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Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story

by Sir Max Beerbohm · English · Gutenberg #1845 · 467,674 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story

Author: Sir Max Beerbohm


        
Release date: August 1, 1999 [eBook #1845]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2016

Language: English

Original publication: S.l:  s.n.], , 1922

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1845

Credits: Produced by Judy Boss, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ZULEIKA DOBSON; OR, AN OXFORD LOVE STORY ***




Produced by Judy Boss





ZULEIKA DOBSON

or, AN OXFORD LOVE STORY

By Max Beerbohm





         NOTE to the 1922 edition

         I was in Italy when this book was first published.
         A year later (1912) I visited London, and I found
         that most of my friends and acquaintances spoke to
         me of Zu-like-a--a name which I hardly recognised
         and thoroughly disapproved. I had always thought
         of the lady as Zu-leek-a. Surely it was thus that
         Joseph thought of his Wife, and Selim of his Bride?
         And I do hope that it is thus that any reader of
         these pages will think of Miss Dobson.

                                              M.B.
                                              Rapallo, 1922.




ILLI ALMAE MATRI





ZULEIKA DOBSON




I

That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford
station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in
tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly
up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine,
they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood
on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique
station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to
the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.

At the door of the first-class waiting-room, aloof and venerable, stood
the Warden of Judas. An ebon pillar of tradition seemed he, in his garb
of old-fashioned cleric. Aloft, between the wide brim of his silk hat
and the white extent of his shirt-front, appeared those eyes which
hawks, that nose which eagles, had often envied. He supported his years
on an ebon stick. He alone was worthy of the background.

Came a whistle from the distance. The breast of an engine was descried,
and a long train curving after it, under a flight of smoke. It grew
and grew. Louder and louder, its noise foreran it. It became a furious,
enormous monster, and, with an instinct for safety, all men receded
from the platform’s margin. (Yet came there with it, unknown to them,
a danger far more terrible than itself.) Into the station it came
blustering, with cloud and clangour. Ere it had yet stopped, the door of
one carriage flew open, and from it, in a white travelling dress, in a
toque a-twinkle with fine diamonds, a lithe and radiant creature slipped
nimbly down to the platform.

A cynosure indeed! A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many
hearts lost to her. The Warden of Judas himself had mounted on his nose
a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Him espying, the nymph darted in his
direction. The throng made way for her. She was at his side.

“Grandpapa!” she cried, and kissed the old man on either cheek. (Not a
youth there but would have bartered fifty years of his future for that
salute.)

“My dear Zuleika,” he said, “welcome to Oxford! Have you no luggage?”

“Heaps!” she answered. “And a maid who will find it.”

“Then,” said the Warden, “let us drive straight to College.” He offered
her his arm, and they proceeded slowly to the entrance. She chatted
gaily, blushing not in the long avenue of eyes she passed through. All
the youths, under her spell, were now quite oblivious of the relatives
they had come to meet. Parents, sisters, cousins, ran unclaimed about
the platform. Undutiful, all the youths were forming a serried suite to
their enchantress. In silence they followed her. They saw her leap into
the Warden’s landau, they saw the Warden seat himself upon her left. Nor
was it until the landau was lost to sight that they turned--how slowly,
and with how bad a grace!--to look for their relatives.

Through those slums which connect Oxford with the world, the landau
rolled on towards Judas. Not many youths occurred, for nearly all--it
was the Monday of Eights Week--were down by the river, cheering the
crews. There did, however, come spurring by, on a polo-pony, a very
splendid youth. His straw hat was encircled with a riband of blue and
white, and he raised it to the Warden.

“That,” said the Warden, “is the Duke of Dorset, a member of my College.
He dines at my table to-night.”

Zuleika, turning to regard his Grace, saw that he had not reined in and
was not even glancing back at her over his shoulder. She gave a little
start of dismay, but scarcely had her lips pouted ere they curved to a
smile--a smile with no malice in its corners.

As the landau rolled into “the Corn,” another youth--a pedestrian, and
very different--saluted the Warden. He wore a black jacket, rusty and
amorphous. His trousers were too short, and he himself was too short:
almost a dwarf. His face was as plain as his gait was undistinguished.
He squinted behind spectacles.

“And who is that?” asked Zuleika.

A deep flush overspread the cheek of the Warden. “That,” he said, “is
also a member of Judas. His name, I believe, is Noaks.”

“Is he dining with us to-night?” asked Zuleika.

“Certainly not,” said the Warden. “Most decidedly not.”

Noaks, unlike the Duke, had stopped for an ardent retrospect. He gazed
till the landau was out of his short sight; then, sighing, resumed his
solitary walk.

The landau was rolling into “the Broad,” over that ground which had once
blackened under the fagots lit for Latimer and Ridley. It rolled past
the portals of Balliol and of Trinity, past the Ashmolean. From those
pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high
grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in
the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The
inanimate had little charm for her.

A moment later, a certain old don emerged from Blackwell’s, where he had
been buying books. Looking across the road, he saw, to his amazement,
great beads of perspiration glistening on the brows of those Emperors.
He trembled, and hurried away. That evening, in Common Room, he told
what he had seen; and no amount of polite scepticism would convince him
that it was but the hallucination of one who had been reading too much
Mommsen. He persisted that he had seen what he described. It was not
until two days had elapsed that some credence was accorded him.

Yes, as the landau rolled by, sweat started from the brows of the
Emperors. They, at least, foresaw the peril that was overhanging Oxford,
and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be remembered to
their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently of them. In their
lives we know, they were infamous, some of them--“nihil non commiserunt
stupri, saevitiae, impietatis.” But are they too little punished, after
all? Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to heat and frost,
to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they
are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty
and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants,
they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even
with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for
the Twelve Apostles. It is but a little way down the road that the two
Bishops perished for their faith, and even now we do never pass the spot
without a tear for them. Yet how quickly they died in the flames! To
these Emperors, for whom none weeps, time will give no surcease. Surely,
it is sign of some grace in them that they rejoiced not, this bright
afternoon, in the evil that was to befall the city of their penance.





II

The sun streamed through the bay-window of a “best” bedroom in the
Warden’s house, and glorified the pale crayon-portraits on the wall,
the dimity curtains, the old fresh chintz. He invaded the many trunks
which--all painted Z. D.--gaped, in various stages of excavation, around
the room. The doors of the huge wardrobe stood, like the doors of
Janus’ temple in time of war, majestically open; and the sun seized this
opportunity of exploring the mahogany recesses. But the carpet, which
had faded under his immemorial visitations, was now almost ENTIRELY
hidden from him, hidden under layers of fair fine linen, layers of
silk, brocade, satin, chiffon, muslin. All the colours of the rainbow,
materialised by modistes, were there. Stacked on chairs were I know not
what of sachets, glove-cases, fan-cases. There were innumerable packages
in silver-paper and pink ribands. There was a pyramid of bandboxes.
There was a virgin forest of boot-trees. And rustling quickly hither and
thither, in and out of this profusion, with armfuls of finery, was an
obviously French maid. Alert, unerring, like a swallow she dipped and
darted. Nothing escaped her, and she never rested. She had the air of
the born unpacker--swift and firm, yet withal tender. Scarce had her
arms been laden but their loads were lying lightly between shelves or
tightly in drawers. To calculate, catch, distribute, seemed in her but a
single process. She was one of those who are born to make chaos cosmic.

Insomuch that ere the loud chapel-clock tolled another hour all the
trunks had been sent empty away. The carpet was unflecked by any scrap
of silver-paper. From the mantelpiece, photographs of Zuleika surveyed
the room with a possessive air. Zuleika’s pincushion, a-bristle with
new pins, lay on the dimity-flounced toilet-table, and round it stood
a multitude of multiform glass vessels, domed, all of them, with dull
gold, on which Z. D., in zianites and diamonds, was encrusted. On
a small table stood a great casket of malachite, initialled in like
fashion. On another small table stood Zuleika’s library. Both books were
in covers of dull gold. On the back of one cover BRADSHAW, in beryls,
was encrusted; on the back of the other, A.B.C. GUIDE, in amethysts,
beryls, chrysoprases, and garnets. And Zuleika’s great cheval-glass
stood ready to reflect her. Always it travelled with her, in a great
case specially made for it. It was framed in ivory, and of fluted ivory
were the slim columns it swung between. Of gold were its twin sconces,
and four tall tapers stood in each of them.

The door opened, and the Warden, with hospitable words, left his
grand-daughter at the threshold.

Zuleika wandered to her mirror. “Undress me, Melisande,” she said. Like
all who are wont to appear by night before the public, she had the habit
of resting towards sunset.

Presently Melisande withdrew. Her mistress, in a white peignoir tied
with a blue sash, lay in a great chintz chair, gazing out of the
bay-window. The quadrangle below was very beautiful, with its walls of
rugged grey, its cloisters, its grass carpet. But to her it was of no
more interest than if it had been the rattling court-yard to one of
those hotels in which she spent her life. She saw it, but heeded it not.
She seemed to be thinking of herself, or of something she desired, or of
some one she had never met. There was ennui, and there was wistfulness,
in her gaze. Yet one would have guessed these things to be transient--to
be no more than the little shadows that sometimes pass between a bright
mirror and the brightness it reflects.

Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and
their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls
was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its
rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were
not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a
gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen
came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere replica of
Cupid’s bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls.
No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian
rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson’s cheeks. Her neck was
imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She
had no waist to speak of.

Yet, though a Greek would have railed at her asymmetry, and an
Elizabethan have called her “gipsy,” Miss Dobson now, in the midst of
the Edwardian Era, was the toast of two hemispheres. Late in her ‘teens
she had become an orphan and a governess. Her grandfather had refused
her appeal for a home or an allowance, on the ground that he would not
be burdened with the upshot of a marriage which he had once forbidden
and not yet forgiven. Lately, however, prompted by curiosity or by
remorse, he had asked her to spend a week or so of his declining
years with him. And she, “resting” between two engagements--one at
Hammerstein’s Victoria, N.Y.C., the other at the Folies Bergeres,
Paris--and having never been in Oxford, had so far let bygones be
bygones as to come and gratify the old man’s whim.

