 CHAPTER IX Across the front quadrangle, heedless of the great crowd to right and left, dorset rushed. Up the stone steps to the hall he bounded, and only on the hall's threshold was he brought to a pause. The doorway was blocked by the backs of youths who had, by hawk and crook, secured standing-room. The whole scene was surprisingly unlike that of the average college concert. "'Let me pass,' said the duke, rather breathlessly. "'Thank you. Make way, please, sir, thanks.' And with quick pulsing heart he made his way down the aisle to the front row. There awaited him a surprise that was like a douche of cold water full in his face. Zulika was not there. It had never occurred to him that she herself might not be punctual. The warden was there, reading his programme with an air of great solemnity. "'Where?' asked the duke, "'Is your granddaughter?' His tone was of a man saying, "'If she is dead, don't break it gently to me.' "'My granddaughter,' said the warden, "'Ah, Duke, good evening. She's not ill?' "'Oh, I think not. She said something about changing the dress she wore at dinner. She will come.' And the warden thanked his young friend for the great kindness he had shown to Zulika. He hoped the duke had not let her worry him with her artless prattle. She seems her to be a good, amiable girl,' he added in his detached way. Seeing beside him the duke looked curiously at the venerable profile, as utter mummies, to think that this had once been a man, to think that his blood flowed in the veins of Zulika. Hitherto the duke had seen nothing grotesque in him, and regarded him always as a dignified specimen of priest and scholar. Such a life as the warden's year following year in ornamental seclusion from the follies and fusses of the world, had to the duke seemed rather admirable and enviable. Often he himself had, for a minute or so, meditated taking a fellowship at all souls, and spending here in Oxford the greater part of his life. He had never been young, and it had never occurred to him that the warden had been young once. Tonight he saw the old man in a new light, saw that he was mad. There was a man who, for had he not married and begotten a child, must have known, in some degree, the emotion of love. How after that could he have gone on thus year by year, rusting among his books, asking no favour of life, waiting for death without a sign of impatience? Why had he not killed himself long ago? Why cumbered he the earth? On the dais an undergraduate was singing a song, entitled, She Loves Not Me. Such planes are apt to leave us unharrowed. Across the footlights of an opera-house the despair of some Italian tenor in red tights and a yellow wig may be convincing enough. Not so at a concert the despair of a shy British amateur in evening dress. The undergraduate on the dais, fumbling with his sheet of music, while he predicted that only when he were laid within the churchyard cold and grey would his lady begin to pity him, seemed to the duke rather ridiculous, but not half so ridiculous as the warden. This fictitious love affair was less nuggetry than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the war-blow was perhaps expressing a genuine sentiment. Zulika herself, be like, was in his thoughts. As he began the second stanza, predicting that when his lady died, too, the angels of heaven would bear her straight to him, the audience heard a loud murmur or subdued roar outside the hall, and after a few bars the war-blow suddenly ceased, staring straight in front of him as though he saw a vision. Suddenly all heads veered in the direction of his gaze. From the entrance, slowly along the aisle, came Zulika, brilliant in black. To the duke, who had rapturously risen, she nodded and smiled as she swerved down on the chair beside him. She looked to him somehow different. He had quite forgiven her for being late. Her mere presence was a perfect excuse, and the very change in her, though he could not define it, was somehow pleasing to him. He was about to question her, but she shook her head and held up to her lips a black-fingered forefinger, enjoying silence for the singer, who, with dogged British pluck, had harked back to the beginning of the second stanza. When his task was done, and he shuffled down from the dais, he received a great ovation. Zulika, in the way peculiar to persons who are in the habit of appearing before the public, held her hands well above the level of her brow, and clapped them with a vigour demonstrative not less of her presence than of her delight. And now, she asked, turning to the duke, do you see, do you see, er, something, yes, but what? Isn't it plain? Lightly she touched the lobe of her left ear. Aren't you flattered? He knew now what made the difference. It was that her little face was flanked by two black pearls. Thing, said she, how deeply I must have been brooding over you since we parted. Is this really, he asked, pointing to the left earring at the pearl you wore to day? Yes, isn't it strange? A man ought to be pleased when a woman goes quite unconsciously into mourning for him, goes just because she really does mourn him. I am more than pleased that I am touched. When did the change come? I don't know. I only noticed it after dinner when I saw myself in the mirror. All through dinner I had been thinking of you and of, er, well, of tomorrow, and this dear, sensitive pink pearl had again expressed my soul. There was I in a yellow gown with green embroideries gay as a Jack-O-Mare. And idiosly on myself I crossed my eyes and brushed upstairs, rang the bell, and tore my things off. My maid was very cross. Cross! The duke shot through with the envy of one who was in a position to be unkind to Zuleka. Happy maid! He murmured. Zuleka replied that he was stealing her thunder. Hadn't she envied the girl at his lodgings? But I, she said, wanted only to serve you in meekness. The idea of ever being pert to you didn't enter my head. You show a side of your character as unpleasing as it was unforeseen. Perhaps, then, said the duke, it is as well that I am going to die. She acknowledged his rebuke with a pretty gesture of penitence. You may have been faultless in love, he added, but you would not have laid down your life for me. Oh! she answered, wouldn't I, though, you don't know me. That is just the sort of thing I should have loved to do. I am much more romantic than you are, really. I wonder, she said, glancing at his breast, if your pink pearl would have turned black, and I wonder if you would have taken the trouble to change that extraordinary coat you're wearing. In zoos no costume could have been more beautifully simerian than Zuleka's. And yet, thought the duke, watching her as the concert proceeded, the effect of her was not legubrious. Her darkness shone, the black sat-in gown she wore, was a stream of shifting highlights. Big black diamonds were around her throat and wrists, and tiny black diamonds starred the fan she wielded. In her hair gleamed a great raven's wing. And brighter, brighter than all these were her eyes. For assuredly, no, there was nothing morbid about her. Would one even, wondered the duke for a disloyal instant, go so far as to say she was heartless? No, no, she was merely strong. She was one who could tread the tragic plain without stumbling, and be resilient in the valley of the shadow. What she had just said was no more than the truth. She would have loved to die for him had he not forfeited her heart. She would have asked no tears. What she had none to shed for him now, that she did but share his exhilaration, was the measure of her worthiness to have the homage of his self-slaughter. By the way, she whispered, I want to ask one little favour of you. Will you please, at the last moment tomorrow, call out my name in a loud voice, so that everyone around can hear? Of course I will, so that no one shall ever be able to say it wasn't for me that should I knew no. May I simply use your Christian name? Yes, I really don't see why you shouldn't at such a moment. Thank you." His face glowed. Thus did they commune these two, radiant without and within, and behind them, throughout the hall, the undergraduates craned their necks for a glimpse. The Duke's piano solo, which was the last item in the first half of the programme, was eagerly awaited. Already whispered first from the lips of Hoover and the others, who had come on from the junta, the news of his resolve had gone from ear to ear among the men. He for his part had forgotten the scene at the junta, the baleful effect of his example. For him the hall was a cave of solitude. No one there but Zuleka and himself. Yet almost, like the late Mr. John Bright, he heard in the air the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. Not awful wings, little wings, that sprouted from the shoulders of a rosy and blindfold child. Love and death, for him they were exquisitely one, and it seemed to him, when his turn came to play, that he floated rather than walked to the desk. He had not considered what he would play to-night, nor maybe was he conscious now of choosing. His fingers caressed the keyboard vaguely, and anon this ivory had voice and language, and for its master and for some of his heroes arose of vision. And it was as though in delicate procession, very slowly, listless with weeping, certain figures passed by, hooded and drooping, for as much as by the loss of him, whom they were following to his grave, their own hold on life had been loosened. He had been so beautiful and young. Lo, he was but a burden to be carried hence, thus to be hidden out of sight. Very slowly, very wretchedly they went by. But as they went, another feeling, faint at first, and all but imperceptible current, seemed to flow through the procession, and now one, now another of the mourners, would look one lay up, with cast back hood, as they were listening, and anon all were listening on their way, first in wonder, then in rapture, for the soul of their friend was singing to them. They heard his voice, but clearer and more blind than they had ever known it, a voice etherealised by a triumph of joy that was not yet for them to share. But presently the voice receded, its echoes dying away into the sphere whence it came. It ceased, and the mourners were left alone with their sorrow, and passed on, all unsolest and drooping, weeping. Soon after the duke had begun to play, an invisible figure came and stood by and listened, a frail man, dressed in the fashion of 1840, the shade of none other than Frederick Chopin, behind whom, a moment later, came a woman of somewhat masculine aspect, and dominant demeanour, mounting guard over him, and, as it were, ready to catch him if he fell. He bowed his head lower and lower. He looked up, with an ecstasy, more and more intense, according to the procedure of his march funerable. And among the audience, too, there was a bowing and uplifting of heads, just as among the figures of the mourners he vote. Yet the head of the player himself was all the while erect, and his face glad and serene, nobly sensitive as was his playing of the mournful passages, he smiled brilliantly through them. Zulika returned his gaze with a smile, not less gay. She was not sure what he was playing, but she assumed that it was for her, and that the music had some reference to his impending death. She was one of the people who say, I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like. And she liked this, and she beat time to it with her fan. She thought her duke looked very handsome. She was proud of him. Strange that this time yesterday she had been wildly in love with him. Strange too that this time tomorrow he would be dead. She was immensely glad that she had saved him this afternoon. Tomorrow there came back to her what he had told her about the omen at Naktan, that stately home. On the eve of the death of a duke of Dorset, two black owls come always and perch on the battlements. They remain there through the night, hooting. At dawn they fly away, none knows wither. Perhaps, thought she, at this very moment those two birds were on the battlements. The music ceased. In the hush that followed it her plaws rang sharp and notable. Not so sure-pans. Of him and his intense excitement none but his companion was aware. Plovant que Bachmann, he reiterated, waving his arms wildly and dancing. Tu auras unicain vafeuse, rentres-en petit coeur. Said George