“Well, did you come and peep down from the gallery?” there was a
distinct tremour.
Throwing aside her cloak, she went quickly to him, and laid a hand on
the lapel of his coat. “Poor grand-papa!” she said.
“Nonsense, my dear child,” he replied, disengaging himself. “I didn’t
give it a thought. If the young men chose to be so silly as to stay
away, I--I--”
“Grand-papa, haven’t you been told YET?”
“Told? I am a Gallio for such follies. I didn’t inquire.”
“But (forgive me, grand-papa, if I seem to you, for the moment, pert)
you are Warden here. It is your duty, even your privilege, to GUARD.
Is it not? Well, I grant you the adage that it is useless to bolt the
stable door when the horse has been stolen. But what shall be said of
the ostler who doesn’t know--won’t even ‘inquire’ whether--the horse HAS
been stolen, grand-papa?”
“You speak in riddles, Zuleika.”
“I wish with all my heart I need not tell you the answers. I think I
have a very real grievance against your staff--or whatever it is you
call your subordinates here. I go so far as to dub them dodderers. And
I shall the better justify that term by not shirking the duty they have
left undone. The reason why there were no undergraduates in your Hall
to-night is that they were all dead.”
“Dead?” he gasped. “Dead? It is disgraceful that I was not told. What
did they die of?”
“Of me.”
“Of you?”
“Yes. I am an epidemic, grand-papa, a scourge, such as the world has not
known. Those young men drowned themselves for love of me.”
He came towards her. “Do you realise, girl, what this means to me? I am
an old man. For more than half a century I have known this College. To
it, when my wife died, I gave all that there was of heart left in me.
For thirty years I have been Warden; and in that charge has been all my
pride. I have had no thought but for this great College, its honour and
prosperity. More than once lately have I asked myself whether my eyes
were growing dim, my hand less steady. ‘No’ was my answer, and again
‘No.’ And thus it is that I have lingered on to let Judas be struck down
from its high eminence, shamed in the eyes of England--a College for
ever tainted, and of evil omen.” He raised his head. “The disgrace to
myself is nothing. I care not how parents shall rage against me, and the
Heads of other Colleges make merry over my decrepitude. It is because
you have wrought the downfall of Judas that I am about to lay my undying
curse on you.”
“You mustn’t do that!” she cried. “It would be a sort of sacrilege. I am
going to be a nun. Besides, why should you? I can quite well understand
your feeling for Judas. But how is Judas more disgraced than any other
College? If it were only the Judas undergraduates who had--”
“There were others?” cried the Warden. “How many?”
“All. All the boys from all the Colleges.”
The Warden heaved a deep sigh. “Of course,” he said, “this changes the
aspect of the whole matter. I wish you had made it clear at once. You
gave me a very great shock,” he said sinking into his arm-chair, “and I
have not yet recovered. You must study the art of exposition.”
“That will depend on the rules of the convent.”
“Ah, I forgot that you were going into a convent. Anglican, I hope?”
Anglican, she supposed.
“As a young man,” he said, “I saw much of dear old Dr. Pusey. It might
have somewhat reconciled him to my marriage if he had known that my
grand-daughter would take the veil.” He adjusted his glasses, and looked
at her. “Are you sure you have a vocation?”
“Yes. I want to be out of the world. I want to do no more harm.”
He eyed her musingly. “That,” he said, “is rather a revulsion than
a vocation. I remember that I ventured to point out to Dr. Pusey the
difference between those two things, when he was almost persuading me
to enter a Brotherhood founded by one of his friends. It may be that the
world would be well rid of you, my dear child. But it is not the world
only that we must consider. Would you grace the recesses of the Church?”
“I could but try,” said Zuleika.
“‘You could but try’ are the very words Dr. Pusey used to me. I ventured
to say that in such a matter effort itself was a stigma of unfitness.
For all my moods of revulsion, I knew that my place was in the world. I
stayed there.”
“But suppose, grand-papa”--and, seeing in fancy the vast agitated
flotilla of crinolines, she could not forbear a smile--“suppose all the
young ladies of that period had drowned themselves for love of you?”
Her smile seemed to nettle the Warden. “I was greatly admired,” he said.
“Greatly,” he repeated.
“And you liked that, grand-papa?”
“Yes, my dear. Yes, I am afraid I did. But I never encouraged it.”
“Your own heart was never touched?”
“Never, until I met Laura Frith.”
“Who was she?”
“She was my future wife.”
“And how was it you singled her out from the rest? Was she very
beautiful?”
“No. It cannot be said that she was beautiful. Indeed, she was accounted
plain. I think it was her great dignity that attracted me. She did not
smile archly at me, nor shake her ringlets. In those days it was the
fashion for young ladies to embroider slippers for such men in holy
orders as best pleased their fancy. I received hundreds--thousands--of
such slippers. But never a pair from Laura Frith.”
“She did not love you?” asked Zuleika, who had seated herself on the
floor at her grandfather’s feet.
I concluded that she did not. It interested me very greatly. It fired
me.
“Was she incapable of love?”
