Chapter XXVII: October Term

October had come, and term had begun again, and Cambridge was full of new faces--fresh young faces that would soon lose their smoothness and roundness, and that delightful ingenuousness that distinguishes successive generations of Cambridge freshmen.

There were a great many girl freshers at Newnham this term, and several of the old familiar faces were no longer seen. Pamela Gwatkin had come up for another year. A scholarship, the Grace-Hardy Scholarship, which is only given to girls in their fourth year, who have done well in a Tripos, had been awarded her to enable her to proceed to the second part of the Mathematical Tripos. When women year after year stand first on the list of the Smith's prizemen, it will be necessary to create a third part, when probably the majority of the candidates will be women.

Pamela Gwatkin had been working hard all through the Long Vacation, and she had come back pale and hollow-eyed, and oh! so lean. She will be like a deal board by the end of the year, and her beautiful, serious eyes will have nothing but mathematics in them.

Lucy had come back to work, too, but there were no mathematics in her eyes. She had just been plucked again in that horrid Part II. of the 'Previous,' which takes in Mathematics and Paley; but she had passed the classical part. She had only come up for one term. She was to be married in the spring, and she was quite, quite determined to get through the Little-go before she took her place as the wife of a Master of a college. She wouldn't be pointed at by everybody in Cambridge as a Failure!

She had got her old room next to Maria Stubbs, and she told Maria all about her engagement the first night after Hall.

Maria didn't bully her as she expected she would, perhaps she would have done the same thing herself had she been in her place.

She thought Lucy a very lucky girl; nobody had ever fallen in love with her, and asked her to preside over a college lodge, though she was twice--a dozen times, at least--as clever as Lucy. She couldn't, for her part, think what men saw in Lucy. Cousin Mary often--indeed, she had always--wondered what the Master of St. Benedict's saw in Lucy. Mary had quite given up the lodge long ago. The shabby, old-fashioned bits of furniture that she had taken away with her had all been carried over the college bridge to the little house at Newnham. She had only taken the oldest and the shabbiest things away; she had left everything that was worth leaving at the lodge.

People who had known her well remarked when they came up in October how much she had aged during the Long Vacation. She was not only looking, but she was feeling old and changed. Something had gone out of her life.

The Master of St. Benedict's noticed the change with a little twinge of conscience, but his hands were too full just now to think very much about any other woman than the woman he was going to marry.

The lodge was full of workpeople; the old place was being turned upside down. The plaster and the paint and the whitewash had been scraped off the old oak, and, oh, what a lot of beeswaxing it took to make it brown and mellow with that delightful old dull polish upon it that antiquaries love! There were all sorts of discoveries made during this pulling down and building up of old panelling. Rooms were unearthed, and musty old cupboards and passages laid open, and no end of old windows that had been blocked up for centuries brought to light. Lucy had to come over to see all these discoveries, but Mary never came to the lodge again after the day she left it. That chapter of her life was closed.

Not many people congratulated Lucy on her engagement. Very few people in Cambridge knew of it. Everyone had been expecting the Senior Tutor for years to marry the Master's niece; and when, after the Long Vacation, the engagement was spoken of, nobody ever dreamed it was Lucy.

Mary had very properly gone away from the lodge until she could return as its mistress; and Lucy--well, Lucy had gone back to Newnham to fit herself for her work as a governess. Under these circumstances she got very few congratulations.

Everybody would congratulate her fast enough when the time came. She was not doing a thing that there was no precedent for. Nearly all the heads of the Colleges in Cambridge had married young wives. It was quite the fashion.

It was not so long ago that Fellows of colleges could not marry at all, but now the order had been reversed, and the first use the dear old things made of their new liberty was to marry wives out of the nursery. As the Poet of the University touchingly put it:

'It hath been decreede, that ye Fellowes may wed,
And settle in College walls;
And wake ye echoes of cloistered life,
With their lyttel chyldren's squalls.'

There had been no children's 'squalls' heard in the lodge of St. Benedict's within the memory of the oldest Fellow in the college; no pattering footsteps on the stairs, no children's voices in the long dim galleries, had disturbed its monastic quietness. The Fellows who in their turn had been Masters of St. Benedict's had been old, old Fellows when their turn came, and one only of all their number that anyone living could remember had taken to him a wife.

Perhaps other women were not so patient and faithful as the old Master's wife.

Lucy would not have been so patient; she was getting impatient already, now the novelty had worn off. She was not sure that she was doing the best, the very best thing she could with her life; that she was making the most of it, that she was 'arranging' it aright, as they put it at Newnham.

Her heart misgave her as she pictured her future, her prosperous future, as the wife of the Master of St. Benedict's. The quiet, stately life of a college lodge oppressed her. She was sure she should soon weary of its stateliness and its loneliness. She pictured herself sometimes standing at the old oriel window and looking down at the lusty young life in the court below and longing to be in the midst of it. She was longing already. The sight of young lovers in the college Backs filled her heart with a strange tumult, and the sound of a fiddle coming from the open window of a man's room as she passed through the court set her feet twinkling. There is a great deal in heredity.