Sound, gently but firmly. Laissez-moi le saluer, cried the composer, struggling in her grasp. Demain soir, oui, il sera un peu à minou. Said the novelist, as she hurried him away. Moi aussi, she added to herself, je me paumais un beau platillon, faisant la connaissance de Sous-Jean-Nôme. Zuleika was the first to rise as Sous-Jean-Nôme came down from the dais. Now was the interval between the two parts of the programme. There was a general creaking and scraping of pushed-back chairs as the audience rose and went forth into the night. The noise aroused from sleep the good warden, who, having peered at his programme, complimented the duke with old world courtesy, and went to sleep again. Zuleika, thrusting her fan under one arm, shook the player by both hands. Also she told him that she knew nothing about music really, but she knew what she liked. As she passed with him up the aisle, she said this again. People who say it are never tired of saying it. Outside the crowd was greater than ever. All the undergraduates from all the colleges seemed now to be concentrated in the great front quadrangle of Judas. Even in the glow of the Japanese lanterns that hung around in honour of the concert, the faces of the lads looked a little pale. For it was known by all now that the duke was to die. Even while the concert was in progress, the news had spread out from the hall, through the thronged doorway, down the thronged steps to the confines of the crowd. Nor had Uver and the other men from the junta made any secret of their own determination. And now, as the rest saw Zuleika yet again at close quarters and verified their remembrance of her, the half-formed desire in them to die too was hardened to a vow. You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs, but by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal the world might have achieved by this time some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost, he becomes just a unit in unreason. If any one of the undergraduates had met Miss Dobson in the desert of the Sahara, he would have fallen in love with her, but not one in a thousand of them would have wished to die because she did not love him. The dukes was a peculiar case. For him to fall in love was itself a violent peripity bound to produce a violent upheaval, and such was his pride that for his love to be unrequited would naturally enamour him of death. These other, these quite ordinary young men were victims less of Zuleika than of the dukes' example, and of one another. A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions and diminishes all in them that pertains to thought. It was because these undergraduates were a crowd that their passion for Zuleika was so intense, and it was because they were a crowd that they followed so blindly the lead given to them. To die for Miss Dobson was the thing to do. The duke was going to do it. The junta was going to do it. It is a hateful fact, but we must face the fact that snobbishness was one of the springs to the tragedy here chronicled. We may set to this crowd's credit that it refrained now from following Zuleika. Not one of the ladies present was deserted by her escort. All the men recognized the duke's right to be alone with Zuleika now. We may set also to their credit that they carefully guarded the ladies from all knowledge of what was afoot. Side by side the great lover and his beloved wandered away beyond the light of the Japanese lanterns, and came to salt-seller. The moon, like a gardenia in the night's buttonhole. But no, why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else, usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance? The moon, looking like nothing whatever but herself, was engaged in her old and futile endeavor to mark the hours correctly on the sundial at the centre of the lawn. However, except one's late one night in the eighteenth century, when the toper who was sub-warden had spent an hour in trying to set his watch here, had she received the slightest encouragement. Still, she won lip-assisted, and this was the more absurd in her, because salt-seller offered very good scope for those legitimate effects of hers which we one and all admire. Was it nothing to her to have cut those black shadows across the cloisters? Was it nothing to her that she so magically mingled her rays with the candle-light she had forth from Zuleka's bedroom? Nothing that she had cleansed the lawn of all its colour, and made of it a platform of silver-gray, fit for fairies to dance on? If Zuleka, as she paced the gravel path, had seen how transfigured, how nobly like the tragic muse she was just now, she could not have gone on bothering the duke for a keepsake of the tragedy that was to be. She was still set on having his two studs. He was still firm in his refusal to misappropriate those heirlooms. In vain she pointed out to him that the pearls he meant, the white ones, no longer existed, and that the pearls he was wearing were no more entailed than if he had got them yesterday. And you actually did get them yesterday, she said, and from me, and I want them back. You are ingenious, he admitted. I, in my simple way, am but head of the Tevil-Tacton family. Had you accepted my offer of marriage, you would have had the right to wear these two pearls during your lifetime. I am very happy to die for you. But tamper with the property of my successor, I cannot, and will not. I am sorry, he added. Sorry! echoed Zuleka. Yes, and you were sorry you couldn't dine with me to-night. But any niggling little scruple is more to you than I am. What old maidsmen are! And viciously with her fan she struck one of the cloister pillars. Her outburst was lost on the duke. At her taunt about his not dining with her, he had stood still, clapping one hand to his brow. The events of the early evening swept back to him. His speech, its unforeseen and horrible reception. He saw again the preter-naturally solemn face of Uva, and the flushed faces of the rest. He had thought, as he pointed down to the abyss over which he stood, these fellows would recoil and pull themselves together. They had recoiled and pulled themselves together only in the manner of athletes about to spring. He was responsible for them. His own life was his to lose, others he must not squander. Besides, he had reckoned to die alone, unique, aloft and apart. There is something, something I had forgotten, he said to Zulika, something that will be a great shock to you. And he gave her an outline of what had passed at the junta. And are you sure they really meant it? She asked in a voice that trembled. I fear so. But they were overexcited. They will recant their folly. I shall force them to. They're not children. You yourself have just been calling the men. Why should they obey you? She turned at the sound of a footstep and saw a young man approaching. He wore a coat like the dukes. And in his hand he dangled a handkerchief. He bowed awkwardly, and holding out the handkerchief said to her, I beg your pardon, but I think you dropped this. I have just picked it up. Zulika looked at the handkerchief, which was obviously a man's, and smilingly shook her head. I don't think you know the Macquern, said the duke with Salkie Grace. This, he said to the intruder, is Miss Dobson. And is it really true, asked Zulika, retaining the Macquern's hand, that you want to die for me? Well, the Scots are a self-seeking and a resolute but a shy race. They have to act when swiftness is needed, but seldom knowing quite what to say. The Macquern, with native reluctance to give something for nothing, had determined to have the pleasure of knowing the young lady for whom he was to lay down his life, and this purpose he had, by the simple stratagem of his own handkerchief, achieved. Nevertheless, in answer to Zulika's question, and with the pressure of her hand to inspire him, the only word that rose to his lips was, I, which may be roughly translated as a yes. You will do nothing of the sort, interposed the duke. There, said Zulika, still retaining Macquern's hand, you see, it is forbidden. You must not defy our dear little duke. He is not used to it. It's not done. I don't know, said the Macquern, with a stony glance at the duke, that he has anything to do with the matter. He is older and wiser than you. More a man of the world regard him as your tutor. Do you want me not to die for you?" asked the young man. Ah, I should not dare to impose my wishes on you, said she, dropping his hand, even, she added, if I knew what my wishes were. And I don't. I know only that I think it is very, very beautiful of you to think of dying for me. Then the heart settles it, said the Macquern. No, no, you must not let yourself be influenced by me. Besides, I'm not in a mood to influence anybody. I'm overwhelmed. Tell me," she said, heedless of the duke, who stored tapping his heel on the ground, with every manifestation of disapproval and impatience, but tell me, is it true that some of the other men love me too and feel as you do? The Macquern said cautiously that he could answer for no one but himself. But, he allowed, I saw a good many men whom I know outside the hall here, just now, and they seem to have made up their minds to die for me, to-morrow. To-morrow, after the eights, I suppose, at the same time as the duke, it wouldn't do to leave the races undecided. Of course not, but the poor dears, it is too touching. I have done nothing, nothing to deserve it. A nothing whatsoever, said the duke, dryly. Oh, he, said Zuleka, thinks me an unredeemed brute, just because I don't love him. You, dear Mr. Macquern, this one called you Mr. Thee, would sound so odd in the vocative, and I can't very well call you Macquern. You don't think me unkind, do you? I simply can't bear to think of all those young lives cut short without me having done a thing to brighten them. What can I do? What can I do to show my gratitude? An idea struck her. She looked up to the lit window of her room. A melissande, she called. A figure appeared at the window. Mamouzelle des Illes. My tricks, melissande, bring down the box quick. She turned excitedly to the two young men. It is all I can do in return, you see, if I could dance for them I would. If I could sing, I would sing to them. I do what I can. You, she said to the duke, must go on to the platform and announce it. Announce what? Why, that I am going to do my tricks. All you need to say is, ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure to. What is the matter now? Uh, you made me feel slightly unwell, said the duke. And you are the most disabligeing and the unkindest and the bestiest person I ever met. Zulika sobbed at him through her hands. The Macquern glared reproaches at him, said in melissande, who had just appeared through the Boston, holding in her arms the great casket of Malachite. A painful scene, and the duke gave in. He said he would do anything, anything. Peace was restored. The Macquern had relieved melissande of her burden, and to him was the privilege of bearing it in procession with his adored and her quelled mentor towards the hall. Zulika babbled like a child going to a juvenile party. This was the great night, as yet in her life. Illustrious enough already it had seemed to her, as Eve of that ultimate flattery vowed her by the duke. So finer thing had his doom seemed to her, his doom alone, as it had suffice to flood her pink pearl with the right hue. And now, not on him alone, Nietzsche Ponder, now he was but the centre of a group, a group that might grow and grow, a group that might, with a little encouragement, be a multitude. With such hopes dimly whirling in the recesses of her soul her beautiful red lips babbled. CHAPTER X Sounds of a violin drifting out through the open windows of the hall suggested that the second part of the concert had begun. All the undergraduates, however, except the few who figured in the programme, had waited outside till their mistress should reappear. The sisters and cousins of the Judas men had been escorted back to their places and hurriedly left there. It was a hushed Ten's crowd. "'The poor darlings,' murmured Zulika, pausing to survey them. "'And oh!' she exclaimed, there won't be room for all of them in there. "'You might give an overflow performance out here afterwards,' suggested the duke grimly. This idea flashed on her a better. Why not give her performance here and