It may be that she still resented his indifference to those early
struggles which, even now, she shuddered to recall. For a governess’
life she had been, indeed, notably unfit. Hard she had thought it, that
penury should force her back into the school-room she was scarce out of,
there to champion the sums and maps and conjugations she had never
tried to master. Hating her work, she had failed signally to pick up
any learning from her little pupils, and had been driven from house
to house, a sullen and most ineffectual maiden. The sequence of her
situations was the swifter by reason of her pretty face. Was there a
grown-up son, always he fell in love with her, and she would let his
eyes trifle boldly with hers across the dinner-table. When he offered
her his hand, she would refuse it--not because she “knew her place,”
 but because she did not love him. Even had she been a good teacher, her
presence could not have been tolerated thereafter. Her corded trunk,
heavier by another packet of billets-doux and a month’s salary in
advance, was soon carried up the stairs of some other house.

It chanced that she came, at length, to be governess in a large family
that had Gibbs for its name and Notting Hill for its background. Edward,
the eldest son, was a clerk in the city, who spent his evenings in the
practice of amateur conjuring. He was a freckled youth, with hair that
bristled in places where it should have lain smooth, and he fell in love
with Zuleika duly, at first sight, during high-tea. In the course of the
evening, he sought to win her admiration by a display of all his tricks.
These were familiar to this household, and the children had been sent
to bed, the mother was dozing, long before the seance was at an end. But
Miss Dobson, unaccustomed to any gaieties, sat fascinated by the young
man’s sleight of hand, marvelling that a top-hat could hold so many
goldfish, and a handkerchief turn so swiftly into a silver florin. All
that night, she lay wide awake, haunted by the miracles he had wrought.
Next evening, when she asked him to repeat them, “Nay,” he whispered,
“I cannot bear to deceive the girl I love. Permit me to explain the
tricks.” So he explained them. His eyes sought hers across the bowl of
gold-fish, his fingers trembled as he taught her to manipulate the magic
canister. One by one, she mastered the paltry secrets. Her respect for
him waned with every revelation. He complimented her on her skill. “I
could not do it more neatly myself!” he said. “Oh, dear Miss Dobson,
will you but accept my hand, all these things shall be yours--the cards,
the canister, the goldfish, the demon egg-cup--all yours!” Zuleika,
with ravishing coyness, answered that if he would give her them now, she
would “think it over.” The swain consented, and at bed-time she
retired with the gift under her arm. In the light of her bedroom candle
Marguerite hung not in greater ecstasy over the jewel-casket than
hung Zuleika over the box of tricks. She clasped her hands over the
tremendous possibilities it held for her--manumission from her bondage,
wealth, fame, power. Stealthily, so soon as the house slumbered,
she packed her small outfit, embedding therein the precious gift.
Noiselessly, she shut the lid of her trunk, corded it, shouldered it,
stole down the stairs with it. Outside--how that chain had grated!
and her shoulder, how it was aching!--she soon found a cab. She took
a night’s sanctuary in some railway-hotel. Next day, she moved into
a small room in a lodging-house off the Edgware Road, and there for
a whole week she was sedulous in the practice of her tricks. Then she
inscribed her name on the books of a “Juvenile Party Entertainments
Agency.”

The Christmas holidays were at hand, and before long she got an
engagement. It was a great evening for her. Her repertory was, it must
be confessed, old and obvious; but the children, in deference to their
hostess, pretended not to know how the tricks were done, and assumed
their prettiest airs of wonder and delight. One of them even pretended
to be frightened, and was led howling from the room. In fact, the whole
thing went off splendidly. The hostess was charmed, and told Zuleika
that a glass of lemonade would be served to her in the hall. Other
engagements soon followed. Zuleika was very, very happy. I cannot claim
for her that she had a genuine passion for her art. The true conjurer
finds his guerdon in the consciousness of work done perfectly and for
its own sake. Lucre and applause are not necessary to him. If he were
set down, with the materials of his art, on a desert island, he would
yet be quite happy. He would not cease to produce the barber’s-pole from
his mouth. To the indifferent winds he would still speak his patter, and
even in the last throes of starvation would not eat his live rabbit or
his gold-fish. Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her
time in looking for a man’s foot-print. She was, indeed, far too human
a creature to care much for art. I do not say that she took her work
lightly. She thought she had genius, and she liked to be told that this
was so. But mainly she loved her work as a means of mere self-display.
The frank admiration which, into whatsoever house she entered, the
grown-up sons flashed on her; their eagerness to see her to the door;
their impressive way of putting her into her omnibus--these were the
things she revelled in. She was a nymph to whom men’s admiration was the
greater part of life. By day, whenever she went into the streets,
she was conscious that no man passed her without a stare; and this
consciousness gave a sharp zest to her outings. Sometimes she was
followed to her door--crude flattery which she was too innocent to fear.
Even when she went into the haberdasher’s to make some little purchase
of tape or riband, or into the grocer’s--for she was an epicure in her
humble way--to buy a tin of potted meat for her supper, the homage of
the young men behind the counter did flatter and exhilarate her. As the
homage of men became for her, more and more, a matter of course, the
more subtly necessary was it to her happiness. The more she won of it,
the more she treasured it. She was alone in the world, and it saved her
from any moment of regret that she had neither home nor friends. For
her the streets that lay around her had no squalor, since she paced them
always in the gold nimbus of her fascinations. Her bedroom seemed not
mean nor lonely to her, since the little square of glass, nailed above
the wash-stand, was ever there to reflect her face. Thereinto, indeed,
she was ever peering. She would droop her head from side to side, she
would bend it forward and see herself from beneath her eyelashes, then
tilt it back and watch herself over her supercilious chin. And she would
smile, frown, pout, languish--let all the emotions hover upon her face;
and always she seemed to herself lovelier than she had ever been.

Yet was there nothing Narcissine in her spirit. Her love for her own
image was not cold aestheticism. She valued that image not for its own
sake, but for sake of the glory it always won for her. In the little
remote music-hall, where she was soon appearing nightly as an “early
turn,” she reaped glory in a nightly harvest. She could feel that all
the gallery-boys, because of her, were scornful of the sweethearts
wedged between them, and she knew that she had but to say “Will any
gentleman in the audience be so good as to lend me his hat?” for the
stalls to rise as one man and rush towards the platform. But greater
things were in store for her. She was engaged at two halls in the West
End. Her horizon was fast receding and expanding. Homage became nightly
tangible in bouquets, rings, brooches--things acceptable and (luckier
than their donors) accepted. Even Sunday was not barren for Zuleika:
modish hostesses gave her postprandially to their guests. Came that
Sunday night, notanda candidissimo calculo! when she received certain
guttural compliments which made absolute her vogue and enabled her to
command, thenceforth, whatever terms she asked for.

Already, indeed, she was rich. She was living at the most exorbitant
hotel in all Mayfair. She had innumerable gowns and no necessity to buy
jewels; and she also had, which pleased her most, the fine cheval-glass
I have described. At the close of the Season, Paris claimed her for
a month’s engagement. Paris saw her and was prostrate. Boldini did a
portrait of her. Jules Bloch wrote a song about her; and this, for a
whole month, was howled up and down the cobbled alleys of Montmartre.
And all the little dandies were mad for “la Zuleika.” The jewellers
of the Rue de la Paix soon had nothing left to put in their
windows--everything had been bought for “la Zuleika.” For a whole month,
baccarat was not played at the Jockey Club--every member had succumbed
to a nobler passion. For a whole month, the whole demi-monde was
forgotten for one English virgin. Never, even in Paris, had a woman
triumphed so. When the day came for her departure, the city wore such an
air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians marched to
its Elysee. Zuleika, quite untouched, would not linger in the conquered
city. Agents had come to her from every capital in Europe, and, for a
year, she ranged, in triumphal nomady, from one capital to another. In
Berlin, every night, the students escorted her home with torches. Prince
Vierfuenfsechs-Siebenachtneun offered her his hand, and was condemned
by the Kaiser to six months’ confinement in his little castle. In Yildiz
Kiosk, the tyrant who still throve there conferred on her the Order of
Chastity, and offered her the central couch in his seraglio. She
gave her performance in the Quirinal, and, from the Vatican, the Pope
launched against her a Bull which fell utterly flat. In Petersburg, the
Grand Duke Salamander Salamandrovitch fell enamoured of her. Of every
article in the apparatus of her conjuring-tricks he caused a replica
to be made in finest gold. These treasures he presented to her in that
great malachite casket which now stood on the little table in her room;
and thenceforth it was with these that she performed her wonders.
They did not mark the limit of the Grand Duke’s generosity. He was for
bestowing on Zuleika the half of his immensurable estates. The Grand
Duchess appealed to the Tzar. Zuleika was conducted across the frontier,
by an escort of love-sick Cossacks. On the Sunday before she left
Madrid, a great bull-fight was held in her honour. Fifteen bulls
received the coup-de-grace, and Alvarez, the matador of matadors, died
in the arena with her name on his lips. He had tried to kill the
last bull without taking his eyes off la divina senorita. A prettier
compliment had never been paid her, and she was immensely pleased with
it. For that matter, she was immensely pleased with everything. She
moved proudly to the incessant music of a paean, aye! of a paean that
was always crescendo.

Its echoes followed her when she crossed the Atlantic, till they were
lost in the louder, deeper, more blatant paean that rose for her from
the shores beyond. All the stops of that “mighty organ, many-piped,” the
New York press, were pulled out simultaneously, as far as they could be
pulled, in Zuleika’s honour. She delighted in the din. She read every
line that was printed about her, tasting her triumph as she had never
tasted it before. And how she revelled in the Brobdingnagian drawings of
her, which, printed in nineteen colours, towered between the columns or
sprawled across them! There she was, measuring herself back to back with
the Statue of Liberty; scudding through the firmament on a comet,
whilst a crowd of tiny men in evening-dress stared up at her from the
terrestrial globe; peering through a microscope held by Cupid over a
diminutive Uncle Sam; teaching the American Eagle to stand on its head;
and doing a hundred-and-one other things--whatever suggested itself
to the fancy of native art. And through all this iridescent maze of
symbolism were scattered many little slabs of realism. At home, on the
street, Zuleika was the smiling target of all snap-shooters, and all the
snap-shots were snapped up by the press and reproduced with annotations:
Zuleika Dobson walking on Broadway in the sables gifted her by Grand
Duke Salamander--she says “You can bounce blizzards in them”; Zuleika
Dobson yawning over a love-letter from millionaire Edelweiss; relishing
a cup of clam-broth--she says “They don’t use clams out there”; ordering
her maid to fix her a warm bath; finding a split in the gloves she has
just drawn on before starting for the musicale given in her honour by
Mrs. Suetonius X. Meistersinger, the most exclusive woman in New York;
chatting at the telephone to Miss Camille Van Spook, the best-born girl
in New York; laughing over the recollection of a compliment made her by
George Abimelech Post, the best-groomed man in New York; meditating a
new trick; admonishing a waiter who has upset a cocktail over her skirt;
having herself manicured; drinking tea in bed. Thus was Zuleika enabled
daily to be, as one might say, a spectator of her own wonderful life.
On her departure from New York, the papers spoke no more than the
truth when they said she had had “a lovely time.” The further she went
West--millionaire Edelweiss had loaned her his private car--the lovelier
her time was. Chicago drowned the echoes of New York; final Frisco
dwarfed the headlines of Chicago. Like one of its own prairie-fires, she
swept the country from end to end. Then she swept back, and sailed for
England. She was to return for a second season in the coming Fall. At
present, she was, as I have said, “resting.”