The Master met her at the lodge one day when she was in this mood. She had been working at mathematics all the morning, and she was nervous and overwrought; she had been feeling a strange depression for several days, and had come over to see the alterations at the lodge in order to shake it off.

The Master took her out into the Fellows' garden to see the new greenhouse. It had been rebuilt, and, late as it was in the season, it was ablaze with Lucy's favourite geraniums. He had considered her taste entirely, and filled it with the flowers of her choice. She ought to have been grateful, at the least, and expressed her gratitude in any of the little pleasant ways that engaged people are wont to express their feelings.

She ought to have gone round sniffing the flowers, and picked the choicest red geranium and stuck it in the Master's coat; but she did nothing of the kind. She sat down on a bench and began to cry. She couldn't keep the tears back.

Perhaps the sight of the new greenhouse had brought to her mind that scene when the old Master had fallen in the garden, and Wyatt Edgell had carried him back to the house.

Lucy couldn't account for her tears. She said it was the air of the greenhouse had made her faint, and her lover walked back with her to Newnham.

'You are sure there is nothing the matter?' the Master said before he left her; he didn't leave her at the gate, he went straight up to the door of Newe Hall with her. 'You are sure that the faintness is quite gone?'

'Yes,' she said, 'it is quite gone. It was only the heat and the smell of those horrid geraniums.'

This was rather hard on the Master, as he had gathered them together for her benefit.

There were still traces of tears on her cheeks when she got back to Newnham, and her eyes were red, and everybody could see she had been crying. Maria Stubbs saw her coming up the path with the Master, and she saw in a moment, directly she came into the hall, that there was something amiss. Nothing escaped Maria.

She followed Lucy into her room and shut the door behind her.

'You have heard, then?' she said.

Lucy noticed that she spoke in a more subdued tone than was usual to her, and there was a catch in her voice that jarred upon her ear.

'Heard what?' she said wearily. 'I have only just come back from the lodge. I have heard nothing.'

She was not very anxious to hear Maria's news. She thought it was one of the old things that was always happening: someone had passed an exam., or someone had been plucked, or someone had broken down. She was so used to these things that she did not care a straw which it was, and she began drawing off her gloves, and threw her hat down on a chair. When she had done this she became aware that Maria was looking at her with a strange pity in her eyes.

'And you have not heard?' she said with a little hard break in her voice.

'I have heard nothing,' Lucy said impatiently.

'Oh, you poor dear! How can I tell you?'

Lucy looked at her startled and amazed, with a sudden terror in her eyes.

'It is about--about----'

Her lips grew suddenly white, and refused to pronounce the name of the man who for so short a time had been her lover.

'Yes,' Maria said softly, 'it is about Wyatt Edgell.'

'He--he--oh, don't say he is dead!'

Lucy fell on her knees beside the couch and clutched Maria's gown. She was white as a sheet, and her lips were quivering.

Maria Stubbs threw her arms around her, she thought she would have fallen, but Lucy pushed her aside.

'Oh, don't tell me he is dead!' she moaned. 'Don't tell me I have killed him!'

'Hush!' Maria said almost fiercely, but her own eyes were full of tears, and her voice faltered as she spoke. 'It isn't your fault that he is dead. He would have died just the same whether you had given him up or not.'

She spoke to unheeding ears, for Lucy had fallen with a little cry to the floor.

She tried in vain to rouse her. Her face was perfectly colourless, and her lips were white, and she lay like a log where she had fallen.

Maria undid her dress and loosened the things about her throat, and threw some water over her face and hands, and then, finding she didn't revive at all, she got frightened and ran to get assistance. Pamela Gwatkin was the only girl who was in her room at that hour, and Maria implored her to come at once.

Pamela was sitting with her hands clasped before her and an open letter in her lap. She looked up when Maria came in with a bewildered look in her eyes, which were heavy with weeping.

'You must not ask me,' she said harshly; 'I would not put my hand out to save her. You must ask someone else. I can never, never forgive her!'

If Pamela could not find it in her heart to forgive the girl who had ruined Wyatt Edgell's life, it was harder for Lucy to forgive herself.

As she lay tossing with fever in her little darkened room for weeks after that miserable day, she reproached herself a thousand times for having murdered her lover. The shock of Wyatt Edgell's death had told on her already overwrought nervous system, and it had given way, and she had been struck down with brain-fever.

It was not an unusual thing in a women's college.

No one but Pamela Gwatkin and Maria knew the real cause; everyone else, doctors and all, put it down to overwork--to the mathematics she was getting up for the Little-go.