now?' "'Now!' So eager was she for contact, as it were, with this crowd, here by moonlight in the pretty glow of these paper lanterns. "'Yes,' she said, "'let it be here and now.' And she bade the duke make the announcement. "'What shall I say?' he asked. "'Gentlemen, I have the pleasure to announce that Miss Zulika Dobbson, the world-renowned she-wizard, will now oblige. Or shall I call gents toot-cook?' She could afford to laugh at his ill-humour. She had his promise of obedience. She told him to say something graceful and simple. The noise of the violin had ceased. There was not a breath of wind. The crowd in the quadrangle was as still and as silent as the night itself, nowhere a tremor. And it was born in on Zulika that this crowd had one mind as well as one heart, a common resolve, calm and clear, as well as a common passion. No need for her to strengthen the spell now. No waverer's here. And thus it came true that gratitude was the sole motive for her display. She stored with eyes downcast and hands folded behind her moonlit in the glow of lanterns, modest at the point of Pethos, while the duke gracefully and simply introduced her to the multitude. He was, he said, empowered by the lady who stood beside him, to say that she would be pleased to give them an exhibition of her skill in the art to which she had devoted her life, an art which, more potently perhaps than any other, touched in mankind the sense of mystery and stirred the faculty of wonder, the most truly romantic of all the arts. He referred to the art of conjuring. It was not too much to say that by her mastery of this art, in which hitherto it must be confessed, women had made no very great mark. Miss Zulika Dobson, for such was the name of the lady who stood beside him, had earned the esteem of the whole civilised world. And here, in Oxford, in this college especially, she had a peculiar claim to, might he say, their affectionate regard, in as much as she was the granddaughter of their venerable and venerated warden. As the duke ceased, there came from his hearers a sound like the rustling of leaves. In return for it, Zulika performed that graceful act of subsidence to the verge of collapse, which is usually kept for the delectation of some royal person. And indeed, in the presence of this doomed Congress, she did experience humility, for she was not altogether without imagination. But as she arose from her bob, she was her own bold self again, bright mistress of the situation. It was impossible for her to give her entertainment in full. Some of her tricks, notably the secret aquarium and the blazing ball of Worcester, needed special preparation, and a table fitted with a savante or secret tray. The table for tonight's performance was an ordinary one, brought out from the porter's lodge. The maquern deposited on it the great casket. Zulika, retaining him as her assistant, picked nimbly out from their places, and put in array the curious appurtenances of her art, the magic canister, the demon-egg-cup, and the sundry other vessels which, lost property of young Edward Gibbs, had been, by a Romanov, transmuted from wood to gold, and were now, by the moon, reduced temporarily to silver. In a great dense semi-circle, the young men disposed themselves around her. Those who were in front squatted down on the gravel. Those who were behind knelt, the rest stood. Young Oxford, here in this mass of boyish faces, all fused and obliterated, was the realization of that phrase. Two or three thousands of human bodies, human souls, yet the effect of them in the moonlight, was as of one great passive monster. So was it seen by the Duke, as he stood leaning against the wall behind Zulika's table. He saw it as a monster Couchon and Enchanted, a monster that was to die, and its death was in part his own doing. But remorse in him gave place to hostility. Zulika had begun her performance. She was producing the barber's pole from her mouth. And it was to her that the Duke's heart went suddenly out in tenderness and pity. He forgot her levity and vanity, her wickedness, as he had inwardly called it. He thrilled with that intense anxiety which comes to a man when he sees his beloved offering to the public an exhibition of her skill, be it in singing, acting, dancing, or any other art. Would she acquit herself well? The lover's trepidation is painful enough when the beloved has genius. How should these clods appreciate her, and who set them in judgment over her? It must be worse when the beloved has mediocrity. And Zulika, in conjuring, had rather less than that. Though indeed she took herself quite seriously as a conjurer, she brought to her art neither conscience nor ambition in any true sense of those words. Since her debut she had learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. The stale and narrow repertory which she had acquired from Edward Gibbs was all she had to offer. And this, and her marked lack of skill, she eaked out with the self-same patter that had sufficed that impossible young man. It was especially her jokes that now sent shudders up the spine of her lover and brought tears to his eyes, and kept him in the state of terror as to what she would say next. You see, she had exclaimed lightly, after the production of the barber's pole, how easy it is to set up in business as a hairdresser. Over the demon-egg-cup she said that the egg was as good as fresh. And her constantly reiterated catchphrase, who willed, this is rather queer, was the most distressing thing of all. The duke blushed to think what these men thought of her. Would love were blind? As her lovers were doubtless judging her, they forgave her, confound their impudence because of her beauty. The banality of her performance was an added grace. It made her piteous. Damn them! They were sorry for her. Little Noakes was squatting in the front row, peering up at her through his spectacles. Noakes was as sorry for her as the rest of them. Why didn't the earth yawn and swallow them all up? Our hero's unreasoning rage was fed by a not unreasonable jealousy. It was clear to him that Zuleka had forgotten his existence. Today, as soon as he had killed her love, she had shown him how much less to her was his love than the crowd's. And now again it was only the crowd she cared for. He followed with her eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously confidingly producing a penny from one lad's elbow, a threap and a bit from between another's neck and collar, half a crown from another's hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers, Well, this is rather queer. Hither and thither she fared, her neck and arms gleaming white from the luminous blackness of her dress, in the luminous blueness of the night. At a distance she might have been a wreath, or a breeze made visible, a vagrant breeze, warm and delicate, and in league with death. Yes, that is how she might have seemed to a casual observer, but the duke was nothing weird about her. She was radiantly a woman, a goddess, and his first and last love. Bitter his heart was, but only against the mob she would, not against her for wooing it. She was cruel. All goddesses are that. She was demeaning herself. His soul welled up anew in pity, in passion. Yonder in the hall the concert ran its course, making a feeble incidental music to the dark emotions of the quadrangle. It ended somewhat before the close of Zuleka's rival show, and then the steps from the hall were thronged by ladies who, with a sprinkling of dons, stood in attitudes of refined displeasure and vulgar curiosity. The warden was just awake enough to notice the sea of undergraduates. Suspecting some breach of college discipline, he retired hastily to his own quarters, for fear his dignity might be somehow compromised. Was there ever, I wonder, an historian so pure as not to have wished just once, to fob off on his readers, just one bright fable for effect? I find myself sorely tempted to tell you that on Zuleka, as her entertainment drew to a close, the spirit of the higher thaumaturgy descended like a flame, and found in her a worthy agent. Specia Apollyon whispers to me, Where would be the harm? Tell your readers that she cast a seed on the ground, and that therefrom presently arose a tamarin tree, which blossomed and bore fruit, and withering vanished. Or say she conjured from an empty basket of osia a hissing and bridling snake. Why not? Your readers would be excited, ratified, and you would never be found out. But the grave eyes of Cleo are bent on me, her servant. Oh, pardon, madam, I did, but waver for an instant. It is not too late to tell my readers that the climax of Zuleka's entertainment was only that dismal affair, the magic canister. It, she took from the table, and holding it aloft, cried, Now before I say good night, I want to see if I have your confidence. But you mustn't think this is a confidence trick. She handed the vessel to the maquern, who, looking like an overgrown acolyte, bore it after her as she went again among the audience. Pausing before a man in the front row, she asked him if he would trust her with his watch. He held it out to her. Thank you! She said, letting her fingers touch his for a moment, before she dropped it into the magic canister. From another man she borrowed a cigarette case, from another anecti, from another a pair of sleeve-links, from nooks, a ring, one of those iron rings which are supposed, rightly or wrongly, to alleviate rheumatism. And when she had made an ample selection, she began her return journey to the table. On her way she saw in the shadow of the wall a figure of her forgotten duke. She saw him, the one man she had ever loved, also the first man who had wished definitely to die for her, and she was touched by remorse. She had said she would remember him to her dying day, and already, but had he not refused her, the were with all to remember him, the pearls she needed as the clue of her dear collection, the great relic among relics. Would you trust me with your studs? She asked him, in a voice that could be heard throughout the quadrangle, with a smile that was for him alone. There was no help for it. He quickly extricated from his shirt front the black pearl and the pink. Her thanks had a special emphasis. Emma Quern placed the magic canister before her on the table. She pressed the outer sheath down on it. Then she inverted it so that the contents fell into the false lid. Then she opened it, looked into it, and exclaiming, Well, this is rather queer. Held it up, so that the audience whose intelligence she was insulting might see there was nothing in it. Accidents, she said, will happen in the best regulated canisters, but I think there is just a chance that I shall be able to restore your property. Excuse me for a moment. She then shut the canister, released the false lid, made several passes over it, opened it, looked into it, and said with a flourish, Now I can clear my character. Again she went among the crowd, attended by the Macquern, and the loans, priceless now because she had touched them, were in due course several restored. When she took the canister from her acolyte, only the two studs remained in it. Not since the night of her flitting from the Gibbs's humble home had Zuley cathieved. Was she a backslider? Would she rob the duke and his heir presumptive and the towel-tactons yet unborn? Alas, yes. But what she did now was proof that she had quans, and her way of doing it showed that for Lejeune-demain she had, after all, a natural aptitude which, properly trained, might have won for her an honourable place, in at least the second rank of contemporary prestidigitators. With the gesture of her disengaged hand, so swift as to be scarcely visible, she unhooked her earrings and passed them into the canister. This she did as she turned away from the crowd on her way to the duke. At the same moment, in a manner technically not less good, so morally deplorable, she withdrew the studs and vanished them into her bosom. Was it a triumph or shame, or of both a little that so flushed her cheeks as she stood before the man she had robbed, or was it the excitement of giving a present to the man she had loved? Certain it is that the nakedness of her ears gave a new look to her face, a primitive look, open and sweetly wild. The duke saw the difference without noticing the cause. She was more adorable than ever. He blenched and swayed as in