As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing
the splendid pageant of her past. She was a young person whose reveries
never were in retrospect. For her the past was no treasury of distinct
memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more
highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused
radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of
her future. She was always looking forward. She was looking forward
now--that shade of ennui had passed from her face--to the week she was
to spend in Oxford. A new city was a new toy to her, and--for it was
youth’s homage that she loved best--this city of youths was a toy after
her own heart.

Aye, and it was youths who gave homage to her most freely. She was
of that high-stepping and flamboyant type that captivates youth most
surely. Old men and men of middle age admired her, but she had not that
flower-like quality of shyness and helplessness, that look of innocence,
so dear to men who carry life’s secrets in their heads. Yet Zuleika
WAS very innocent, really. She was as pure as that young shepherdess
Marcella, who, all unguarded, roved the mountains and was by all the
shepherds adored. Like Marcella, she had given her heart to no man, had
preferred none. Youths were reputed to have died for love of her,
as Chrysostom died for love of the shepherdess; and she, like the
shepherdess, had shed no tear. When Chrysostom was lying on his bier in
the valley, and Marcella looked down from the high rock, Ambrosio,
the dead man’s comrade, cried out on her, upbraiding her with bitter
words--“Oh basilisk of our mountains!” Nor do I think Ambrosio spoke too
strongly. Marcella cared nothing for men’s admiration, and yet, instead
of retiring to one of those nunneries which are founded for her kind,
she chose to rove the mountains, causing despair to all the shepherds.
Zuleika, with her peculiar temperament, would have gone mad in a
nunnery. “But,” you may argue, “ought not she to have taken the veil,
even at the cost of her reason, rather than cause so much despair in the
world? If Marcella was a basilisk, as you seem to think, how about Miss
Dobson?” Ah, but Marcella knew quite well, boasted even, that she never
would or could love any man. Zuleika, on the other hand, was a woman of
really passionate fibre. She may not have had that conscious, separate,
and quite explicit desire to be a mother with which modern playwrights
credit every unmated member of her sex. But she did know that she could
love. And, surely, no woman who knows that of herself can be rightly
censured for not recluding herself from the world: it is only women
without the power to love who have no right to provoke men’s love.

Though Zuleika had never given her heart, strong in her were the desire
and the need that it should be given. Whithersoever she had fared, she
had seen nothing but youths fatuously prostrate to her--not one upright
figure which she could respect. There were the middle-aged men, the old
men, who did not bow down to her; but from middle-age, as from eld, she
had a sanguine aversion. She could love none but a youth. Nor--though
she herself, womanly, would utterly abase herself before her
ideal--could she love one who fell prone before her. And before her all
youths always did fall prone. She was an empress, and all youths were
her slaves. Their bondage delighted her, as I have said. But no empress
who has any pride can adore one of her slaves. Whom, then, could proud
Zuleika adore? It was a question which sometimes troubled her. There
were even moments when, looking into her cheval-glass, she cried out
against that arrangement in comely lines and tints which got for her
the dulia she delighted in. To be able to love once--would not that be
better than all the homage in the world? But would she ever meet whom,
looking up to him, she could love--she, the omnisubjugant? Would she
ever, ever meet him?

It was when she wondered thus, that the wistfulness came into her eyes.
Even now, as she sat by the window, that shadow returned to them. She
was wondering, shyly, had she met him at length? That young equestrian
who had not turned to look at her; whom she was to meet at dinner
to-night... was it he? The ends of her blue sash lay across her lap,
and she was lazily unravelling their fringes. “Blue and white!” she
remembered. “They were the colours he wore round his hat.” And she gave
a little laugh of coquetry. She laughed, and, long after, her lips were
still parted in a smile.

So did she sit, smiling, wondering, with the fringes of her sash
between her fingers, while the sun sank behind the opposite wall of the
quadrangle, and the shadows crept out across the grass, thirsty for the
dew.




III

The clock in the Warden’s drawing-room had just struck eight, and
already the ducal feet were beautiful on the white bearskin hearthrug.
So slim and long were they, of instep so nobly arched, that only with
a pair of glazed ox-tongues on a breakfast-table were they comparable.
Incomparable quite, the figure and face and vesture of him who ended in
them.

The Warden was talking to him, with all the deference of elderly
commoner to patrician boy. The other guests--an Oriel don and his
wife--were listening with earnest smile and submissive droop, at a
slight distance. Now and again, to put themselves at their ease, they
exchanged in undertone a word or two about the weather.

“The young lady whom you may have noticed with me,” the Warden was
saying, “is my orphaned grand-daughter.” (The wife of the Oriel don
discarded her smile, and sighed, with a glance at the Duke, who was
himself an orphan.) “She has come to stay with me.” (The Duke glanced
quickly round the room.) “I cannot think why she is not down yet.” (The
Oriel don fixed his eyes on the clock, as though he suspected it of
being fast.) “I must ask you to forgive her. She appears to be a bright,
pleasant young woman.”

“Married?” asked the Duke.

“No,” said the Warden; and a cloud of annoyance crossed the boy’s face.
“No; she devotes her life entirely to good works.”

“A hospital nurse?” the Duke murmured.

“No, Zuleika’s appointed task is to induce delightful wonder rather than
to alleviate pain. She performs conjuring-tricks.”

“Not--not Miss Zuleika Dobson?” cried the Duke.

“Ah yes. I forgot that she had achieved some fame in the outer world.
Perhaps she has already met you?”

“Never,” said the young man coldly. “But of course I have heard of Miss
Dobson. I did not know she was related to you.”

The Duke had an intense horror of unmarried girls. All his vacations
were spent in eluding them and their chaperons. That he should be
confronted with one of them--with such an one of them!--in Oxford,
seemed to him sheer violation of sanctuary. The tone, therefore, in
which he said “I shall be charmed,” in answer to the Warden’s request
that he would take Zuleika into dinner, was very glacial. So was his
gaze when, a moment later, the young lady made her entry.

“She did not look like an orphan,” said the wife of the Oriel don,
subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one. Zuleika
would have looked singular in one of those lowly double-files of
straw-bonnets and drab cloaks which are so steadying a feature of
our social system. Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom
downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with
emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead and
behind her ears, as an orphan’s should be. Parted somewhere at the side,
it fell in an avalanche of curls upon one eyebrow. From her right
ear drooped heavily a black pearl, from her left a pink; and their
difference gave an odd, bewildering witchery to the little face between.

Was the young Duke bewitched? Instantly, utterly. But none could
have guessed as much from his cold stare, his easy and impassive bow.
Throughout dinner, none guessed that his shirt-front was but the screen
of a fierce warfare waged between pride and passion. Zuleika, at the
foot of the table, fondly supposed him indifferent to her. Though he
sat on her right, not one word or glance would he give her. All his
conversation was addressed to the unassuming lady who sat on his other
side, next to the Warden. Her he edified and flustered beyond measure
by his insistent courtesy. Her husband, alone on the other side of
the table, was mortified by his utter failure to engage Zuleika in
small-talk. Zuleika was sitting with her profile turned to him--the
profile with the pink pearl--and was gazing full at the young Duke. She
was hardly more affable than a cameo. “Yes,” “No,” “I don’t know,”
 were the only answers she would vouchsafe to his questions. A vague “Oh
really?” was all he got for his timid little offerings of information.
In vain he started the topic of modern conjuring-tricks as compared with
the conjuring-tricks performed by the ancient Egyptians. Zuleika did not
even say “Oh really?” when he told her about the metamorphosis of the
bulls in the Temple of Osiris. He primed himself with a glass of sherry,
cleared his throat. “And what,” he asked, with a note of firmness, “did
you think of our cousins across the water?” Zuleika said “Yes;” and
then he gave in. Nor was she conscious that he ceased talking to her. At
intervals throughout the rest of dinner, she murmured “Yes,” and “No,”
 and “Oh really?” though the poor little don was now listening silently
to the Duke and the Warden.

She was in a trance of sheer happiness. At last, she thought, her hope
was fulfilled--that hope which, although she had seldom remembered it in
the joy of her constant triumphs, had been always lurking in her, lying
near to her heart and chafing her, like the shift of sackcloth which
that young brilliant girl, loved and lost of Giacopone di Todi, wore
always in secret submission to her own soul, under the fair soft robes
and the rubies men saw on her. At last, here was the youth who would not
bow down to her; whom, looking up to him, she could adore. She ate and
drank automatically, never taking her gaze from him. She felt not one
touch of pique at his behaviour. She was tremulous with a joy that was
new to her, greater than any joy she had known. Her soul was as a flower
in its opetide. She was in love. Rapt, she studied every lineament of
the pale and perfect face--the brow from which bronze-coloured hair rose
in tiers of burnished ripples; the large steel-coloured eyes, with their
carven lids; the carven nose, and the plastic lips. She noted how long
and slim were his fingers, and how slender his wrists. She noted the
glint cast by the candles upon his shirt-front. The two large white
pearls there seemed to her symbols of his nature. They were like two
moons: cold, remote, radiant. Even when she gazed at the Duke’s face,
she was aware of them in her vision.

Nor was the Duke unconscious, as he seemed to be, of her scrutiny.
Though he kept his head averse, he knew that always her eyes were
watching him. Obliquely, he saw them; saw, too, the contour of the face,
and the black pearl and the pink; could not blind himself, try as he
would. And he knew that he was in love.

