"You"re awfully good to me. But how can I come to be a burden on you?"
"But I shall go too," said Mrs. Mulholland firmly.
Connie exclaimed in triumph.
"We four--to front the desert!--while he"--she nodded towards Sorell--"is showing Nora and Uncle Ewen Rome. You mayn"t know it"--she addressed Sorell--"but on Monday, January 24th--I think I"ve got the date right--you and they go on a picnic to Hadrian"s Villa. The weather"s arranged for--and the carriage is ordered."
She looked at him askance; but her colour had risen. So had his. He looked down on her while Mrs. Mulholland and Falloden were both talking fast to Otto.
"You little witch!" said Sorell in a low voice--"what are you after now?"
Connie laughed in his face.
"You"ll go--you"ll see!"
The little dinner which followed was turned into a betrothal feast.
Champagne was brought in, and Otto, madly gay, boasted of his forebears and the incomparable greatness of Poland as usual. n.o.body minded. After dinner the magic toy in the studio discoursed Brahms and Schumann, in the intervals of discussing plans and chattering over maps. But Connie insisted on an early departure. "My guardian will have to sleep upon it--and there"s really no time to lose." Every one took care not to see too much of the parting between her and Falloden. Then she and Mrs.
Mulholland were put into their carriage. But Sorell preferred to walk home, and Falloden went back to Otto.
Sorell descended the hill towards Oxford. The storm was dying away, and the now waning moon, which had shone so brilliantly over the frozen floods a day or two before, was venturing out again among the scudding clouds. The lights in Christ Church Hall were out, but the beautiful city shone vaguely luminous under the night.
Sorell"s mind was full of mingled emotion--as torn and jagged as the clouds rushing overhead. The talk and laughter in the cottage came back to him. How hollow and vain it sounded in the spiritual ear! What could ever make up to that poor boy, who could have no more, at the most, than a year or two to live, for the spilt wine of his life?--the rifled treasure of his genius? And was it not true to say that his loss had made the profit of the two lovers--of whom one had been the author of it? When Palloden and Constance believed themselves to be absorbed in Otto, were they not really playing the great game of s.e.x like any ordinary pair?
It was the question that Otto himself had asked--that any cynic must have asked. But Sorell"s tender humanity pa.s.sed beyond it. The injury done, indeed, was beyond repair. But the mysterious impulse which had brought Falloden to the help of Otto was as real in its sphere as the anguish and the pain; aye, for the philosophic spirit, more real than they, and fraught with a healing and disciplining power that none could measure. Sorell admitted--half reluctantly--the changes in life and character which had flowed from it. He was even ready to say that the man who had proved capable of feeling it, in spite of all past appearances, was "not far from the Kingdom of G.o.d."
Oxford drew nearer and nearer. Tom Tower loomed before him. Its great bell rang out. And suddenly, as if he could repress it no longer, there ran through Scroll"s mind--his half melancholy mind, unaccustomed to the claims of personal happiness--the vision that Connie had so sharply evoked; of a girl"s brown eyes, and honest look--the look of a child to be cherished, of a woman to be loved.
Was it that morning that he had helped Nora to translate a few lines of the "Antigone"?
"Love, all conquering love, that nestles in the fair cheeks of a maiden--"
It is perhaps not surprising that Sorell, on this occasion, after he had entered the High, should have taken the wrong turn to St. Cyprian"s, and wakened up to find himself pa.s.sing through the Turl, when he ought to have been in Radcliffe Square.