proximity to a loveliness beyond endurance. His heart cried out within him. A sudden mist came over his eyes. In the canister that she held out to him, the two pearls rattled like dice. Keep them!" he whispered. "'I shall!' she whispered back almost shyly. "'But these are for you!' And she took one of his hands, and holding it open, till tilted the canister over it, and let drop into it the two earrings, and went quickly away. As she reappeared at the table, the crowd gave her a long ovation of gratitude for her performance, an ovation all the more impressive because it was solemn and subdued. She curts it again and again, not indeed with the timid simplicity of her first obeisance, so familiar already was she with the thought of the crowd-doom, but rather in the manner of a primadonna, chin up, eyelids down, all teeth manifest, and hands from the bosom flung ecstatically wide asunder. You know how at a concert a primadonna who has just sung insists on shaking hands with the accompanist and dragging him forward to show how beautiful her nature is into the applause that is for herself alone, and your heart like mine has gone out to the wretched victim. Even so would you have felt for the maquern, when Zuleka on the implied assumption that half the credit was his, grasped him by the wrist, and continuing to curtsy would not release him till the last echoes of the clapping had died away. The ladies on the steps of the hall moved down into the quadrangle, spreading their resentment like a miasma. The tragic passion of the crowd was merged in mere awkwardness. There was a general movement towards the college gate. Zuleka was putting her tricks back into the great casket, the maquern assisting her. The Scots, as I have said, are a shy race, but a resolute and self-seeking. This young chieftain had not yet recovered from what his heroine had let him in for, but he did not lose the opportunity of asking her to lunch with him to-morrow. "'Delighted,' she said, fitting the demon-egg-cup into its groove. Then, looking up at him, "'Are you popular?' she asked. "'Have you many friends?' he nodded. She said he must invite them all. This was a blow to the young man who, at once thrifty and infatuate, had planned a lunche-enardure. "'I had hoped,' he began. "'Vainly,' she cut him short. There was a pause. "'Ooom! Shall I invite them?' "'I don't know any of them. How should I have any preferences?' She remembered the duke. She looked round and saw him still standing in the shadow of the wall. He came towards her. "'Of course,' she said hastily to her host. "'You must ask him,' the maquern complied. He turned to the duke and told him that Miss Dobson had very kindly promised a lunch with him to-morrow. "'And,' said Zuleka, "'I simply won't, unless you will.' The duke looked at her. Had it not been arranged that he and she should spend his last day together? Did it mean nothing that she had given him her earrings? Quickly drawing about him some remnants of his tattered pride, he hid his wound and accepted the invitation. "'It seems a shame,' said Zuleka to the maquern, "'to ask you to bring this great heavy-box all the way back again. But those last poor rags of pride fell away now. The duke threw a prehensile hand on the casket and coldly glaring at the maquern, pointed with his other hand towards the college gate. He, and he alone, was going to see Zuleka home. It was his last night on earth, and he was not to be trifled with. Such was the message of his eyes. The Scotsmans flashed back a precisely similar message. Men had fought for Zuleka, but never in her presence. Her eyes dilated. She had not the slightest impulse to throw herself between the two antagonists. Indeed, she stepped back, so as not to be in the way. A short, sharp fight, how much better that is than bad blood! She hoped the better man would win, and do not misjudge her. She rather hoped this man was the duke. It occurred to her, of a vague memory of some play or picture, that she ought to be holding aloft a candelabra of lit tapers. No, that was only done indoors and in the eighteenth century. Was she to hold a sponge? Idle, these speculations of hers, and based on complete ignorance of the manners and customs of undergraduates, the duke and the maquern would never have come to blows in the presence of a lady. Their conflict was necessarily spiritual. And it was the Scotsman, Scots though he was, who had to yield. Cowed by something dim and ick, and the will-power pitted against his, he found himself retreating in the direction indicated by the duke's forefinger. As he disappeared into the porch, Zuleka turned to the duke. He was splendid, she said softly. He knew that very well. Does the stag in his hour of victory need a diploma from the hind? Holding in his hands the Malachite casket, that was the symbol of his triumph, the duke smiled dictatorially at his darling. He came near to thinking of her as a chattel. Even with a pang, he remembered his abject devotion to her. Abject no longer, though. The victory he had just won restored his manhood, his sense of supremacy among his fellows. He loved this woman on equal terms. She was transcendent, so was he, Dorset. Tonight the world had on its moonlit surface two great ornaments, Zuleka and himself. Neither of the pair could be replaced. Was one of them to be shattered? Life and love were good. He had been mad to think of dying. No word was spoken as they went together to salt-seller. She expected him to talk about her conjuring tricks. Could he have been disappointed? She dared not inquire, for she had the sensitiveness, though no other quality whatsoever, of the true artist. She felt herself aggrieved. She had half a mind to ask him to give her back her earrings. And by the way, he hadn't yet thanked her for them. Well, she would make allowances for a condemned man. And again she remembered the omen of which he had told her. She looked at him, and then up into the sky. This same moon, she said to herself, sees the battlements of Taktun. Does she see two black owls there? Does she hear them hooting? They were in salt-seller now. Millisoned, she called up to her window. Hush, said the duke, I have something to say to you. Well, you can say it all the better without that great box in your hands. I want my maid to carry it up to my room for me. And again she called out for Millison and received no answer. I suppose she's in the housekeeper's room or somewhere. You had better put the box down inside the door. She can bring it up later. She pushed open the poston, and the duke, as he stepped across the threshold, thrilled with a romantic awe. Being a moment later into the moonlight, he felt that she had been right about the box. It was fatal to self-expression, and he was glad he had not tried to speak on the way from the front quad. The soul needs gesture, and the duke's first gesture now was to see Zuleka's hands in his. She was too startled to move. Zuleka! he whispered. She was too angry to speak, but with a sudden twist she freed her hands and darted back. He laughed. You are afraid of me. You are afraid to let me kiss you, because you are afraid of loving me. This afternoon, here, I all but kissed you. I mistook you for death. I was enamoured of death. I was a fool. That is what you are, you incomparable darling. You are a fool. You are afraid of life. I am not. I love life. I am going to live for you. Do you hear? She stood with her back to the poston. Anger in her eyes had given place to scorn. You mean? She said that you go back on your promise. You will release me from it. You mean you are afraid to die. You will not be guilty of my death. You love me. Good night! You miserable coward! She stepped back through the poston. Don't, Zuleka, and Miss Dobson, don't pull yourself together. Reflect. I implore you. You will repent. Slowly she closed the poston on him. You will repent. I shall wait here under your window." He heard a bolt rasped into his socket. He heard the retreat of a light tread on the Paven Hall. And he hadn't even kissed her, that was his first thought. He ground his heel in the gravel. And he had hurt her wrists. This was Zuleka's first thought as she came into her bedroom. Yes, there were two red marks where he had held her. No man had ever dared to lay hands on her. With a sense of contamination she proceeded to wash her hands thoroughly with soap and water, from time to time such words as cat and beast came through her teeth. She dried her hands and flung herself into a chair, arose, and went pacing the room. So this was the end of her great night. What had she done to deserve it? How had he dared? There was a sound as of rain against the window. She was glad the night needed cleansing. She had told her she was afraid of life, life, to have herself caressed by him, humbly to devote herself to being humbly doted on, with a slave over slave, to swim in a private pond of treacle. If the thought were so clawing and degrading it would be laughable. For a moment her hands hovered over those two golden and gemmed volumes encasing Bradshaw and the ABC Guide. To leave Oxford by an early train, leave him to drown unthanked, unlooked at. But this could not be done without sliding all those hundreds of other men, and besides. Again that sound on the window-pane. This time it startled her. There seemed to be no rain. Could it have been little bits of gravel? She darted noiselessly to the window, pushed it open and looked down. She saw the upturned face of the duke. She stepped back, trembling with fury, staring around her. Inspiration came. She thrust her head out again. Are you there? She whispered. Yes, yes, I knew you would come. Wait a moment. Wait! The water-jug stood where she had left it, on the floor by the wash-stand. It was almost full, rather heavy. She bore it steadily to the window and looked out. Come a little nearer, she whispered. The upturned and moonlit face obeyed her. She saw its lips forming the word Sulica. She took careful aim. Full on the face crashed the cascade of moonlit water, shooting out on all sides, like the petals of some great silver anemone. She laughed shrilly as she let back, letting the empty jug roll over on the carpet. Then she stood tense, crouching, her hands to her mouth, her eyes a-scanse, as much as to say, Now I've done it! She listened hard, holding her breath. In the stillness of the night was a faint sound of dripping water and presently of footsteps going away. Then stillness unbroken. CHAPTER X I said that I was Cleo's servant, and I felt when I said it that you looked at me dubiously and murmured among yourselves. Not that you doubted I was somewhat connected with Cleo's household. The lady after whom I have named this book is alive and well known to some of you personally, to all of you by repute. Nor had you finished my first page, before you guessed my theme to be that episode in her life, which caused so greater sensation among the newspaper-reading public a few years ago. It all seems but yesterday, does it not? They're still vivid to us, those headlines. We have hardly yet ceased to be edified by the morals pointed in those leading articles. Then yet very soon you found me behaving just like any novelist, reporting the exact words that passed between the protagonists at private interviews, I and the exact thoughts and emotions that were in their breasts. Little wonder that you wondered! Let me make things clear to you. I have my mistresses leave to do this. At first, for reasons which you will presently understand, she demurred. But I pointed out to her that I had been placed in a false position, and that until this were rectified neither she nor I could reap the credit due to us. Know then that for a long time Cleo had been thoroughly discontented. She was happy enough, she says, when first she left the home of Pierras, her father, to become a muse. On those humble beginnings she looks back with affection. She kept only one servant, Herodotus. The romantic element in him appealed to her. He died, and she had about her a large staff of able and faithful servants, whose way of doing their work irritated and depressed her. To them, apparently, life consisted of nothing but politics and military operations. Things to which she, being a woman, was somewhat indifferent. She was jealous of melpomony. It seemed to her that her own servants worked from without at a mass of dry details