Like Zuleika herself, this young Duke was in love for the first time.
Wooed though he had been by almost as many maidens as she by youths, his
heart, like hers, had remained cold. But he had never felt, as she
had, the desire to love. He was not now rejoicing, as she was, in the
sensation of first love; nay, he was furiously mortified by it, and
struggled with all his might against it. He had always fancied himself
secure against any so vulgar peril; always fancied that by him at least,
the proud old motto of his family--“Pas si bete”--would not be belied.
And I daresay, indeed, that had he never met Zuleika, the irresistible,
he would have lived, and at a very ripe old age died, a dandy without
reproach. For in him the dandiacal temper had been absolute hitherto,
quite untainted and unruffled. He was too much concerned with his
own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else. Different from
Zuleika, he cared for his wardrobe and his toilet-table not as a means
to making others admire him the more, but merely as a means through
which he could intensify, a ritual in which to express and realise, his
own idolatry. At Eton he had been called “Peacock,” and this nick-name
had followed him up to Oxford. It was not wholly apposite, however. For,
whereas the peacock is a fool even among birds, the Duke had already
taken (besides a particularly brilliant First in Mods) the Stanhope,
the Newdigate, the Lothian, and the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse. And
these things he had achieved currente calamo, “wielding his pen,” as
Scott said of Byron, “with the easy negligence of a nobleman.” He was
now in his third year of residence, and was reading, a little, for
Literae Humaniores. There is no doubt that but for his untimely death he
would have taken a particularly brilliant First in that school also.

For the rest, he had many accomplishments. He was adroit in the killing
of all birds and fishes, stags and foxes. He played polo, cricket,
racquets, chess, and billiards as well as such things can be played.
He was fluent in all modern languages, had a very real talent in
water-colour, and was accounted, by those who had had the privilege of
hearing him, the best amateur pianist on this side of the Tweed. Little
wonder, then, that he was idolised by the undergraduates of his day.
He did not, however, honour many of them with his friendship. He had a
theoretic liking for them as a class, as the “young barbarians all at
play” in that little antique city; but individually they jarred on him,
and he saw little of them. Yet he sympathised with them always, and, on
occasion, would actively take their part against the dons. In the middle
of his second year, he had gone so far that a College Meeting had to be
held, and he was sent down for the rest of term. The Warden placed his
own landau at the disposal of the illustrious young exile, who therein
was driven to the station, followed by a long, vociferous procession
of undergraduates in cabs. Now, it happened that this was a time of
political excitement in London. The Liberals, who were in power,
had passed through the House of Commons a measure more than usually
socialistic; and this measure was down for its second reading in the
Lords on the very day that the Duke left Oxford, an exile. It was but a
few weeks since he had taken his seat in the Lords; and this afternoon,
for the want of anything better to do, he strayed in. The Leader of the
House was already droning his speech for the bill, and the Duke found
himself on one of the opposite benches. There sat his compeers, sullenly
waiting to vote for a bill which every one of them detested. As the
speaker subsided, the Duke, for the fun of the thing, rose. He made
a long speech against the bill. His gibes at the Government were so
scathing, so utterly destructive his criticism of the bill itself, so
lofty and so irresistible the flights of his eloquence, that, when he
resumed his seat, there was only one course left to the Leader of the
House. He rose and, in a few husky phrases, moved that the bill “be read
this day six months.” All England rang with the name of the young Duke.
He himself seemed to be the one person unmoved by his exploit. He did
not re-appear in the Upper Chamber, and was heard to speak in slighting
terms of its architecture, as well as of its upholstery. Nevertheless,
the Prime Minister became so nervous that he procured for him, a month
later, the Sovereign’s offer of a Garter which had just fallen vacant.
The Duke accepted it. He was, I understand, the only undergraduate on
whom this Order had ever been conferred. He was very much pleased with
the insignia, and when, on great occasions, he wore them, no one dared
say that the Prime Minister’s choice was not fully justified. But you
must not imagine that he cared for them as symbols of achievement and
power. The dark blue riband, and the star scintillating to eight
points, the heavy mantle of blue velvet, with its lining of taffeta
and shoulder-knots of white satin, the crimson surcoat, the great
embullioned tassels, and the chain of linked gold, and the plumes of
ostrich and heron uprising from the black velvet hat--these things had
for him little significance save as a fine setting, a finer setting than
the most elaborate smoking-suit, for that perfection of aspect which
the gods had given him. This was indeed the gift he valued beyond
all others. He knew well, however, that women care little for a man’s
appearance, and that what they seek in a man is strength of character,
and rank, and wealth. These three gifts the Duke had in a high degree,
and he was by women much courted because of them. Conscious that every
maiden he met was eager to be his Duchess, he had assumed always a
manner of high austerity among maidens, and even if he had wished to
flirt with Zuleika he would hardly have known how to do it. But he did
not wish to flirt with her. That she had bewitched him did but make
it the more needful that he should shun all converse with her. It was
imperative that he should banish her from his mind, quickly. He must not
dilute his own soul’s essence. He must not surrender to any passion his
dandihood. The dandy must be celibate, cloistral; is, indeed, but a monk
with a mirror for beads and breviary--an anchorite, mortifying his soul
that his body may be perfect. Till he met Zuleika, the Duke had not
known the meaning of temptation. He fought now, a St. Anthony, against
the apparition. He would not look at her, and he hated her. He loved
her, and he could not help seeing her. The black pearl and the pink
seemed to dangle ever nearer and clearer to him, mocking him and
beguiling. Inexpellible was her image.

So fierce was the conflict in him that his outward nonchalance gradually
gave way. As dinner drew to its close, his conversation with the wife
of the Oriel don flagged and halted. He sank, at length, into a deep
silence. He sat with downcast eyes, utterly distracted.

Suddenly, something fell, plump! into the dark whirlpool of his
thoughts. He started. The Warden was leaning forward, had just said
something to him.

“I beg your pardon?” asked the Duke. Dessert, he noticed, was on the
table, and he was paring an apple. The Oriel don was looking at him with
sympathy, as at one who had swooned and was just “coming to.”

“Is it true, my dear Duke,” the Warden repeated, “that you have been
persuaded to play to-morrow evening at the Judas concert?”

“Ah yes, I am going to play something.”

Zuleika bent suddenly forward, addressed him. “Oh,” she cried, clasping
her hands beneath her chin, “will you let me come and turn over the
leaves for you?”

He looked her full in the face. It was like seeing suddenly at close
quarters some great bright monument that one has long known only as a
sun-caught speck in the distance. He saw the large violet eyes open to
him, and their lashes curling to him; the vivid parted lips; and the
black pearl, and the pink.

“You are very kind,” he murmured, in a voice which sounded to him quite
far away. “But I always play without notes.”

Zuleika blushed. Not with shame, but with delirious pleasure. For that
snub she would just then have bartered all the homage she had hoarded.
This, she felt, was the climax. She would not outstay it. She rose,
smiling to the wife of the Oriel don. Every one rose. The Oriel don held
open the door, and the two ladies passed out of the room.

The Duke drew out his cigarette case. As he looked down at the
cigarettes, he was vaguely conscious of some strange phenomenon
somewhere between them and his eyes. Foredone by the agitation of the
past hour, he did not at once realise what it was that he saw. His
impression was of something in bad taste, some discord in his costume
... a black pearl and a pink pearl in his shirt-front!

Just for a moment, absurdly over-estimating poor Zuleika’s skill, he
supposed himself a victim of legerdemain. Another moment, and the import
of the studs revealed itself. He staggered up from his chair, covering
his breast with one arm, and murmured that he was faint. As he hurried
from the room, the Oriel don was pouring out a tumbler of water and
suggesting burnt feathers. The Warden, solicitous, followed him into
the hall. He snatched up his hat, gasping that he had spent a delightful
evening--was very sorry--was subject to these attacks. Once outside, he
took frankly to his heels.

At the corner of the Broad, he looked back over his shoulder. He had
half expected a scarlet figure skimming in pursuit. There was nothing.
He halted. Before him, the Broad lay empty beneath the moon. He went
slowly, mechanically, to his rooms.

The high grim busts of the Emperors stared down at him, their faces more
than ever tragically cavernous and distorted. They saw and read in
that moonlight the symbols on his breast. As he stood on his doorstep,
waiting for the door to be opened, he must have seemed to them a thing
for infinite compassion. For were they not privy to the doom that the
morrow, or the morrow’s morrow, held for him--held not indeed for him
alone, yet for him especially, as it were, and for him most lamentably?




IV

The breakfast-things were not yet cleared away. A plate streaked with
fine strains of marmalade, an empty toast-rack, a broken roll--these and
other things bore witness to a day inaugurated in the right spirit.

Away from them, reclining along his window-seat, was the Duke. Blue
spirals rose from his cigarette, nothing in the still air to trouble
them. From their railing, across the road, the Emperors gazed at him.

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not
for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not become,
in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead.
Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him,
and he sees nothing dreadful after all. “Why not?” is the sun’s bright
message to him, and “Why not indeed?” his answer. After hours of
agony and doubt prolonged to cock-crow, sleep had stolen to the Duke’s
bed-side. He awoke late, with a heavy sense of disaster; but lo! when he
remembered, everything took on a new aspect. He was in love. “Why not?”
 He mocked himself for the morbid vigil he had spent in probing and
vainly binding the wounds of his false pride. The old life was done
with. He laughed as he stepped into his bath. Why should the disseizin
of his soul have seemed shameful to him? He had had no soul till it
passed out of his keeping. His body thrilled to the cold water, his soul
as to a new sacrament. He was in love, and that was all he wished for...
There, on the dressing-table, lay the two studs, visible symbols of his
love. Dear to him, now, the colours of them! He took them in his hand,
one by one, fondling them. He wished he could wear them in the day-time;
but this, of course, was impossible. His toilet finished, he dropped
them into the left pocket of his waistcoat.

Therein, near to his heart, they were lying now, as he looked out at
the changed world--the world that had become Zuleika. “Zuleika!” his
recurrent murmur, was really an apostrophe to the whole world.

Piled against the wall were certain boxes of black japanned tin, which
had just been sent to him from London. At any other time he would
certainly not have left them unopened. For they contained his robes of
the Garter. Thursday, the day after to-morrow, was the date fixed for
the investiture of a foreign king who was now visiting England: and the
full chapter of Knights had been commanded to Windsor for the ceremony.
Yesterday the Duke had looked keenly forward to his excursion. It was
only in those too rarely required robes that he had the sense of being
fully dressed. But to-day not a thought had he of them.

