"Oh, quite well!" The strong wrinkled face flashed into laughter. But suddenly the speaker checked herself, and laid a worn hand gently on Constance"s knee--"You won"t mind if I tell you things?--you won"t think me an impertinent old woman? I knew your father"--was there just an imperceptible pause on the words?--"when he was quite a boy; and my people were small squires under the shelter of the Risboroughs before your father sold the property and settled abroad. I was brought up with all your people--your Aunt Marcia, and your Aunt Winifred, and all the rest of them. I saw your mother once in Rome--and loved her, like everybody else. But--as probably you know--your Aunt Winifred--who was keeping house for your father--gathered up her silly skirts, and departed when your father announced his engagement. Then she and your Aunt Marcia settled together in an old prim Georgian house, about five miles from the Fallodens; and there they have been ever since. And now they are tremendously excited about you!"
"About me?" said Constance, astonished. "I don"t know them. They never write to me. They never wrote to father!"
Mrs. Mulholland smiled.
"All the same you will have a letter from them soon. And of course you remember your father"s married sister, Lady Langmoor?"
"No, I never even saw her. But she did sometimes write to father."
"Yes, she was not quite such a fool as the others. Well, she will certainly descend on you. She"ll want you for some b.a.l.l.s--for a drawing-room--and that kind of thing. I warn you!"
The girl"s face showed her restive.
"Why should she want me?--when she never wanted me before--or any of us?"
"Ah, that"s her affair! But it is your other aunts who delight me. Your Aunt Marcia, when I first knew her, was in an ascetic phase. People called it miserliness--but it wasn"t; it was only a moral hatred of waste--in anything. We envied her abominably, when I was a girl in my early teens, much bothered with dressing, because she had invented a garment--the only one of any kind that she wore under her dress. She called it a "Unipantaloonicoat"--you can imagine why! It included stockings. It was thin in summer and thick in winter. There was only one putting on--pouf!--and then the dress. I thought it a splendid idea, but my mother wouldn"t let me copy it. Your Aunt Winifred had just the opposite mania--of piling on clothes--because she said there were "always draughts." If one petticoat fastened at the back, there must be another over that which fastened at the front--and another at the side--and so on, _ad infinitum_. But then, alack!--they suddenly dropped all their absurdities, and became quite ordinary people. Aunt Winifred took to religion; she befriends all the clergy for miles round. She is the mother of Mother Church. And Aunt Marcia, after having starved herself of clothes for years and collected nothing more agreeable than snails, now wears silks and satins, and gossips and goes out to tea, and collects blue china like anybody else. I connect it with the advent of a certain General who after all went off solitary to Malta, and died there. Poor Marcia! But you will certainly have to go and stay there."
"I don"t know!" said Constance, her delicate mouth setting rather stiffly.
"Ah, well--they are getting old!"
Mrs. Mulholland"s tone had softened again, and when it softened there was a wonderful kindness in it.
A door opened suddenly. The Master came in, followed by Alexander Sorell.
"My dear Edward!" said Miss Wenlock, "how late you are!"
"I was caught by a bore, dear, after chapel. Horace couldn"t get rid of his, and I couldn"t get rid of mine. But now all is well. How do you do, Lady Constance? Have you had enough tea, and will you come and see my books?"
He carried her off, Connie extremely nervous, and wondering into what bogs she was about to flounder.
But she was a scholar"s daughter, and she had lived with books. She would have scorned to pretend, and her pose, if she had one, was a pose of ignorance--she claimed less than she might. But the Master soon discovered that she had many of her father"s tastes, that she knew something of archaeology--he bore it even when she shyly quoted Lanciani--that she read Latin, and was apparently pa.s.sionately fond of some kinds of poetry. And all the time she pleased his tired eyes by her youth and freshness, and when as she grew at ease with him, and began to chatter to him about Rome, and how the learned there love one another, the Master"s startling, discordant laugh rang out repeatedly.
The three in the other room heard it.
"She is amusing him," said Miss Wenlock, looking rather bewildered.
"They are generally so afraid of him."
The Master put his head into the drawing-room.
"I am taking Lady Constance into the garden, my dear. Will you three follow when you like?"
He took her through the old house, with the dim faces of former masters and college worthies shining softly on its panelled walls, in the golden lights from the level sun outside, and presently they emerged upon the garden which lay like an emerald encased on three sides by surfaces of silver-grey stone, and overlooked by a delicate cla.s.sical tower designed by the genius of Christopher Wren. Over one-half of the garden lay an exquisite shadow; the other was in vivid light. The air seemed to be full of bells--a murmurous voice--the voice of Oxford; as though the dead generations were perpetually whispering to the living--"We who built these walls, and laid this turf for you--we, who are dead, call to you who are living--carry on our task, continue our march:
"On to the bound of the waste-- On to the City of G.o.d!"