which might as well be forgotten. Melpomonies worked on material that was eternally interesting, the souls of men and women, and not from without either, but rather casting themselves into those souls, and showing us the essence of them. She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle's, that tragedy was more philosophic than history. Inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been. This summed up for her what she had often felt, but could not have exactly formulated. She saw that the department over which she presided was at best an inferior one. She saw that just what she liked, and rightly liked, in poor dear Herodotus, was just what prevented him from being a good historian. It was wrong to mix up facts and fancies. But why should her present servants deal with only one little special set of the variegated facts of life? It was not in her power to interfere. The nine, by the terms of the charter that Zeus had granted to them, were bound to leave their servants in the absolutely free hand. But Cleo could at least refrain from reading the works which, by a legal fiction, she was supposed to inspire. Once or twice in the course of a century she would glance into this or that new history-book, only to lay it down with the shrug of her shoulders. Some of the medieval chronicles she rather liked. But when one day Pallas asked her what she thought of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, her only answer was ostia toia eche etedoni eche etedoni toia. For people who liked that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing they like. This she did, let's live. Generally throughout all the centuries she kept up a pretense of thinking history the greatest of all the arts. She always held her head high among her sisters. It was only on the sly that she was an omnivorous reader of dramatic and lyric poetry. She watched, with keen interest, the earliest developments of the prose romance in southern Europe. And after the publication of Clarissa Harlow, she spent practically all her time in reading novels. It was not until the spring of the year 1863 that an entirely new element forced itself into her peaceful life. Zeus fell in love with her. To us, for whom so quickly, time doth transfix the flourished set on youth, there is something strange, even a trifle ludicrous in the thought that Zeus, after all these years, is still at the beck and call of his passions. And it seems anyhow lamentable that he has not yet gained self-confidence enough to appear in his own person to the lady of his choice, and is still at pains to transform himself into whatever object he deems likely as to please her. To Cleo, suddenly from Olympus, he flashed down in the semblance of King's Lake's invasion of the Crimea, for volumes of large octavo, half-calf. She saw through his disguise immediately, and with great courage and independence, bad him be gone. When he rebuffed, he was not deflected. Indeed it would seem that Cleo's high spirit did but sharpen his desire. Hardly a day passed, but he appeared in what he hoped would be the irresistible form, a recently discovered fragment of Polybius, an advance copy of the forthcoming issue of The Historical Review, the notebook of Professor Card Virtulapin. One day all crying Hermes told him of Cleo's secret addiction to novel-reading. Thenceforth, year in, year out, it was in the form of fiction that Zeus wooed her. The sole result was that she grew sick of the sight of novels, and found a perverse pleasure in reading history. These dry details of what had actually happened were a relief, she told herself, from all that make-believe. Once on the afternoon, the day before that very Monday on which this narrative opens, it occurred to her how fine a thing history might be, if the historian had the novelist's privileges. Suppose he could be present at every scene which he was going to describe, a presence invisible and inevitable, and equipped with power to see into the breasts of all the persons whose actions he set himself to watch. While the muse was thus musing, Zeus, the disguised as Miss Annie S. Swan's latest work, paid his usual visit. She let her eyes rest on him. Hither and thither she divided her swift mind, and addressed him in winged words. Zeus, father of gods and men, cloud-compeller, what wouldst thou of me? But first will I say what I would of thee. And she besought him to extend to the writers of history such privileges as are granted to novelists. His whole manner had changed. He listened to her with the massive gravity of a ruler who never yet has allowed private influence to obscure his judgment. He was silent for some time after her appeal. Then in a voice of thunder which made quake the slopes of Parnassus, he gave his answer. He admitted the disabilities under which historians laboured, but the novelists were they not equally handicapped. They had to treat of persons who never existed, events which never were, only by the privilege of being in the thick of those events, and in the very bowels of those persons could they hope to hold the reader's attention. If similar privileges were granted to the historian, the demand for novels would cease forthwith, and many thousand of hard-working, deserving men and women would be thrown out of employment. In fact Cleo had asked him an impossible favour. But he might, he said he conceivably might, be induced to let her have her way just once. In that event all she would have to do was to keep her eye on the world's surface, and then, so soon as she had reason to think that somewhere was impending something of great import, to choose an historian. On him, straightway, Zeus would confer invisibility, inevitability, and psychic penetration, with a flawless memory thrown in. On the following afternoon, Cleo's roving eye saw Zuleka stepping from the Paddington Platform into the Oxford train. A few moments later I found myself suddenly on Parnassus. In hurried words Cleo told me how I came there, and what I had to do. She said she had selected me because she knew me to be honest, sober and capable, and no stranger to Oxford. Another moment, and I was at the throne of Zeus. With a majesty of gesture which I shall never forget, he stretched his hand over me, and I was endued with the promised gifts. And then, lo, I was on the platform of Oxford station. The train was not due for another hour, but the time passed pleasantly enough. It was fun to float all unseen, to float all unhampered by any corporeal nonsense up and down the platform. It was fun to watch the inmost thoughts of the station-master of the porters, of the young person at the buffet. But of course I did not let the holiday-moon master me. I realized the seriousness of my mission. I must concentrate myself on the matter in hand. Miss Dobson's visit. What was going to happen? Prescience was no part of my outfit. From what I knew about Miss Dobson I deduced that she would be a great success. That was all. Had I had the instinct that was given to those emperors in stone, or even to the dog-corker I should have begged Cleo to send in my stead some man of stronger nerve. He had charged me to be calmly vigilant, scrupulously fair. I could have been neither had I from the outset foreseen all. Only because the immediate future was broken to me by degrees, first as a set of possibilities, then as a set of probabilities that yet might not come off, was I able to fulfill the trust imposed in me. Even so it was hard. I had always accepted the doctrine that to understand all is to forgive all. Just as use, I understood all about Miss Dobson, and yet there were moments when she repelled me, moments when I wished to see her neither from without nor from within. So soon as the Duke of Dorset met her on the Monday night, I felt I was in duty bound to keep him under constant surveillance. Yet there were moments when I was so sorry for him that I deemed myself a brute for shadowing him. Ever since I can remember I have been beset by a recurring doubt as to whether I be or be not quite a gentleman. I have never attempted to define that term. I have, but feverishly wondered whether in its usual acceptance, whatever that is, to be strictly applicable to myself. Many people hold that the qualities connoted by it are primarily moral, a kind heart, honorable conduct, and so forth. On Cleo's mission I found honour and kindness tugging me in precisely opposite directions. In so far as honour tugged the harder, was I the more or the less, gentlemanly. But the test is not a fair one. Curiosity tugged on the side of honour. This goes to prove me a cad? Oh, set against it the fact that I did at one point betray Cleo's trust. When Miss Dobson had done the deed recorded at the close of the foregoing chapter, I gave the Duke of Dorset an hour's grace. I could have done no less. In the lives of most of us is some one thing that we would not, after the lapse of how many years so ever confess, to our most understanding friend. The thing that does not bear thinking of, the one thing to be forgotten, the unforgettable thing. Not the commission of some great crime. This can be atoned for by great penances, and the very enormity of it has a dark grandeur. Maybe some little deadly act of meanness, some hole and corner treachery, but what a man has once willed to do, his will helps him to forget. The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done, or left undone, but a thing done to him. Some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself. This it is, that often comes back to him years after, in his dreams, and thrusts itself suddenly into his waking thoughts, so that he clenches his hands, and shakes his head, and hunts a tune loudly, anything to beat it off. In the very hour when first befell him that odious humiliation, would you have spied on him? I gave the Duke of Dorset an hour's grace. What were his thoughts in that interval? What words, if any, he uttered to the night, never will be known. For this Cleo has abused me in language less fitting amused than a fish-wife. I do not care. I would rather be chideened by Cleo than by my own sense of delicacy any day. CHAPTER XII Not less averse than from dogging the Duke was I from remaining another instant in the presence of Miss Dobson. There seemed to be no possible excuse for her. This time she had gone too far. She was outrageous. As soon as the Duke had had time to get clear away, I floated out into the night. I may have consciously reasoned that the best way to forget the present was in the revival of memories, or I may have been driven by a mere homing instinct. Anyhow, it was in the direction of my old college that I went. Midnight was tolling as I floated in through the shut Grimm Gate, at which I had so often stood knocking for admission. The man who now occupied my room had sported his oak, my oak. I read the name on the visiting card attached there to E. J. Craddock, and went in. E. J. Craddock interloper was sitting at my table, with elbows squared, and head on one side in the act of literary composition. The oars and caps on my walls betokened him a rowing man. Indeed, I recognized his somewhat heavy face as that of the man whom, from the Judas Barge this afternoon, I had seen rowing stroke in my college-eight. He ought, therefore, to have been in bed and asleep two hours ago, and the offence of his vigil was aggravated by a large tumbler that stood in front of him, containing whisky and soda. From this he took a deep draft. Then he read over what he had written. I did not care to peer over his shoulder at a manuscript, which, though written in my room, was not intended for my eyes, but the writer's brain was open to me. And he had written, I, the undersigned Edward Joseph Craddock, do hereby leave and bequeath all my personal and other property to Zuleka Dobson, Spinster. This is my last will and testament. He gnawed his pen, and presently altered hereby leave to hereby and herewith leave. Fool! I thereby and therewith left him. As I emerged through the floor of the room above, through the very carpet that had so often been steeped in wine and encrusted with smithereens of glass in the brave old days of a well- remembered occupant, I found two men, both of them evidently reading men. One of them was pacing round the room. Do you know, he was saying, what she reminded me of all the time, those words aren't they in the song