Some clock clove with silver the stillness of the morning. Ere came the
second stroke, another and nearer clock was striking. And now there were
others chiming in. The air was confused with the sweet babel of its many
spires, some of them booming deep, measured sequences, some tinkling
impatiently and outwitting others which had begun before them. And when
this anthem of jealous antiphonies and uneven rhythms had dwindled quite
away and fainted in one last solitary note of silver, there started
somewhere another sequence; and this, almost at its last stroke, was
interrupted by yet another, which went on to tell the hour of noon in
its own way, quite slowly and significantly, as though none knew it.

And now Oxford was astir with footsteps and laughter--the laughter and
quick footsteps of youths released from lecture-rooms. The Duke shifted
from the window. Somehow, he did not care to be observed, though it was
usually at this hour that he showed himself for the setting of some
new fashion in costume. Many an undergraduate, looking up, missed the
picture in the window-frame.

The Duke paced to and fro, smiling ecstatically. He took the two studs
from his pocket and gazed at them. He looked in the glass, as one
seeking the sympathy of a familiar. For the first time in his life,
he turned impatiently aside. It was a new kind of sympathy he needed
to-day.

The front door slammed, and the staircase creaked to the ascent of two
heavy boots. The Duke listened, waited irresolute. The boots passed his
door, were already clumping up the next flight. “Noaks!” he cried. The
boots paused, then clumped down again. The door opened and disclosed
that homely figure which Zuleika had seen on her way to Judas.

Sensitive reader, start not at the apparition! Oxford is a plexus of
anomalies. These two youths were (odd as it may seem to you) subject to
the same Statutes, affiliated to the same College, reading for the same
School; aye! and though the one had inherited half a score of noble and
castellated roofs, whose mere repairs cost him annually thousands and
thousands of pounds, and the other’s people had but one little mean
square of lead, from which the fireworks of the Crystal Palace were
clearly visible every Thursday evening, in Oxford one roof sheltered
both of them. Furthermore, there was even some measure of intimacy
between them. It was the Duke’s whim to condescend further in the
direction of Noaks than in any other. He saw in Noaks his own foil and
antithesis, and made a point of walking up the High with him at least
once in every term. Noaks, for his part, regarded the Duke with feelings
mingled of idolatry and disapproval. The Duke’s First in Mods oppressed
him (who, by dint of dogged industry, had scraped a Second) more than
all the other differences between them. But the dullard’s envy of
brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to
a bad end. Noaks may have regarded the Duke as a rather pathetic figure,
on the whole.

“Come in, Noaks,” said the Duke. “You have been to a lecture?”

“Aristotle’s Politics,” nodded Noaks.

“And what were they?” asked the Duke. He was eager for sympathy in his
love. But so little used was he to seeking sympathy that he could not
unburden himself. He temporised. Noaks muttered something about getting
back to work, and fumbled with the door-handle.

“Oh, my dear fellow, don’t go,” said the Duke. “Sit down. Our Schools
don’t come on for another year. A few minutes can’t make a difference in
your Class. I want to--to tell you something, Noaks. Do sit down.”

Noaks sat down on the edge of a chair. The Duke leaned against the
mantel-piece, facing him. “I suppose, Noaks,” he said, “you have never
been in love.”

“Why shouldn’t I have been in love?” asked the little man, angrily.

“I can’t imagine you in love,” said the Duke, smiling.

“And I can’t imagine YOU. You’re too pleased with yourself,” growled
Noaks.

“Spur your imagination, Noaks,” said his friend. “I AM in love.”

“So am I,” was an unexpected answer, and the Duke (whose need of
sympathy was too new to have taught him sympathy with others) laughed
aloud. “Whom do you love?” he asked, throwing himself into an arm-chair.

“I don’t know who she is,” was another unexpected answer.

“When did you meet her?” asked the Duke. “Where? What did you say to
her?”

“Yesterday. In the Corn. I didn’t SAY anything to her.”

“Is she beautiful?”

“Yes. What’s that to you?”

“Dark or fair?”

“She’s dark. She looks like a foreigner. She looks like--like one of
those photographs in the shop-windows.”

“A rhapsody, Noaks! What became of her? Was she alone?”

“She was with the old Warden, in his carriage.”

Zuleika--Noaks! The Duke started, as at an affront, and glared. Next
moment, he saw the absurdity of the situation. He relapsed into his
chair, smiling. “She’s the Warden’s niece,” he said. “I dined at the
Warden’s last night.”

Noaks sat still, peering across at the Duke. For the first time in his
life, he was resentful of the Duke’s great elegance and average stature,
his high lineage and incomputable wealth. Hitherto, these things
had been too remote for envy. But now, suddenly, they seemed near to
him--nearer and more overpowering than the First in Mods had ever been.
“And of course she’s in love with you?” he snarled.

Really, this was for the Duke a new issue. So salient was his own
passion that he had not had time to wonder whether it were returned.
Zuleika’s behaviour during dinner... But that was how so many young
women had behaved. It was no sign of disinterested love. It might mean
merely... Yet no! Surely, looking into her eyes, he had seen there a
radiance finer than could have been lit by common ambition. Love, none
other, must have lit in those purple depths the torches whose clear
flames had leapt out to him. She loved him. She, the beautiful, the
wonderful, had not tried to conceal her love for him. She had shown him
all--had shown all, poor darling! only to be snubbed by a prig, driven
away by a boor, fled from by a fool. To the nethermost corner of his
soul, he cursed himself for what he had done, and for all he had left
undone. He would go to her on his knees. He would implore her to impose
on him insufferable penances. There was no penance, how bittersweet
soever, could make him a little worthy of her.

“Come in!” he cried mechanically. Entered the landlady’s daughter.

“A lady downstairs,” she said, “asking to see your Grace. Says she’ll
step round again later if your Grace is busy.”

“What is her name?” asked the Duke, vacantly. He was gazing at the girl
with pain-shot eyes.

“Miss Zuleika Dobson,” pronounced the girl.

He rose.

“Show Miss Dobson up,” he said.

Noaks had darted to the looking-glass and was smoothing his hair with a
tremulous, enormous hand.

“Go!” said the Duke, pointing to the door. Noaks went, quickly. Echoes
of his boots fell from the upper stairs and met the ascending susurrus
of a silk skirt.

The lovers met. There was an interchange of ordinary greetings: from the
Duke, a comment on the weather; from Zuleika, a hope that he was well
again--they had been so sorry to lose him last night. Then came a pause.
The landlady’s daughter was clearing away the breakfast-things.
Zuleika glanced comprehensively at the room, and the Duke gazed at the
hearthrug. The landlady’s daughter clattered out with her freight. They
were alone.

“How pretty!” said Zuleika. She was looking at his star of the Garter,
which sparkled from a litter of books and papers on a small side-table.

“Yes,” he answered. “It is pretty, isn’t it?”

“Awfully pretty!” she rejoined.

This dialogue led them to another hollow pause. The Duke’s heart beat
violently within him. Why had he not asked her to take the star and keep
it as a gift? Too late now! Why could he not throw himself at her feet?
Here were two beings, lovers of each other, with none by. And yet...

She was examining a water-colour on the wall, seemed to be absorbed by
it. He watched her. She was even lovelier than he had remembered;
or rather her loveliness had been, in some subtle way, transmuted.
Something had given to her a graver, nobler beauty. Last night’s nymph
had become the Madonna of this morning. Despite her dress, which was
of a tremendous tartan, she diffused the pale authentic radiance of a
spirituality most high, most simple. The Duke wondered where lay the
change in her. He could not understand. Suddenly she turned to him, and
he understood. No longer the black pearl and the pink, but two white
pearls!... He thrilled to his heart’s core.

“I hope,” said Zuleika, “you aren’t awfully vexed with me for coming
like this?”

“Not at all,” said the Duke. “I am delighted to see you.” How inadequate
the words sounded, how formal and stupid!

“The fact is,” she continued, “I don’t know a soul in Oxford. And
I thought perhaps you’d give me luncheon, and take me to see the
boat-races. Will you?”

“I shall be charmed,” he said, pulling the bell-rope. Poor fool! he
attributed the shade of disappointment on Zuleika’s face to the coldness
of his tone. He would dispel that shade. He would avow himself. He would
leave her no longer in this false position. So soon as he had told them
about the meal, he would proclaim his passion.

The bell was answered by the landlady’s daughter.

“Miss Dobson will stay to luncheon,” said the Duke. The girl withdrew.
He wished he could have asked her not to.

He steeled himself. “Miss Dobson,” he said, “I wish to apologise to
you.”

Zuleika looked at him eagerly. “You can’t give me luncheon? You’ve got
something better to do?”

“No. I wish to ask you to forgive me for my behaviour last night.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“There is. My manners were vile. I know well what happened. Though you,
too, cannot have forgotten, I won’t spare myself the recital. You were
my hostess, and I ignored you. Magnanimous, you paid me the prettiest
compliment woman ever paid to man, and I insulted you. I left the house
in order that I might not see you again. To the doorsteps down which
he should have kicked me, your grandfather followed me with words of
kindliest courtesy. If he had sped me with a kick so skilful that my
skull had been shattered on the kerb, neither would he have outstepped
those bounds set to the conduct of English gentlemen, nor would you have
garnered more than a trifle on account of your proper reckoning. I do
not say that you are the first person whom I have wantonly injured. But
it is a fact that I, in whom pride has ever been the topmost quality,
have never expressed sorrow to any one for anything. Thus, I might urge
that my present abjectness must be intolerably painful to me, and should
incline you to forgive. But such an argument were specious merely.
I will be quite frank with you. I will confess to you that, in this
humbling of myself before you, I take a pleasure as passionate as it is
strange. A confusion of feelings? Yet you, with a woman’s instinct, will
have already caught the clue to it. It needs no mirror to assure me
that the clue is here for you, in my eyes. It needs no dictionary of
quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul. And I
know that from two open windows my soul has been leaning and signalling
to you, in a code far more definitive and swifter than words of mine,
that I love you.”

Zuleika, listening to him, had grown gradually paler and paler. She had
raised her hands and cowered as though he were about to strike her. And
then, as he pronounced the last three words, she had clasped her hands
to her face and with a wild sob darted away from him. She was leaning
now against the window, her head bowed and her shoulders quivering.