“No, it was notorious in her circle that she had loved often, but loved
in vain.”
“Why did she marry you?”
“I think she was fatigued by my importunities. She was not very strong.
But it may be that she married me out of pique. She never told me. I did
not inquire.”
“Yet you were very happy with her?”
“While she lived, I was ideally happy.”
The young woman stretched out a hand, and laid it on the clasped hands
of the old man. He sat gazing into the past. She was silent for a while;
and in her eyes, still fixed intently on his face, there were tears.
“Grand-papa dear”--but there were tears in her voice, too.
“My child, you don’t understand. If I had needed pity--”
“I do understand--so well. I wasn’t pitying you, dear, I was envying you
a little.”
“Me?--an old man with only the remembrance of happiness?”
“You, who have had happiness granted to you. That isn’t what made me
cry, though. I cried because I was glad. You and I, with all this great
span of years between us, and yet--so wonderfully alike! I had always
thought of myself as a creature utterly apart.”
“Ah, that is how all young people think of themselves. It wears off.
Tell me about this wonderful resemblance of ours.”
He sat attentive while she described her heart to him. But when, at the
close of her confidences, she said, “So you see it’s a case of sheer
heredity, grand-papa,” the word “Fiddlesticks!” would out.
“Forgive me, my dear,” he said, patting her hand. “I was very much
interested. But I do believe young people are even more staggered by
themselves than they were in my day. And then, all these grand theories
they fall back on! Heredity... as if there were something to baffle us
in the fact of a young woman liking to be admired! And as if it were
passing strange of her to reserve her heart for a man she can respect
and look up to! And as if a man’s indifference to her were not of all
things the likeliest to give her a sense of inferiority to him! You and
I, my dear, may in some respects be very queer people, but in the matter
of the affections we are ordinary enough.”
“Oh grand-papa, do you really mean that?” she cried eagerly.
“At my age, a man husbands his resources. He says nothing that he does
not really mean. The indifference between you and other young women
is that which lay also between me and other young men: a special
attractiveness... Thousands of slippers, did I say? Tens of thousands. I
had hoarded them with a fatuous pride. On the evening of my betrothal I
made a bonfire of them, visible from three counties. I danced round it
all night.” And from his old eyes darted even now the reflections of
those flames.
“Glorious!” whispered Zuleika. “But ah,” she said, rising to her feet,
“tell me no more of it--poor me! You see, it isn’t a mere special
attractiveness that _I_ have. _I_ am irresistible.”
“A daring statement, my child--very hard to prove.”
“Hasn’t it been proved up to the hilt to-day?”
“To-day?... Ah, and so they did really all drown themselves for you?...
Dear, dear!... The Duke--he, too?”
“He set the example.”
“No! You don’t say so! He was a greatly-gifted young man--a true
ornament to the College. But he always seemed to me rather--what shall I
say?--inhuman... I remember now that he did seem rather excited when
he came to the concert last night and you weren’t yet there... You are
quite sure you were the cause of his death?”
“Quite,” said Zuleika, marvelling at the lie--or fib, rather: he had
been GOING to die for her. But why not have told the truth? Was it
possible, she wondered, that her wretched vanity had survived her
renunciation of the world? Why had she so resented just now the doubt
cast on that irresistibility which had blighted and cranked her whole
life?
“Well, my dear,” said the Warden, “I confess that I am
amazed--astounded.” Again he adjusted his glasses, and looked at her.
She found herself moving slowly around the study, with the gait of a
mannequin in a dress-maker’s show-room. She tried to stop this; but her
body seemed to be quite beyond control of her mind. It had the insolence
to go ambling on its own account. “Little space you’ll have in a convent
cell,” snarled her mind vindictively. Her body paid no heed whatever.
Her grandfather, leaning back in his chair, gazed at the ceiling, and
meditatively tapped the finger-tips of one hand against those of the
other. “Sister Zuleika,” he presently said to the ceiling.
“Well? and what is there so--so ridiculous in”--but the rest was lost in
trill after trill of laughter; and these were then lost in sobs.
The Warden had risen from his chair. “My dear,” he said, “I wasn’t
laughing. I was only--trying to imagine. If you really want to retire
from--”
“I do,” moaned Zuleika.
“Then perhaps--”
“But I don’t,” she wailed.
“Of course, you don’t, my dear.”
“Why, of course?”
“Come, you are tired, my poor child. That is very natural after this
wonderful, this historic day. Come dry your eyes. There, that’s better.
To-morrow--”
“I do believe you’re a little proud of me.”
“Heaven forgive me, I believe I am. A grandfather’s heart--But there,
good night, my dear. Let me light your candle.”
She took her cloak, and followed him out to the hall table. There she
mentioned that she was going away early to-morrow.
“To the convent?” he slyly asked.
“Ah, don’t tease me, grand-papa.”
“Well, I am sorry you are going away, my dear. But perhaps, in the
circumstances, it is best. You must come and stay here again, later
on,” he said, handing her the lit candle. “Not in term-time, though,” he
added.
“No,” she echoed, “not in term-time.”