Lady Connie. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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at her new writing-table contemplating her transformed room with a childish satisfaction, Nora knocked and came in.
She walked up to Connie, and stood looking down upon her. She was very red, and her eyes sparkled.
"I want to tell you that I am disappointed in you--dreadfully disappointed in you!" said the girl fiercely.
"What do you mean!" Constance rose in amazement.
"Why didn't you insist on my father's buying these things? You ought to have insisted. You pay us a large sum, and you had a right. Instead, you have humiliated us--because you are rich, and we are poor! It was mean--and purse-proud."
"How dare you say such things?" cried Connie. "You mustn't come into my room at all, if you are going to behave like this. You know very well I didn't do it unkindly. It is you who are unkind! But of course it doesn't matter. You don't understand. You are only a child!" Her voice shook.
"I am not a child!" said Nora indignantly. "And I believe I know a great deal more about money than you do--because you have never been poor. I have to keep all the accounts here, and make mother and Alice pay their debts. Father, of course, is always too busy to think of such things. Your money is dreadfully useful to us. I wish it wasn't. But I wanted to do what was honest--if you had only given me time. Then you slipped out and did it!"
Constance stared in bewilderment.
"Are you the mistress in this house?" she said.
Nora nodded. Her colour had all faded away, and her breath was coming quick. "I practically am," she said stoutly.
"At seventeen?" asked Connie, ironically.
Nora nodded again.
Connie turned away, and walked to the window. She was enraged with Nora, whose attack upon her seemed quite inexplicable and incredible. Then, all in a moment, a bitter forlornness overcame her. Nora, standing by the table, and already pierced with remorse, saw her cousin's large eyes fill with tears. Connie sat down with her face averted. But Nora--trembling all over--perceived that she was crying. The next moment, the newcomer found Nora kneeling beside her, in the depths of humiliation and repentance.
"I am a beast!--a horrid beast! I always am. Oh, please, please don't cry!"
"You forget"--said Connie, with difficulty--"how I--how I miss my mother!"
And she broke into a fit of weeping. Nora, beside herself with self-disgust, held her cousin embraced, and tried to comfort her. And presently, after an agitated half-hour, each girl seemed to herself to have found a friend. Reserve had broken; they had poured out confidences to each other; and after the thunder and the shower came the rainbow of peace.
Before Nora departed, she looked respectfully at the beautiful dress of white satin, draped with black, which Annette had laid out upon the bed in readiness for the Vice-Chancellor's party.
"It will suit you perfectly!" she said, still eager to make up. Then--eyeing Constance--
"You know, of course, that you are good-looking?"
"I am not hideous--I know that," said Constance, laughing. "You odd girl!"
"We have heard often how you were admired in Rome. I wonder--don't be offended!"--said Nora, bluntly--"have you ever been in love?"
"Never!" The reply was passionately prompt.
Nora looked thoughtful.
"Perhaps you don't know whether you were or not. Girls get so dreadfully mixed up. But I am sure people--men--have been in love with you."
"Well, of course!" said Connie, with the same emphatic gaiety.
Nora opened her eyes.
"'Of course?' But I know heaps of girls with whom nobody has ever been in love!"
As soon as she was alone, Connie locked her door, and walked restlessly up and down her room, till by sheer movement she had tamed a certain wild spirit within her let loose by Nora's question. And as she walked, the grey Oxford walls, the Oxford lilacs and laburnums, vanished from perception. She was in another scene. Hot sun--gleaming orange-gardens and blue sea--bare-footed, black-eyed children--and a man beside her, on whom she has been showering epithets that would have shamed--surely!--any other human being in the world. Tears of excitement are in her eyes; in his a laughing triumph mixed with astonishment.
"But, now--" she thinks, drawing herself up, erect and tense, her hands behind her head; "now, I am ready for him. Let him try such ways again--if he dare!"
CHAPTER III
The party given at St. Hubert's on this evening in the Eights week was given in honour of a famous guest--the Lord Chancellor of the day, one of the strongest members of a strong Government, of whom St. Hubert's, which had nurtured him through his four academic years, was quite inordinately proud. It was very seldom that their great nursling was able or willing to revisit the old nest. But the head of the college, who had been in the same class-list and rowed in the same boat with the politician, was now Vice-Chancellor of the University; and the greater luminary had come to shine upon the lesser, by way of heightening the dignity of both. For the man who has outsoared his fellows likes to remind himself by contrast of his callow days, before the hungry and fighting impulses had driven him down--a young eaglet--upon the sheepfolds of law and politics; while to the majority of mankind, even to-day, hero-worship, when it is not too exacting, is agreeable.
So all Oxford had been bidden. The great hall of St. Hubert's, with its stately portraits and its emblazoned roof, had been adorned with flowers and royally lit up. From the hills round Oxford the "line of festal light" made by its Tudor windows, in which gleamed the escutcheons of three centuries, could have been plainly seen. The High Street was full of carriages, and on the immaculate grass of the great quadrangle, groups of the guests, the men in academic costume, the women in the airiest and gayest of summer dresses, stood to watch the arrivals. The evening was clear and balmy; moonrise and dying day disputed the sky; and against its pale blue still scratched over with pale pink shreds and wisps of cloud, the grey college walls, battlemented and flecked with black, rose warmed and transfigured by that infused and golden summer in which all, Oxford lay bathed. Through open gateways there were visions of green gardens, girdled with lilacs and chestnuts; and above the quadrangle towered the crocketed spire of St. Mary's, ethereally wrought, it seemed, in ebony and silver, the broad May moon behind it. Within the hall, the guests were gathering fast. The dais of the high table was lit by the famous candelabra bequeathed to the college under Queen Anne; a piano stood ready, and a space had been left for the college choir who were to entertain the party. In front of the dais in academic dress stood the Vice-Chancellor, a thin, silver-haired man, with a determined mouth, such as befitted the champion of a hundred orthodoxies; and beside him his widowed sister, a nervous and rather featureless lady who was helping him to receive. The guest of the evening had not yet appeared.
Mr. Sorell, in a master's gown, stood talking with a man, also in a master's gown, but much older than himself, a man with a singular head--both flat and wide--scanty reddish hair, touched with grey, a massive forehead, pale blue eyes, and a long pointed chin. Among the bright colours of so many of the gowns around him--the yellow and red of the doctors of law, the red and black of the divines, the red and white of the musicians--this man's plain black was conspicuous. Every one who knew Oxford knew why this eminent scholar and theologian had never become a doctor of divinity. The University imposes one of her few remaining tests on her D.D's; Mr. Wenlock, Master of Beaumont, had never been willing to satisfy it, so he remained undoctored. When he preached the University sermon he preached in the black gown; while every ambitious cleric who could put a thesis together could flaunt his red and black in the Vice-Chancellor's procession on Sundays in the University church. The face was one of mingled irony and melancholy, and there came from it sometimes the strangest cackling laugh.
"Well, you