The Duke came softly behind her. “Why should you cry? Why should you
turn away from me? Did I frighten you with the suddenness of my words? I
am not versed in the tricks of wooing. I should have been more patient.
But I love you so much that I could hardly have waited. A secret hope
that you loved me too emboldened me, compelled me. You DO love me. I
know it. And, knowing it, I do but ask you to give yourself to me, to
be my wife. Why should you cry? Why should you shrink from me? Dear,
if there were anything... any secret... if you had ever loved and been
deceived, do you think I should honour you the less deeply, should not
cherish you the more tenderly? Enough for me, that you are mine. Do you
think I should ever reproach you for anything that may have--”

Zuleika turned on him. “How dare you?” she gasped. “How dare you speak
to me like that?”

The Duke reeled back. Horror had come into his eyes. “You do not love
me!” he cried.

“LOVE you?” she retorted. “YOU?”

“You no longer love me. Why? Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“You loved me. Don’t trifle with me. You came to me loving me with all
your heart.”

“How do you know?”

“Look in the glass.” She went at his bidding. He followed her. “You
see them?” he said, after a long pause. Zuleika nodded. The two pearls
quivered to her nod.

“They were white when you came to me,” he sighed. “They were white
because you loved me. From them it was that I knew you loved me even as
I loved you. But their old colours have come back to them. That is how I
know that your love for me is dead.”

Zuleika stood gazing pensively, twitching the two pearls between her
fingers. Tears gathered in her eyes. She met the reflection of her
lover’s eyes, and her tears brimmed over. She buried her face in her
hands, and sobbed like a child.

Like a child’s, her sobbing ceased quite suddenly. She groped for her
handkerchief, angrily dried her eyes, and straightened and smoothed
herself.

“Now I’m going,” she said.

“You came here of your own accord, because you loved me,” said the Duke.
“And you shall not go till you have told me why you have left off loving
me.”

“How did you know I loved you?” she asked after a pause. “How did you
know I hadn’t simply put on another pair of ear-rings?”

The Duke, with a melancholy laugh, drew the two studs from his
waistcoat-pocket. “These are the studs I wore last night,” he said.

Zuleika gazed at them. “I see,” she said; then, looking up, “When did
they become like that?”

“It was when you left the dining-room that I saw the change in them.”

“How strange! It was when I went into the drawing-room that I noticed
mine. I was looking in the glass, and”--She started. “Then you were in
love with me last night?”

“I began to be in love with you from the moment I saw you.”

“Then how could you have behaved as you did?”

“Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try
to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. The basis
of my pet system was celibacy. I don’t mean the mere state of being
a bachelor. I mean celibacy of the soul--egoism, in fact. You have
converted me from that. I am now a confirmed tuist.”

“How dared you insult me?” she cried, with a stamp of her foot.
“How dared you make a fool of me before those people? Oh, it is too
infamous!”

“I have already asked you to forgive me for that. You said there was
nothing to forgive.”

“I didn’t dream that you were in love with me.”

“What difference can that make?”

“All the difference! All the difference in life!”

“Sit down! You bewilder me,” said the Duke. “Explain yourself!” he
commanded.

“Isn’t that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?”

“I don’t know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems
to me that every man has a right to some explanation from the woman who
has ruined his life.”

“You are frightfully sorry for yourself,” said Zuleika, with a bitter
laugh. “Of course it doesn’t occur to you that _I_ am at all to be
pitied. No! you are blind with selfishness. You love me--I don’t love
you: that is all you can realise. Probably you think you are the first
man who has ever fallen on such a plight.”

Said the Duke, bowing over a deprecatory hand, “If there were to pass my
window one tithe of them whose hearts have been lost to Miss Dobson, I
should win no solace from that interminable parade.”

Zuleika blushed. “Yet,” she said more gently, “be sure they would all be
not a little envious of YOU! Not one of them ever touched the surface of
my heart. You stirred my heart to its very depths. Yes, you made me love
you madly. The pearls told you no lie. You were my idol--the one thing
in the wide world to me. You were so different from any man I had ever
seen except in dreams. You did not make a fool of yourself. I admired
you. I respected you. I was all afire with adoration of you. And now,”
 she passed her hand across her eyes, “now it is all over. The idol has
come sliding down its pedestal to fawn and grovel with all the other
infatuates in the dust about my feet.”

The Duke looked thoughtfully at her. “I thought,” he said, “that you
revelled in your power over men’s hearts. I had always heard that you
lived for admiration.”

“Oh,” said Zuleika, “of course I like being admired. Oh yes, I like all
that very much indeed. In a way, I suppose, I’m even pleased that
YOU admire me. But oh, what a little miserable pleasure that is in
comparison with the rapture I have forfeited! I had never known the
rapture of being in love. I had longed for it, but I had never guessed
how wonderfully wonderful it was. It came to me. I shuddered and wavered
like a fountain in the wind. I was more helpless and flew lightlier
than a shred of thistledown among the stars. All night long, I could not
sleep for love of you; nor had I any desire of sleep, save that it might
take me to you in a dream. I remember nothing that happened to me this
morning before I found myself at your door.”

“Why did you ring the bell? Why didn’t you walk away?”

“Why? I had come to see you, to be near you, to be WITH you.”

“To force yourself on me.”

“Yes.”

“You know the meaning of the term ‘effective occupation’? Having marched
in, how could you have held your position, unless”--

“Oh, a man doesn’t necessarily drive a woman away because he isn’t in
love with her.”

“Yet that was what you thought I had done to you last night.”

“Yes, but I didn’t suppose you would take the trouble to do it again.
And if you had, I should have only loved you the more. I thought you
would most likely be rather amused, rather touched, by my importunity. I
thought you would take a listless advantage, make a plaything of me--the
diversion of a few idle hours in summer, and then, when you had tired
of me, would cast me aside, forget me, break my heart. I desired nothing
better than that. That is what I must have been vaguely hoping for. But
I had no definite scheme. I wanted to be with you and I came to you. It
seems years ago, now! How my heart beat as I waited on the doorstep! ‘Is
his Grace at home?’ ‘I don’t know. I’ll inquire. What name shall I say?’
I saw in the girl’s eyes that she, too, loved you. Have YOU seen that?”

“I have never looked at her,” said the Duke.

“No wonder, then, that she loves you,” sighed Zuleika. “She read my
secret at a glance. Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter
freemasonry. We resented each other. She envied me my beauty, my dress.
I envied the little fool her privilege of being always near to you.
Loving you, I could conceive no life sweeter than hers--to be always
near you; to black your boots, carry up your coals, scrub your doorstep;
always to be working for you, hard and humbly and without thanks. If you
had refused to see me, I would have bribed that girl with all my jewels
to cede me her position.”

The Duke made a step towards her. “You would do it still,” he said in a
low voice.

Zuleika raised her eyebrows. “I would not offer her one garnet,” she
said, “now.”

“You SHALL love me again,” he cried. “I will force you to. You said just
now that you had ceased to love me because I was just like other men. I
am not. My heart is no tablet of mere wax, from which an instant’s heat
can dissolve whatever impress it may bear, leaving it blank and soft
for another impress, and another, and another. My heart is a bright hard
gem, proof against any die. Came Cupid, with one of his arrow-points
for graver, and what he cut on the gem’s surface never can be effaced.
There, deeply and forever, your image is intagliated. No years, nor
fires, nor cataclysm of total Nature, can efface from that great gem
your image.”

“My dear Duke,” said Zuleika, “don’t be so silly. Look at the matter
sensibly. I know that lovers don’t try to regulate their emotions
according to logic; but they do, nevertheless, unconsciously conform
with some sort of logical system. I left off loving you when I found
that you loved me. There is the premiss. Very well! Is it likely that I
shall begin to love you again because you can’t leave off loving me?”

The Duke groaned. There was a clatter of plates outside, and she whom
Zuleika had envied came to lay the table for luncheon.

A smile flickered across Zuleika’s lips; and “Not one garnet!” she
murmured.




V

Luncheon passed in almost unbroken silence. Both Zuleika and the Duke
were ravenously hungry, as people always are after the stress of any
great emotional crisis. Between them, they made very short work of
a cold chicken, a salad, a gooseberry-tart and a Camembert. The Duke
filled his glass again and again. The cold classicism of his face had
been routed by the new romantic movement which had swept over his soul.
He looked two or three months older than when first I showed him to my
reader.

He drank his coffee at one draught, pushed back his chair, threw away
the cigarette he had just lit. “Listen!” he said.

Zuleika folded her hands on her lap.

“You do not love me. I accept as final your hint that you never will
love me. I need not say--could not, indeed, ever say--how deeply, deeply
you have pained me. As lover, I am rejected. But that rejection,” he
continued, striking the table, “is no stopper to my suit. It does but
drive me to the use of arguments. My pride shrinks from them. Love,
however, is greater than pride; and I, John, Albert, Edward, Claude,
Orde, Angus, Tankerton,* Tanville-Tankerton,** fourteenth Duke of
Dorset, Marquis of Dorset, Earl of Grove, Earl of Chastermaine, Viscount
Brewsby, Baron Grove, Baron Petstrap, and Baron Wolock, in the Peerage
of England, offer you my hand. Do not interrupt me. Do not toss your
head. Consider well what I am saying. Weigh the advantages you would
gain by acceptance of my hand. Indeed, they are manifold and tremendous.
They are also obvious: do not shut your eyes to them. You, Miss Dobson,
what are you? A conjurer, and a vagrant; without means, save such as you
can earn by the sleight of your hand; without position; without a
home; all unguarded but by your own self-respect. That you follow an
honourable calling, I do not for one moment deny. I do, however, ask
you to consider how great are its perils and hardships, its fatigues and
inconveniences. From all these evils I offer you instant refuge. I offer
you, Miss Dobson, a refuge more glorious and more augustly gilded
than you, in your airiest flights of fancy, can ever have hoped for or
imagined. I own about 340,000 acres. My town-residence is in St. James’s
Square. Tankerton, of which you may have seen photographs, is the chief
of my country-seats. It is a Tudor house, set on the ridge of a valley.
The valley, its park, is halved by a stream so narrow that the deer leap
across. The gardens are estraded upon the slope. Round the house runs
a wide paven terrace. There are always two or three peacocks trailing
their sheathed feathers along the balustrade, and stepping how stiffly!
as though they had just been unharnessed from Juno’s chariot. Two
flights of shallow steps lead down to the flowers and fountains. Oh,
the gardens are wonderful. There is a Jacobean garden of white roses.
Between the ends of two pleached alleys, under a dome of branches, is
a little lake, with a Triton of black marble, and with water-lilies.
Hither and thither under the archipelago of water-lilies, dart
gold-fish--tongues of flame in the dark water. There is also a long
strait alley of clipped yew. It ends in an alcove for a pagoda
of painted porcelain which the Prince Regent--peace be to his
ashes!--presented to my great-grandfather. There are many twisting
paths, and sudden aspects, and devious, fantastic arbours. Are you fond
of horses? In my stables of pine-wood and plated-silver seventy are
installed. Not all of them together could vie in power with one of the
meanest of my motor-cars.”