Nobody attached any meaning to her wandering, not even when in her delirium she called herself a murderess; she didn't mince matters, she shocked Cousin Mary by declaring that she was a murderess. She was for ever raving about that dreadful scene, when she had found Eric Gwatkin on his knees beside the couch, and in her dreams she was ever helping him to sew up that awful wound. She couldn't get that gaping wound out of her eyes.

Nurse Brannan came over from Addenbroke's to Newnham to nurse Lucy. Perhaps she could have thrown some light on the girl's wanderings, but she was silent. She nursed her back to life, and soothed her and comforted her in the first wild abandonment of her grief and remorse, as she had comforted the old Master. She had only one kind of medicine for all the diseases of the mind. She had only one set of old-fashioned remedies. She read Lucy in those first weak days of convalescence the same, the self-same, words from the same old Book that she had come upon her reading to the Master at the lodge. She had only one story to tell to all her patients--an old, old story. It seemed quite new to Lucy as she sat listening to it in those weak tired days; it seemed to her that she had never heard it before.

When she was well enough to talk about anything, Lucy insisted upon talking about the subject that was uppermost in her mind. Nurse Brannan let her have her way; she could not have stopped her if she would.

'You have nothing to reproach yourself with, my dear,' she said to her when she found there was nothing to be gained by silence; 'it would have happened in any case. With that tendency and that awful heritage, you could not have prevented it.'

Then Lucy learned, what she had only surmised before, that Wyatt Edgell had died by his own hand.

'You must tell me how it happened,' she said, 'and who was with him; you must not conceal anything.'

'There is very little to tell, dear. Eric Gwatkin was with him. He could not have had a truer or more devoted friend.'

'No,' said Lucy with a sigh; 'he loved him more than I loved him; he would have laid down his life for him.'

'Yes, I think he would. They were away alone together in Scotland, on some shootings that Mr. Edgell had taken, when it happened. He had been moody and out of sorts for several days, and had stayed indoors wrestling with his disease. Eric did not leave him day or night during this dreadful time, and on the fourth day the temptation seemed to have passed, and he went out on the moors. Eric was with him alone when it happened; there was no keeper near. It was all over, and--and he was quite dead when the keeper came up. There was only Eric to witness that it was not an accident. Oh, he behaved splendidly! He did everything. He brought the dear fellow back to his people; he covered up all the dreadful part of the story; and no one--no one belonging to him--will ever know that it was not an accident. It would have broken his mother's heart; it would have killed his old father, who was so proud of him; it would have been a crushing blow. Oh, Eric was quite justified--it must have cost him a great deal to cover it up, but he was quite justified; he behaved splendidly!'

When Lucy got well enough to see anyone, the first person she saw was the Master of St. Benedict's. He had inquired for her every day during her illness, and he had sent daily messages by Mary. He reproached himself for letting her walk back on that last day he had seen her. He ought to have known that she had broken down when she fainted in the greenhouse.

He was not at all prepared for the change in her. She had not only grown thin and white, but her eyes had changed; they were graver and steadier, and something that used to be there, he didn't know what, had gone out of them.

'The lodge is quite finished,' the Master said cheerfully, as he took his seat by her side; 'your home is quite ready for you, my dear.'

Then Lucy had to say to him what she had sent for him to say. It was rather difficult to say, and she said it in her little weak, faltering voice.

'I have found out,' she said, 'while I have been lying here, that I have made a mistake. It is not the first mistake I have made--and--and thank God I have found it out in time!'

Her voice broke, and her lips quivered, and a faint flush of colour came into her cheeks.

'We have all made mistakes, my darling,' the Master said, stroking her little thin hand that lay on the coverlet. 'Don't let this little mistake you have made, or fancy you have made, trouble you; you have all your life to set it right. You have only to get well as fast as you can; your new home is ready, quite ready, for you.'

Lucy shivered.

'That is it,' she said eagerly; 'I want you to help me to set it right. I have ruined one man's life; I will not ruin another. I--I want you to give me up.'

She did not tell him she was not worthy, she knew that would be of no avail; she only asked him to give her up.

'You do not love me, Lucy?' he said reproachfully, when he found that all other arguments failed to move her.

'No,' she said sadly, 'I do not love you enough. I never, never could love you enough to marry you for yourself. I should have married you for--for the sake of your position--it is a great thing to be mistress of a college lodge--and, and I wanted a home, and to be taken care of--and loved--and I had nothing to give in return.'

It took a long time to convince the Master of St. Benedict's that Lucy hadn't accepted him for himself. He hadn't looked in the glass lately, or his eyes had grown dim--he hadn't seen that the brown locks of his youth were turning gray, and that he was getting bald, and fat, and florid. There were plenty of women in the world who would have loved him for himself still; there was a dear woman in the adjoining room who had loved him for twenty years, and who would go on loving him in spite of his baldness--who rather preferred it, indeed.

The Master couldn't conceal from himself that the girl really desired to be free. Her words, her eyes, her manner, all showed him that she desired to break off her engagement. He had no alternative but to give her the release she sought.