of Solomon, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" Supplied his host, rather testily, for he was writing a letter. It began, "'My dear father, by the time you receive this I shall have taken a step which—' Really it was vain to seek distraction in my old college. I floated out into the untenanted meadows. Over them was the usual covalent of white vapour, trailed from the ISIS, right up to Merton Wall. The scent of these meadows moisture is the scent of Oxford. Even in the hottest noon one feels that the sun has not dried them. Always there is moisture drifting across them, drifting into the colleges. It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit, that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who, as youths, were brought into Kennevit, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly it is this mild miasma layer, not less than the gray beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The undergraduate, in his brief periods of residence, is too buoyant to be mastered by the spirit of the place. He does but salute it and catch the manner. It is on him who stays to spend his maturity here, that the spirit will, in its fullness, gradually descend. The buildings and their traditions keep a stir in his mind, whatsoever is gracious. The climate, enfolding and enfeebling him, lulling him, keeps him careless of the sharp, harsh, exigent realities of the outer world. Careless? Not utterly. These realities may be seen by him. He may study them, be amused or touched by them. But they cannot fire him. Oxford is too damp for that. The movements made there have been no more than protests against the mobility of others. They have been without the dynamic quality implied in their name. They have been no more than the size of men gazing at what other men have left behind them. Faint impossible appeals to the God of retrogression, uttered for their own sake and ritual, rather than with any intent that they should be heard. Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power of action. But in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the vision, gives above all that playful and caressing suavity of manner, which comes from a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and that not even ideas are worth dying for, in as much as the ghosts of them slain seem worthy of yet more piously elaborate homage than can be given to them in their heyday. If the colleges could be transferred to the dry and bracing top of some hill, doubtless they would be more evidently useful to the nation. Could let us be glad there is no engineer or enchanter to compass that task. Ergomet, I would leave her have the rest of England subside into the sea, than have Oxford set on the salubrious level, for there is nothing in England to be matched by what lurks in the vapours of these meadows and in the shadows of these spires, that mysterious, inenubilable spirit. Spirit of Oxford, Oxford, the very sight of the word printed or sound of it spoken, is fraught for me with most actual magic. And on that moonlit night, when I floated among the vapours of these meadows, myself less than a vapour, I knew and loved Oxford as never before, as never since. Yonder, in the colleges was the fume and fret of tragedy, love as death's decoy and youth following her. What then, not Oxford was menaced, come what might, not a stone of Oxford's walls would be loosened, nor a wreath of her vapours be undone, nor lost a breath of her sacred spirit. I floated up into the higher, drier air, that I might for once see the total body of that spirit. There lay Oxford far beneath me, like a map in grey and black and silver, all that I had known, only as great single things, I saw now outspread in opposition, and tiny, tiny symbols, as it were of themselves, greatly symbolizing their oneness. There they lay, these multitudinous and disparate quadrangles, all their rival is merged in the making of a great Catholic pattern, and the roofs of the buildings around them seemed level with their lawns. No higher the roofs of the very towers, up from their tiny segment of the earth's spinning surface, they stood negligible beneath infinity. And new, too, quite new, in eternity, transient upstarts. I saw Oxford as a place that had no more past and no more future than a mining-camp. I smiled down, oh, whorey and unassainable mushroom! But if a man carry his spirit of proportion far enough, though, he is back at the point from which he started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and infinity but a speck in infinity. How should they belittle the things near to him? Oxford was venerable and magical, after all, and enduring. I, and not because she would endure, was it the less lamentable that the young lives within her walls were like to be taken? My equanimity was gone, and a tear fell on Oxford. And then, as though Oxford herself were speaking up to me, the air vibrated with a sweet noise of music. It was the hour of one, and the end of the Duke's hour of grace. Through the silvery tangle of sounds from other clocks, I floated quickly down to the broad. CHAPTER XIII I had on the way a horrible apprehension. What if the Duke, in his agony, had taken the one means to forgetfulness? His room, I could see, was lit up, but a man does not necessarily choose to die in the dark. I hovered afraid over the dome of the Sheldonian. I saw that the window of the room above the Duke's was also lit up, and there was no reason at all to doubt the survival of Noakes. Perhaps the sight of him would hearten me. I was wrong. The sight of Noakes in his room was as dismal a thing as could be. With his chin sunk on his breast, he sat there, on a rickety chair, staring up at the mantelpiece. This he had decked out as a sort of shrine. In the centre, a loft on an inverted tin that had contained Abernethy biscuits stood a blue plush frame, with an inner rim of brass. Several sizes too big for the picture postcard installed in it. Zulika's image gazed forth, with a smile that was obviously not intended for the humble worshipper at this excruble shrine. On either side of her stood a small vase. One holding some Geraniums, the other some Minionette. And just beneath her was placed that iron ring which, rightly or wrongly, Noakes supposed to alleviate rheumatism, that same iron ring which, by her touch to-night, had been charged for him with a yet deeper magic, in so much that he dared no longer wear it, and had set it before her as an oblation. Yet for all his humility he was possessed by a spirit of egoism that repelled me. While he sat peering over his spectacles at the beautyous image, he said again and again to himself, in a hollow voice, I am so young to die. Every time he said this, too large pear-shaped tears emerged from behind his spectacles, and found their way to his waistcoat. It did not seem to strike him that quite half the undergraduates who contemplated death, and contemplated it in a fearless, wholesome, manly fashion, were his juniors. It seemed to seem to him that his own death, even though all these other far brighter and more promising lives than his were to be sacrificed, was a thing to bother about. Well, if he did not want to die, why could he not have at least the courage of his cowardice? The world would not cease to revolve, because Noakes still clung to its surface. For me the whole tragedy was cheapened by his participation in it. I was feigned to leave him. His squint, his short legs dangling toward the floor, his tear-sodden waistcoat, and his refrain, I am so young to die, were beyond measure exasperating. Yet I hesitated to pass into the room beneath, for fear of what I might see there. How long I might have faltered, had no sound come from that room I know not, but a sound came, sharp and sudden in the night, instantly reassuring. I swept down into the presence of the duke. He stood with his head flung back, and his arms folded, gorgeous in a dressing-gown of crimson brocade. In animation of pride and pomp, he looked less like a mortal man, than like a figure from some great biblical group by Paul Ferenese. And this was he whom I had presumed to pity, and this was he whom I had half expected to find dead. His face, usually pale, was now red, and his hair, which no I had ever yet seen disordered, stood up in a glistening shock. These two changes in him intensified the effect of vitality. One of them, however, vanished as I watched it. The duke's face resumed its pallor. I realized then that he had but blushed, and I realized simultaneously that what had called that blush to his cheek was what had also been the signal to me that he was alive. His blush had been appended to his sneeze. And his sneeze had been appended to that outrage which he had been striving to forget. He had caught cold. In the hour of his soul's bitter need his body had been suborned against him. Base! Had he not stripped his body of its wet vesture? Had he not vigorously dried his hair, and robed himself in crimson, and stuck in solitude such attitudes as were most congruous with his high spirits and high rank? He had set himself to crush remembrance of that by which, through his body, his soul had been assailed. And well had he known that in this conflict a giant demon was his antagonist, but that his own body would play traitor. No, this he had not foreseen. This was too base a thing to be foreseen. He stood quite still, a figure augulus and splendid. And it seemed as though the hot night, too, stood still, to watch him in awe through the open lattices of his window, breathlessly. But to me, equipped to see beneath the surface, he was piteous, piteous in ratio to the pretension of his aspect. Had he crouched down and sobbed, I should have been as much relieved as he. But he stood, senorial, and aquiline. Painless, by comparison with this conflict in him, seemed the conflict that had raged in him yesterday night, then it had been his dandyhood against his passion for Zulika. What mattered the issue? Whichever won the victory was sweet. And of this he had been all the while subconscious, gallantly, though he fought for his pride of dandyhood. Tonight, in the battle between pride and memory, he knew from the outset that pride was but a forlorn hope, and that memory would be barbarous in her triumph. Not winning to oblivion, he must hate with a fathomless hatred. Of all the emotions, hatred is the most excruciating. Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful. Of all deaths, the bitterest that can befall a man, is that he lay down his life to flatter the woman he deems vilest of her sex. Such was the death that the Duke of Dorset saw confronting him. Most men, when they are at war with the past, have the future as ally. Looking steadfastly forward, they can forget. The Duke's future was openly in league with his past. For him, the prospect was memory. All that there was for him a future was the death to which his honour was pledged. To envisage that was to—no, he would not envisage it. With a passionate effort he hypnotised himself to think of nothing at all. His brain, into which, by the powers you gave me, I was gazing, became a perfect vacuum, insulated by the will. It was the kind of experiment which scientists call beautiful. And yes, beautiful it was. But not in the eyes of nature, she abhors a vacuum. Seeing the enormous odds against which the Duke was fighting, she might well have stood aside, but she has no sense of sport whatsoever. She stepped in. At first I did not realise what was happening. I saw the Duke's eyes contract, and the muscles of his mouth drawn down, and at the same time a tense upward movement of his whole body. Then suddenly, the strain undone, a downward dart of the head, a loud percussion, thrice the Duke sneezed, with a sound that was as the bursting of dams of body and soul together, and then sneezed again. Now was his will broken. He capitulated. In rushed shame and horror and hatred, Pell-Mell, to ravage him. What care now? What use for deportment? He walked coweringly round and round his room, with frantic gestures, with head bowed, he shuffled and slunk. His dressing-gown had the look of a gabardine. Shame and horror and hatred went slashing and hewing throughout the fallen citadel. At length, exhausted, he flung himself down on the window-seat, and leant out into the night, panting. The air was full of thunder. He clutched