   *Pronounced as Tacton.

  **Pronounced as Tavvle-Tacton.

“Oh, I never go in motors,” said Zuleika. “They make one look like
nothing on earth, and like everybody else.”

“I myself,” said the Duke, “use them little for that very reason. Are
you interested in farming? At Tankerton there is a model farm which
would at any rate amuse you, with its heifers and hens and pigs that are
like so many big new toys. There is a tiny dairy, which is called ‘Her
Grace’s.’ You could make, therein, real butter with your own hands, and
round it into little pats, and press every pat with a different device.
The boudoir that would be yours is a blue room. Four Watteaus hang in
it. In the dining-hall hang portraits of my forefathers--in petto,
your forefathers-in-law--by many masters. Are you fond of peasants?
My tenantry are delightful creatures, and there is not one of them who
remembers the bringing of the news of the Battle of Waterloo. When a
new Duchess is brought to Tankerton, the oldest elm in the park must
be felled. That is one of many strange old customs. As she is driven
through the village, the children of the tenantry must strew the road
with daisies. The bridal chamber must be lighted with as many candles as
years have elapsed since the creation of the Dukedom. If you came into
it, there would be”--and the youth, closing his eyes, made a rapid
calculation--“exactly three hundred and eighty-eight candles. On the eve
of the death of a Duke of Dorset, two black owls come and perch on the
battlements. They remain there through the night, hooting. At dawn
they fly away, none knows whither. On the eve of the death of any other
Tanville-Tankerton, comes (no matter what be the time of year) a cuckoo.
It stays for an hour, cooing, then flies away, none knows whither.
Whenever this portent occurs, my steward telegraphs to me, that I, as
head of the family, be not unsteeled against the shock of a bereavement,
and that my authority be sooner given for the unsealing and garnishing
of the family-vault. Not every forefather of mine rests quiet beneath
his escutcheoned marble. There are they who revisit, in their wrath or
their remorse, the places wherein erst they suffered or wrought evil.
There is one who, every Halloween, flits into the dining-hall, and
hovers before the portrait which Hans Holbein made of him, and flings
his diaphanous grey form against the canvas, hoping, maybe, to catch
from it the fiery flesh-tints and the solid limbs that were his, and so
to be re-incarnate. He flies against the painting, only to find himself
t’other side of the wall it hangs on. There are five ghosts permanently
residing in the right wing of the house, two in the left, and eleven in
the park. But all are quite noiseless and quite harmless. My servants,
when they meet them in the corridors or on the stairs, stand aside to
let them pass, thus paying them the respect due to guests of mine; but
not even the rawest housemaid ever screams or flees at sight of them. I,
their host, often waylay them and try to commune with them; but always
they glide past me. And how gracefully they glide, these ghosts! It is a
pleasure to watch them. It is a lesson in deportment. May they never be
laid! Of all my household-pets, they are the dearest to me. I am Duke
of Strathsporran and Cairngorm, Marquis of Sorby, and Earl Cairngorm, in
the Peerage of Scotland. In the glens of the hills about Strathsporran
are many noble and nimble stags. But I have never set foot in my house
there, for it is carpeted throughout with the tartan of my clan. You
seem to like tartan. What tartan is it you are wearing?”

Zuleika looked down at her skirt. “I don’t know,” she said. “I got it in
Paris.”

“Well,” said the Duke, “it is very ugly. The Dalbraith tartan is
harmonious in comparison, and has, at least, the excuse of history. If
you married me, you would have the right to wear it. You would have many
strange and fascinating rights. You would go to Court. I admit that the
Hanoverian Court is not much. Still, it is better than nothing. At your
presentation, moreover, you would be given the entree. Is that nothing
to you? You would be driven to Court in my statecoach. It is swung so
high that the streetsters can hardly see its occupant. It is lined
with rose-silk; and on its panels, and on its hammer-cloth, my arms
are emblazoned--no one has ever been able to count the quarterings. You
would be wearing the family-jewels, reluctantly surrendered to you by my
aunt. They are many and marvellous, in their antique settings. I don’t
want to brag. It humiliates me to speak to you as I am speaking. But
I am heart-set on you, and to win you there is not a precious stone I
would leave unturned. Conceive a parure all of white stones--diamonds,
white sapphires, white topazes, tourmalines. Another, of rubies and
amethysts, set in gold filigree. Rings that once were poison-combs on
Florentine fingers. Red roses for your hair--every petal a hollowed
ruby. Amulets and ape-buckles, zones and fillets. Aye! know that you
would be weeping for wonder before you had seen a tithe of these gauds.
Know, too, Miss Dobson, that in the Peerage of France I am Duc d’Etretat
et de la Roche Guillaume. Louis Napoleon gave the title to my father for
not cutting him in the Bois. I have a house in the Champs Elysees. There
is a Swiss in its courtyard. He stands six-foot-seven in his stockings,
and the chasseurs are hardly less tall than he. Wherever I go, there are
two chefs in my retinue. Both are masters in their art, and furiously
jealous of each other. When I compliment either of them on some dish,
the other challenges him. They fight with rapiers, next morning, in the
garden of whatever house I am occupying. I do not know whether you are
greedy? If so, it may interest you to learn that I have a third chef,
who makes only souffles, and an Italian pastry-cook; to say nothing of
a Spaniard for salads, an Englishwoman for roasts, and an Abyssinian for
coffee. You found no trace of their handiwork in the meal you have just
had with me? No; for in Oxford it is a whim of mine--I may say a point
of honour--to lead the ordinary life of an undergraduate. What I eat
in this room is cooked by the heavy and unaided hand of Mrs. Batch,
my landlady. It is set before me by the unaided and--or are you in
error?--loving hand of her daughter. Other ministers have I none here. I
dispense with my private secretaries. I am unattended by a single valet.
So simple a way of life repels you? You would never be called upon to
share it. If you married me, I should take my name off the books of my
College. I propose that we should spend our honeymoon at Baiae. I have
a villa at Baiae. It is there that I keep my grandfather’s collection of
majolica. The sun shines there always. A long olive-grove secretes the
garden from the sea. When you walk in the garden, you know the sea only
in blue glimpses through the vacillating leaves. White-gleaming from the
bosky shade of this grove are several goddesses. Do you care for Canova?
I don’t myself. If you do, these figures will appeal to you: they are in
his best manner. Do you love the sea? This is not the only house of mine
that looks out on it. On the coast of County Clare--am I not Earl of
Enniskerry and Baron Shandrin in the Peerage of Ireland?--I have an
ancient castle. Sheer from a rock stands it, and the sea has always
raged up against its walls. Many ships lie wrecked under that loud
implacable sea. But mine is a brave strong castle. No storm affrights
it; and not the centuries, clustering houris, with their caresses can
seduce it from its hard austerity. I have several titles which for the
moment escape me. Baron Llffthwchl am I, and... and... but you can
find them for yourself in Debrett. In me you behold a Prince of the Holy
Roman Empire, and a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Look
well at me! I am Hereditary Comber of the Queen’s Lap-Dogs. I am young.
I am handsome. My temper is sweet, and my character without blemish. In
fine, Miss Dobson, I am a most desirable parti.”

“But,” said Zuleika, “I don’t love you.”

The Duke stamped his foot. “I beg your pardon,” he said hastily. “I
ought not to have done that. But--you seem to have entirely missed the
point of what I was saying.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Zuleika.

“Then what,” cried the Duke, standing over her, “what is your reply?”

Said Zuleika, looking up at him, “My reply is that I think you are an
awful snob.”

The Duke turned on his heel, and strode to the other end of the room.
There he stood for some moments, his back to Zuleika.

“I think,” she resumed in a slow, meditative voice, “that you are, with
the possible exception of a Mr. Edelweiss, THE most awful snob I have
ever met.”

The Duke looked back over his shoulder. He gave Zuleika the stinging
reprimand of silence. She was sorry, and showed it in her eyes. She felt
she had gone too far. True, he was nothing to her now. But she had loved
him once. She could not forget that.

“Come!” she said. “Let us be good friends. Give me your hand!” He came
to her, slowly. “There!”

The Duke withdrew his fingers before she unclasped them. That
twice-flung taunt rankled still. It was monstrous to have been called
a snob. A snob!--he, whose readiness to form what would certainly be
regarded as a shocking misalliance ought to have stifled the charge, not
merely vindicated him from it! He had forgotten, in the blindness of his
love, how shocking the misalliance would be. Perhaps she, unloving, had
not been so forgetful? Perhaps her refusal had been made, generously,
for his own sake. Nay, rather for her own. Evidently, she had felt that
the high sphere from which he beckoned was no place for the likes of
her. Evidently, she feared she would pine away among those strange
splendours, never be acclimatised, always be unworthy. He had thought to
overwhelm her, and he had done his work too thoroughly. Now he must try
to lighten the load he had imposed.

Seating himself opposite to her, “You remember,” he said, “that there is
a dairy at Tankerton?”

“A dairy? Oh yes.”

“Do you remember what it is called?”

Zuleika knit her brows.

He helped her out. “It is called ‘Her Grace’s’.”

“Oh, of course!” said Zuleika.

“Do you know WHY it is called so?”

“Well, let’s see... I know you told me.”

