high
chance not missed. I like to think it was by operation of this law that
Noaks had now clambered out upon the window-sill, silencing, sickening,
scattering like chaff the women beneath him.
He was already not there when Clarence bounded into the room. “Come on!”
yelled the boy, first thrusting his head behind the door, then diving
beneath the table, then plucking aside either window-curtain, vowing
vengeance.
Vengeance was not his. Down on the road without, not yet looked at but
by the steadfast eyes of the Emperors, the last of the undergraduates
lay dead; and fleet-footed Zuleika, with her fingers still pressed to
her ears, had taken full toll now.