at his throat. From the depths of the black caverns beneath their brows, the eyes of the unsleeping emperors watched him. He had gone through much in the day that was past. He had loved and lost. He had striven to recapture, and had failed. In a strange resolve, he had found serenity and joy. He had been at the point of death and had been saved. He had seen that his beloved was worthless, and he had not cared. He had fought for her and conquered, and had played with her, and all these memories were loathsome by reason of that final thing which had all the while lain in wait for him. He looked back and saw himself as he had been at a score of crucial moments in the day, always in the shadow of that final thing. He saw himself as he had been on the playing-fields of Eaton, eyed in the arms of his nurse, to and fro on the terrace of Tacton, always in the shadow of that final thing, always piteous and ludicrous, doomed. Thank heaven the future was unknowable. It wasn't now. Tomorrow, and today, he must die for that accursed fiend of a woman, the woman with the hyena laugh. Not to do, meanwhile, impossible to sleep. He felt in his body the strain of his quick sequence of spiritual adventures. He was dog-tired, but his brain was furiously out of hand, no stopping it, and the night was stifling, and all the while in the dead silence, as though his soul had ears, there was a sound. It was a very faint, unearthly sound, and seemed to come from nowhere, yet to have a meaning. He feared he was rather over-raught. He must express himself. That would soothe him. Ever since childhood he had had, from time to time, the impulse to set down in writing his thoughts or his moods. In such exercises he had found for his self-consciousness the vent which natures less reserved than his, finding casual talk with Tom, Dick, and Harry, with Jane, Susan, and Liz. A loop from either of these triads he had in his first term at Eaton, taken to himself as confident, and retained ever since a great quarter-volume, bound in red Morocco and stamped with his coronet and cipher. It was, herein, year by year that his soul spread itself. He wrote mostly in English prose, but other modes were not infrequent. Whenever he was abroad it was his courteous habit to write in the language of the country where he was residing, French when he was in his house on the Champs-Élysées, Italian when he was in his villa at Abayai, and so on. When he was in his own country he felt himself free to deviate sometimes from the vernacular into whatever language were aptest to his frame of mind. In his sterner moods he gravitated to Latin, and wrought the noble iron of that language to effects that were, if anything, a trifle over-impressive. He found, for his highest flights of contemplation, a handy vehicle in Sanskrit. In hours of mere joy it was Greek poetry that flowed likeliest from his pen, and he had a special fondness for the meter of Alcheas. And now, too, in his darkest hour it was Greek that surged in him. Iambics of thunderous wrath, such as those which are valid by Prometheus, but as he sat down to his writing-table, and unlocked the dear old album, and dipped his pen in the ink, a great calm fell on him. The Iambics in him began to breathe such sweetness as is on the lips of Alcestis going to her doom. But, just as he set pen to paper, his hand faltered, and he sprang up, victim of another, and yet more violent fit of sneezing. Disbaskin'd, dangerous, the spirit of juvenile woken him. He would flay, he wouldn't make woman, as he called Zuleika, writhe. Latin hexameters, of course, and he pestled to his air presumptive. Vaitibi, he began, Vaitibi, Vaitibi, visoro, nisai, circumspexori, sartis, feminias, nam nula, salus, quin femina, posit, tradire, nula, fides, quin, quin, he repeated. In writing Soliloquy's, his trouble was to curb inspiration. The thought that he was addressing his air presumptive, now air only to apparent, gave him pause, nor, he reflected, was he addressing this brute only, but a huge posthumous audience, these hexameters would be sure to appear in the authorised biography. A melancholy interest attaches to the following lines, written it would seem on the very eve of, he winced, was it really possible, and no dream, that he was to die to-morrow. Today, even you, an assuming reader, go about with a vague notion that in your case, somehow, the ultimate demand of nature will be waived. The duke, until he conceived his sudden desire to die, had deemed himself certainly exempt. And now, as he sat staring at his window, he saw in the paling of the night the presage of the dawn of his own last day. Sometimes, often though he was in early childhood, he had even found it hard to believe that there was no exemption for those to whom he stood in any personal relation. He remembered how, soon after he went to eaton, he had received, almost with incredulity, the news of the death of his godfather, Lord Stackley, an octogenarian. He took from the table his album, knowing that on one of the earliest pages was inscribed his boyish sense of that bereavement. Yes, here the passage was, written in a large round hand. Death knocks, as we know, at the door of the cottage and of the castle. He stalks up to the front garden, and the steep steps of the semi-detached villa implies the ornamental knocker so imperiously that the panels of imitation stained glass quiver in the thin front door. Even the family that occupies the topmost story of a building without a lift is on his ghastly visiting list. He rattles his fleshless knuckles against the door of the gypsies' caravan. Into the savage's tent, we guam all waddled hut, he darts unbidden. Even on the hermit in the cave, he forces his obnoxious presence. He is as a universal beat, and he walks it with a grin. But be sure it is at the somber portal of the nobleman that he knocks with the greatest gusto. It is there, where happily his visit will be commemorated with a hatchment. It is then, when the muffled thunder of the dead march in Saul will soon be rolling in cathedrals, it is then, it is there, that the pride of his unquestioned power comes grimliest home to him. Is there nowithstanding him? Why should he be admitted always with awe, a cravenly honoured ghast? When next he calls, let the butler send him about his business, or tell him to step round to the servant's entrance. If it be made plain to him that his visits are an impertinence, he will soon be disemboldened. Once the aristocracy make a stand against him, there need be no more trouble about the exorbitant duties named after him. And for the hereditary system, that system which both offends the common sense of the radical and wounds the Tory by its implied admission that noblemen are mortal, a seemingly substitute will have been found. Artless and crude in expression, very boyish, it seemed now to its author. Yet, in its simple wistfulness, it had quality. It rang true. The Duke wondered whether, with all that he had since mastered in the great art of English prose, he had not lost something, too. Is there nowithstanding him? To think that the boy who uttered that cry and gave back so brave an answer was within nine years to go seek death of his own accord, how the gods must be laughing. Yes, the exquisite point of the joke for them was that he chose to die, but as the thought flashed through him he started like a man shot. What if he chose not to? Stay. Surely there was some reason why he must die. Else why throughout the night had he taken his doom for granted? Honor? Yes, he had pledged himself. Better death than dishonor. Was it, though? Was it? Ah! He, who had come so near to death, saw dishonor as a tiny trifle. Where was the sting of it? No. He would be ridiculous to-morrow. Today everyone would acclaim his splendid act of model courage. She, the hyena woman, would be the fool. So one would have thought of dying for her had he not set the example. Everyone would follow his new example. Yes, he would save Oxford yet. That was his duty, duty and darling vengeance and life, life! It was full dawn now. Gone was that faint monotonous sound which had punctuated in his soul the horrors of his vigil. But in reminder of those hours his lamp was still burning. He extinguished it, and the going out of that tarnished light made perfect his sense of release. He threw wide his arms in welcome of the greater adorable day, and of all the greater adorable days that were to be his. He leant out from his window, drinking the dawn in. The gods had made merry over him, had they, and the cry of the hyena had made the night hideous. Well, it was his turn now. He would laugh last and loudest. And already, for what was to be, he laughed out right into the morning, in so much that the birds in the trees of Trinity, and still more the emperors over the way, marveled greatly. CHAPTER XIV They had awaited thousands and innumerable thousands of day-breaks in the broad, those emperors, counting the long slow hours till the night were over. It is in the night especially that their fallen greatness haunts them. Day brings some distraction. They are not incurious of the lives around them, those little lives that succeed one another so quickly. To them, in their immemorial old age, youth is a constant wonder. And so is death, which to them comes not. Youth or death, which they had often asked themselves, was a goodlier. But it was ill that these two things should be mated. It was ill come, this day of days. Long after the duke was in bed and asleep, his peel of laughter echoed in the ears of the emperors. Why had he laughed? And they said to themselves, We are very old men and broken, and in a land not our own. There are things that we do not understand. Death was the freshness of the dawn. From all points of the compass, dark grey clouds mounted into the sky. There, taking their places as though, in accordance to a strategic plan laid down for them, they ponderously massed themselves, and presently, as at a given signal, drew nearer to earth, and halted an irresistible great army, awaiting orders. Somewhere under cover of them, the sun went his way, transmitting a sulfurous heat, the very birds in the trees of Trinity were oppressed, and did not twitter. The very leaves did not whisper. Out through the railings and across the road, proud of skimpy and dingy cat, trying to look like a tiger. It was all very sinister and dismal. The hours passed. The broad put forth, one by one, its signs of waking. Soon after eight o'clock, as usual, the front door of the duke's lodgings was opened from within. The emperors watched for the faint cloud of dust that presently emerged, and for her whom it proceeded. To them, this first outcoming of the landlady's daughter was a moment of daily interest. Katie, they had known her as a toddling child, and later as a little girl, scampering off to school, all legs and pinafore and streaming golden hair, and now she was sixteen years old. Her hair, tied back at the nape of her neck, would very soon be up. Her big blue eyes were, as they had always been, but she had long passed out of pinafores into aprons, had taken on a sedateness befitting her years and her duties, and was anxious to be regarded, rather as an aunt, than as a sister, by her brother Clarence, age twelve. The emperors had always predicted that she would be pretty, and very pretty she was. As she came slowly out, with eyes downcast to her broom, sweeping the dust so seriously over the doorstep, and then across the pavement, and anon when she reappeared with pale and scrubbing brush, and abased herself before the doorstep, and wrought so vehemently there, what filled her little soul was not the dignity of manual labour. The duties that Zuleka had envied her were dear to her exactly as they would have been, yesterday morning, to Zuleka. The emperors had often noticed that during vacations their little favourites treatment of the doorstep was languid and perfunctory. They knew well her secret, and always, for who can belong in England without becoming sentimental, they cherished the hope of a romantic union between her and a certain young gentleman, as they actually called the Duke. His continued indifference to her they talked almost as an affront to themselves, where in all England was a pretty, a sweeter girl than their Katie. The sudden eruption of Zuleka into Oxford was especially grievous to them, because