A silence fell upon Constance as she walked beside the Master. She was thinking involuntarily of that absent word dropped by her uncle--"_Oxford is a place of training_"--and there was a pa.s.sionate and troubled revolt in her. Other ghostly wills seemed to be threatening her--wills that meant nothing to her. No!--her own will should shape her own life! As against the austere appeal that comes from the inner heart of Oxford, the young and restless blood in her sang defiance. "I will ride with him to-morrow--I will--I will!"
But the Master merely thought that she was feeling the perennial spell of the Oxford beauty.
"You are going to like Oxford, I hope?"
"Yes--" said Constance, a little reluctantly. "Oh, of course I shall like it. But it oppresses me--rather."
"I know!" he said eagerly--always trying to place himself in contact with the young mind and life, always seeking something from them in which he was constantly disappointed. "Yes, we all feel that! We who are alive must always fight the past, though we owe it all we have. Oxford has been to me often a witch--a dangerous--almost an evil witch. I seemed to see her--benumbing the young forces of the present. And the scientific and practical men, who would like to sc.r.a.p her, have sometimes seemed to me right. And then one changes--one changes!"
His voice dropped. All that was slightly grotesque in his outer man, the broad flat head, the red hair, the sharp wedge-like chin, disappeared for Constance in the single impression of his eyes--pale blue, intensely melancholy, and most human.
"Take up some occupation--some study--" he said to her gently. "You won"t be long here; but still, ask us for what we can give. In Oxford one must learn something--or teach something. If not, life here goes sour."
Constance repeated Sorell"s promise to teach her Greek.
"Excellent!" said the Master. "You will be envied. Sorell is a capital fellow! And one of the ablest of our younger scholars--though of course"--the speaker drew himself up with a slight acerbity--"he and I belong to different schools of criticism. He was devoted to your mother."
Constance a.s.sented dumbly.
"And shows already"--thought the Master--"some dangerous signs of being devoted to you. Poor wretch!" Aloud he said--"Ah, here they come. I must get some more chairs."
The drawing-room party joined them, and the gathering lasted a little longer. Sorell walked up and down with Constance. She liked him increasingly--could not help liking him. And apart from his personal charm, he recalled all sorts of pleasant things and touching memories to her. But he was almost oppressively refined and scrupulous and high-minded. "He is too perfect!" she thought rebelliously. "One can"t be as good as that. It isn"t allowed."
As to Mrs. Mulholland, Constance felt herself taken possession of--mothered--by that lady. She could not understand why, but though rather puzzled and bewildered, she did not resist. There was something, indeed, in the generous dark eyes that every now and then touched the girl"s feeling intolerably, as though it reminded her of a tenderness she had been long schooling herself to do without.
"Come and see me, my dear, whenever you like. I have a house in St.
Giles, and all my husband"s books. I do a lot of things--I am a guardian--I work at the schools--the town schools for the town children, et cetera. We all try to save our souls by committees nowadays. But my real business is to talk, and make other people talk. So I am always at home in the evenings after dinner, and a good many people come. Bring Nora sometimes. Alice doesn"t like me. Your aunt will let you come--though we don"t know each other very well. I am very respectable."
The laughing face looked into Constance"s, which laughed back.
"That"s all right!" said Mrs. Mulholland, as though some confidences had been exchanged between them. "You might find me useful. Consider me a friend of the family. I make rather a good umbrella-stand. People can lean against me if they like. I hold firm. Good-bye. That"s the Cathedral bell."
But Constance and Sorell, followed discreetly by Annette, departed first. Mrs. Mulholland stayed for a final word to the Master, before obeying the silver voice from St. Frideswide"s tower.
"To think of that girl being handed over to Ellen Hooper, just when all her love affairs will be coming on! A woman with the wisdom of a rabbit, and the feelings of a mule! And don"t hold your finger up at me, Master! You know you can"t suffer fools at all--either gladly--or sadly.
Now let me go, Grace!--or I shan"t be fit for church."
"A very pretty creature!" said Ewen Hooper admiringly--"and you look very well on her, Constance."
He addressed his niece, who had been just put into her saddle by the neat groom who had brought the horses.
Mrs. Hooper, Alice and Nora were standing on the steps of the old house.
A knot of onlookers had collected on the pavement--mostly errand boys.
The pa.s.sing undergraduates tried not to look curious, and hurried by.
Constance, in her dark blue riding-habit and a _tricorne_ felt hat which she had been accustomed to wear in the Campagna, kept the mare fidgeting and pawing a little that her uncle might inspect both her and her rider, and then waved her hand in farewell.
"Where are you going, Connie?" cried Nora.
"Somewhere out there--beyond the railway," she said vaguely, pointing with her riding-whip. "I shall be back in good time."