they could no longer hope against hope that Katie would be led by the Duke to the altar, and then sin to the highest social circles, and live happily ever after. Luckily it was for Katie, however, that they had no power to fill her head with their foolish notions. It was well for her to have never doubted she loved in vain. She had soon grown used to her lot. Not until yesterday, had there been any bitterness, jealousy surged in Katie at the very moment when she beheld Zuleka on the threshold. A glance at the Duke's face when she showed the visitor up was enough to acquaint her with the state of his heart. And she did not, for confirming her intuition, need the two or three opportunities she took of listening at the keyhole. What in the course of those informal audiences did surprise her? Much indeed, that she could hardly believe her ear, was that it was possible for a woman not to love the Duke. Her jealousy of that Miss Dobson was for a while swallowed up in her pity for him. What she had borne so cheerfully for herself she could not bear for her hero. She wished she had not happened to listen. And this morning, while she knelt swaying and spreading over his doorstep, her blue eyes added certain tears to be scrubbed away in the general moisture of the stone. Rising she dried her hands in her apron and dried her eyes with her hands. Lest her mother should see that she had been crying, she loitered outside the door. Suddenly her roving-glance changed to a stare of acute hostility. She knew well that the person wandering towards her was, no, not that Miss Dobson, as she had for the fraction of an instant, supposed, but the next worst thing. It has been said that Melisande indoors was unevidently French-made. Out of doors she was not less evidently Zuleica's. Not that she ate her mistress, the resemblance had come by force of propinquity and devotion. Nature had laid no basis for it. Not one point of form or colour had the two women in common. It has been said that Zuleica was not strictly beautiful. Melisande, like most French women, was strictly plain. But in expression and port, in her whole tonneau, she had become, as every good-made does, her mistress's replica. The poise of her head, the boldness of her regard and brilliance of her smile, the leisurely and swinging way in which she walked, with a hand on the hip. All these things of hers were Zuleica's, too. She was no conqueror, none but the man to whom she was betrothed. A waiter at the café-toutel, named Peleas, had ever paid court to her, nor was she covered her so other hearts. Yet she looked victorious, and insatiable of victories and terrible as an army with banners. In the hand that was not on her hip she carried a letter, and on her shoulders she had to bear the full burden of the hatred that Zuleica had inspired in Katie. But this she did not know. She came, glancing boldly, leisurely, at the numbers on the front doors. Katie stepped back on to the doorstep, lest the inferiority of her stature should mar the effect of her disdain. Agudé, is it here that the ducteur sé lives? asked Melissande, as nearly accurate as a gall, maybe, in such matters. The doke of Dorcet, said Katie, with a cold and insular emphasis, leves ae, and you, she tried to convey with her eyes. You, for all your smart black silk, are a hireling. I am mismatch. I happen to have a hobby for housework. I have not been crying." Rzin, please mount this to him at once, said Melissande, holding out the letter. It is from Miss Dobbson's part. Very express. I wait response. You are very ugly," Katie signalled with her eyes. I am very pretty. I have the Oxfordshire complexion, and I play the piano. With her lips, she said merely, his grace is not called before nine o'clock. But today you go wake him now, quick, is he not? Quite out of the question, said Katie, if you care to leave that letter here, I will see that it is placed on his Grace's breakfast table with the morning's post. For the rest, added her eyes, down with France. Ah, then you drawle, but drawle, my little one," cried Melissande. Katie stepped back and shut the door in her face. Ah! Like a little empress," the emperor's commented. The French woman threw up her hands and apostrophised heaven. To this day she believes that all the bonds of Oxford are mad, but mad and of her madness. She stared at the door, at the pale and scrubbing brush that had been shut out with her, at the letter in her hand. She decided that she had better drop the letter into the slit in the door and make report to Miss Dobson. As the envelope fell through the slit to the door-mat, Katie made at Melissande a grimace which, had not the panels been opaque, would have astonished the emperor's. Resuming her dignity, she picked the thing up, and at arm's length examined it. It was inscribed in pencil. It is lips curled at sight of the large audacious handwriting. But it is probable that whatever kind of handwriting Zuleka might have had would have been just the kind that Katie would have expected. Fingering the envelope, she wondered what the wretched woman had to say. It occurred to her that the kettle was simmering on the hob in the kitchen, and that she might easily steam-open the envelope and master its contents. However, her doing this would have in no way affected the course of the tragedy, and so the gods, being today in a strictly artistic mood, prompted her to mind her own business. Laying the duke's table for breakfast, she made, as usual, a neat rectangular pile of the letters that had come for him by post. Zuleka's letter she threw down as cue. That luxury, she allowed herself. And he, when he saw the letter, allowed himself the luxury of leaving it unopened awhile. After its purport, he knew it could but minister to his happy malice. A few hours ago, with what shame and dread it would have stricken him. Now it was a dainty to be dallied with. His eyes rested on the black tin boxes that contained his robes of the garter. Hateful had been the sight of them in the watches of the night when he thought he had worn those robes for the last time. But now? He opened Zuleka's letter. He did not disappoint him. Dear duke, do do forgive me. I am beyond words ashamed of the silly, tomboyish thing I did last night. Of course it was no worse than that, but an awful fear haunts me that you may have thought I acted in anger at the idea of your breaking your promise to me. Well it is quite true I had been hurt and angry when you hinted at doing that. But the moment I left you I saw that you had been only in fun, and I enjoyed the joke against myself, though I thought it was rather too bad of you. And then, as a sort of revenge, but almost before I knew what I was doing, I played that idiotic, practical joke on you. I have been miserable ever since. Do come round as early as possible and tell me I am forgiven. But before you tell me that, please lecture me till I cry, though indeed I have been crying halfway through the night. And then, if you want to be very horrid, you may tease me for being so slow to see a joke, and then you might take me to see some of the colleges and things before we go on to lunch at the Macquerns. Forgive pencil and scrawl, I am sitting up in bed to write. Your sincere friend, J.D., PS, please burn this. At that final injunction, the duke abandoned himself to his mirth. Please burn this. Oh, poor dear young woman, how modest she was in the glare of her diplomacy! Why, there was nothing, not one phrase, to compromise her in the eyes of a coroner's jury. Seriously, she had good reason to be proud of her letter. For the purpose in view it couldn't have been better done. That was what made it so touchingly absurd. He put himself in her position. He pictured himself as her, sitting up in bed, pencil in hand, to explain a way, to soothe, to clinch, and bind. Yes, if he had happened to be some other man, one whom her insult might have angered without giving love its death-blow, and one who could be frightened out of not keeping his word, this letter would have been capital. He helped himself to some more marmalade, and poured out another cup of coffee. Nothing is more thrilling, thought he, than to be treated as a culley by the person you hold in the hollow of your hand. But within this great irony lay, to be glided over another irony, he knew well in what mood Zuleka had done what she had done to him last night, yet he preferred to accept her explanation of it. Officially then he acquitted her of anything worse than tomboyishness. But this verdict for his own convenience implied no mercy to the culprit. The sole point for him was how to administer her punishment the most poignantly. Just how should he word his letter? He rose from his chair and, Dear Miss Dobson, no, my dear Miss Dobson, he murmured, pacing the room, I am so very sorry I cannot come to see you. I have to attend to two lectures this morning. By contrast with this weirdness it will be the more delightful to meet you at the Macquerns. I want to see as much as I can of you to-day because to-night there is the bump supper, and to-morrow morning alas I must motet a Windsor for this wretched investiture. Meanwhile, how can you ask to be forgiven when there is nothing whatever to forgive? It seems to me that mine, and not yours, is the form of humour that needs explanation. My proposal to die for you was made in as playful a spirit as my proposal to marry you. And it is really for me to ask forgiveness of you. One thing especially, he murmured, fingering in his waistcoat pocket the earrings she had given him, pricks my conscience. I do feel that I ought not to have let you give me those two pearls, at any rate not the one which went into premature mourning for me. As I have no means of deciding which of the two this one is, I enclose them both, with the hope that the petty deference between them will in time re-appear. All words to that effect. Stay, why not add to the joy of contriving that effect the greater joy of watching it? Why send Zuleka a letter? He would obey her summons. He would speed to her side. He snatched up a hat. In this haste, however, he detected a certain lack of dignity. He steadied himself and went slowly to the mirror. There he adjusted his hat with care and regarded himself very seriously, very sternly, from various angles. Like a man invited to paint his own portrait for the Uffizi, he must be worthy of himself. It was well that Zuleka should be chastened. Great was her sin. Out of life and death she had fashioned toys for her vanity. But his joy must be in vindication of what was noble, not in making suffer what was vile. Yesterday he had been her puppet, her jumping-jack. Today it was as avenging angel that he would appear before her. The gods had mocked him who was now their minister. Their minister? Their master, as being once more master of himself. It was they who had plotted his undoing, because they loved him they were feign that he should die young. The dobson woman was but their agent, their cat's poor. By her they had all but caught him. Not quite. But now, to teach them, through her, a lesson they would not soon forget, he would go forth. Shaking with laughter, the gods lent over the thunder-clouds to watch him. He went forth. On the well-witened doorstep he was confronted by a small boy in uniform, bearing a telegram. "'Doc of Dorset!' asked the small boy. Opening the envelope the duke saw that the message, with which was a prepaid form for reply, had been handed in at the tact and post-office. It ran thus. "'A deeply regret informed your grace last night. Two black owls came and perched on battlements. Remained there through night, hooting. At dawn flew away, none no wither. Awaiting instructions, jellings. The duke's face, though it grew white, moved not one muscle. Somewhat shamed now the gods ceased from laughing. The duke looked from the telegram to the boy. "'Have you a pencil?' he asked. "'Yes, my lord!' said the boy, producing a stump of pencil. Holding the prepaid form against the door, the duke wrote, jellings, tact and hall, prepare vault for funeral Monday. Dorset!' His handwriting was as firmly and minutely beautiful as ever. Only in that he forgot there was nothing to pay did he belie his calm. "'Here,' he said to the boy, is a shelling, and you may keep the change. "'Ain't ye, my lord?' said the boy, and went his way, as happy as a postman.' End of chapter 14