“Did I? I think not. I will tell you now... That cool out-house dates
from the middle of the eighteenth century. My great-great-grandfather,
when he was a very old man, married en troisiemes noces a dairy-maid
on the Tankerton estate. Meg Speedwell was her name. He had seen her
walking across a field, not many months after the interment of his
second Duchess, Maria, that great and gifted lady. I know not whether it
was that her bonny mien fanned in him some embers of his youth, or that
he was loth to be outdone in gracious eccentricity by his crony the Duke
of Dewlap, who himself had just taken a bride from a dairy. (You have
read Meredith’s account of that affair? No? You should.) Whether it was
veritable love or mere modishness that formed my ancestor’s resolve,
presently the bells were ringing out, and the oldest elm in the park was
being felled, in Meg Speedwell’s honour, and the children were strewing
daisies on which Meg Speedwell trod, a proud young hoyden of a bride,
with her head in the air and her heart in the seventh heaven. The Duke
had given her already a horde of fine gifts; but these, he had said,
were nothing--trash in comparison with the gift that was to ensure for
her a perdurable felicity. After the wedding-breakfast, when all the
squires had ridden away on their cobs, and all the squires’ ladies in
their coaches, the Duke led his bride forth from the hall, leaning on
her arm, till they came to a little edifice of new white stone, very
spick and span, with two lattice-windows and a bright green door
between. This he bade her enter. A-flutter with excitement, she
turned the handle. In a moment she flounced back, red with shame and
anger--flounced forth from the fairest, whitest, dapperest dairy,
wherein was all of the best that the keenest dairy-maid might need. The
Duke bade her dry her eyes, for that it ill befitted a great lady to be
weeping on her wedding-day. ‘As for gratitude,’ he chuckled, ‘zounds!
that is a wine all the better for the keeping.’ Duchess Meg soon forgot
this unworthy wedding-gift, such was her rapture in the other, the so
august, appurtenances of her new life. What with her fine silk gowns
and farthingales, and her powder-closet, and the canopied bed she slept
in--a bed bigger far than the room she had slept in with her sisters,
and standing in a room far bigger than her father’s cottage; and
what with Betty, her maid, who had pinched and teased her at the
village-school, but now waited on her so meekly and trembled so
fearfully at a scolding; and what with the fine hot dishes that were set
before her every day, and the gallant speeches and glances of the fine
young gentlemen whom the Duke invited from London, Duchess Meg was quite
the happiest Duchess in all England. For a while, she was like a child
in a hay-rick. But anon, as the sheer delight of novelty wore away, she
began to take a more serious view of her position. She began to realise
her responsibilities. She was determined to do all that a great lady
ought to do. Twice every day she assumed the vapours. She schooled
herself in the mysteries of Ombre, of Macao. She spent hours over the
tambour-frame. She rode out on horse-back, with a riding-master. She had
a music-master to teach her the spinet; a dancing-master, too, to teach
her the Minuet and the Triumph and the Gaudy. All these accomplishments
she found mighty hard. She was afraid of her horse. All the morning, she
dreaded the hour when it would be brought round from the stables. She
dreaded her dancing-lesson. Try as she would, she could but stamp her
feet flat on the parquet, as though it had been the village-green. She
dreaded her music-lesson. Her fingers, disobedient to her ambition,
clumsily thumped the keys of the spinet, and by the notes of the score
propped up before her she was as cruelly perplexed as by the black and
red pips of the cards she conned at the gaming-table, or by the red
and gold threads that were always straying and snapping on her
tambour-frame. Still she persevered. Day in, day out, sullenly, she
worked hard to be a great lady. But skill came not to her, and hope
dwindled; only the dull effort remained. One accomplishment she did
master--to wit, the vapours: they became for her a dreadful reality. She
lost her appetite for the fine hot dishes. All night long she lay awake,
restless, tearful, under the fine silk canopy, till dawn stared her
into slumber. She seldom scolded Betty. She who had been so lusty and so
blooming saw in her mirror that she was pale and thin now; and the fine
young gentlemen, seeing it too, paid more heed now to their wine and
their dice than to her. And always, when she met him, the Duke smiled
the same mocking smile. Duchess Meg was pining slowly and surely away...
One morning, in Spring-time, she altogether vanished. Betty, bringing
the cup of chocolate to the bedside, found the bed empty. She raised the
alarm among her fellows. They searched high and low. Nowhere was their
mistress. The news was broken to their master, who, without comment,
rose, bade his man dress him, and presently walked out to the place
where he knew he would find her. And there, to be sure, she was,
churning, churning for dear life. Her sleeves were rolled above her
elbows, and her skirt was kilted high; and, as she looked back over her
shoulder and saw the Duke, there was the flush of roses in her cheeks,
and the light of a thousand thanks in her eyes. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘what
a curtsey I would drop you, but that to let go the handle were to spoil
all!’ And every morning, ever after, she woke when the birds woke, rose
when they rose, and went singing through the dawn to the dairy, there to
practise for her pleasure that sweet and lowly handicraft which she had
once practised for her need. And every evening, with her milking-stool
under her arm, and her milk-pail in her hand, she went into the field
and called the cows to her, as she had been wont to do. To those other,
those so august, accomplishments she no more pretended. She gave them
the go-by. And all the old zest and joyousness of her life came back
to her. Soundlier than ever slept she, and sweetlier dreamed, under the
fine silk canopy, till the birds called her to her work. Greater than
ever was her love of the fine furbelows that were hers to flaunt in, and
sharper her appetite for the fine hot dishes, and more tempestuous her
scolding of Betty, poor maid. She was more than ever now the cynosure,
the adored, of the fine young gentlemen. And as for her husband, she
looked up to him as the wisest, kindest man in all the world.”

“And the fine young gentlemen,” said Zuleika, “did she fall in love with
any of them?”

“You forget,” said the Duke coldly, “she was married to a member of my
family.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. But tell me: did they ALL adore her?”

“Yes. Every one of them, wildly, madly.”

“Ah,” murmured Zuleika, with a smile of understanding. A shadow crossed
her face, “Even so,” she said, with some pique, “I don’t suppose she had
so very many adorers. She never went out into the world.”

“Tankerton,” said the Duke drily, “is a large house, and my
great-great-grandfather was the most hospitable of men. However,” he
added, marvelling that she had again missed the point so utterly, “my
purpose was not to confront you with a past rival in conquest, but to
set at rest a fear which I had, I think, roused in you by my somewhat
full description of the high majestic life to which you, as my bride,
would be translated.”

“A fear? What sort of a fear?”

“That you would not breathe freely--that you would starve (if I may use
a somewhat fantastic figure) among those strawberry-leaves. And so I
told you the story of Meg Speedwell, and how she lived happily ever
after. Nay, hear me out! The blood of Meg Speedwell’s lord flows in
my veins. I think I may boast that I have inherited something of his
sagacity. In any case, I can profit by his example. Do not fear that
I, if you were to wed me, should demand a metamorphosis of your present
self. I should take you as you are, gladly. I should encourage you to be
always exactly as you are--a radiant, irresistible member of the upper
middle-class, with a certain freedom of manner acquired through a
life of peculiar liberty. Can you guess what would be my principal
wedding-gift to you? Meg Speedwell had her dairy. For you, would be
built another outhouse--a neat hall wherein you would perform your
conjuring-tricks, every evening except Sunday, before me and my tenants
and my servants, and before such of my neighbours as might care to come.
None would respect you the less, seeing that I approved. Thus in
you would the pleasant history of Meg Speedwell repeat itself. You,
practising for your pleasure--nay, hear me out!--that sweet and lowly
handicraft which--”

“I won’t listen to another word!” cried Zuleika. “You are the most
insolent person I have ever met. I happen to come of a particularly good
family. I move in the best society. My manners are absolutely perfect.
If I found myself in the shoes of twenty Duchesses simultaneously, I
should know quite well how to behave. As for the one pair you can offer
me, I kick them away--so. I kick them back at you. I tell you--”

“Hush,” said the Duke, “hush! You are over-excited. There will be a
crowd under my window. There, there! I am sorry. I thought--”

“Oh, I know what you thought,” said Zuleika, in a quieter tone. “I am
sure you meant well. I am sorry I lost my temper. Only, you might have
given me credit for meaning what I said: that I would not marry you,
because I did not love you. I daresay there would be great advantages
in being your Duchess. But the fact is, I have no worldly wisdom. To me,
marriage is a sacrament. I could no more marry a man about whom I could
not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of
himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster. Oh my friend,
do not imagine that I have not rejected, in my day, a score of suitors
quite as eligible as you.”

“As eligible? Who were they?” frowned the Duke.

“Oh, Archduke this, and Grand Duke that, and His Serene Highness the
other. I have a wretched memory for names.”

“And my name, too, will soon escape you, perhaps?”

“No. Oh, no. I shall always remember yours. You see, I was in love with
you. You deceived me into loving you...” She sighed. “Oh, had you but
been as strong as I thought you... Still, a swain the more. That is
something.” She leaned forward, smiling archly. “Those studs--show me
them again.”

The Duke displayed them in the hollow of his hand. She touched them
lightly, reverently, as a tourist touches a sacred relic in a church.

At length, “Do give me them,” she said. “I will keep them in a little
secret partition of my jewel-case.” The Duke had closed his fist. “Do!”
 she pleaded. “My other jewels--they have no separate meanings for me.
I never remember who gave me this one or that. These would be quite
different. I should always remember their history... Do!”

“Ask me for anything else,” said the Duke. “These are the one thing I
could not part with--even to you, for whose sake they are hallowed.”

Zuleika pouted. On the verge of persisting, she changed her mind, and
was silent.

“Well!” she said abruptly, “how about these races? Are you going to take
me to see them?”

“Races? What races?” murmured the Duke. “Oh yes. I had forgotten. Do you
really mean that you want to see them?”

“Why, of course! They are great fun, aren’t they?”

“And you are in a mood for great fun? Well, there is plenty of time. The
Second Division is not rowed till half-past four.”

“The Second Division? Why not take me to the First?”

“That is not rowed till six.”

“Isn’t this rather an odd arrangement?”

“No doubt. But Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics.”

“Why, it’s not yet three!” cried Zuleika, with a woebegone stare at the
clock. “What is to be done in the meantime?”

“Am not I sufficiently diverting?” asked the Duke bitterly.

“Quite candidly, no. Have you any friend lodging with you here?”

“One, overhead. A man named Noaks.”

“A small man, with spectacles?”

“Very small, with very large spectacles.”

“He was pointed out to me yesterday, as I was driving from the Station
... No, I don’t think I want to meet him. What can you have in common
with him?”

“One frailty, at least: he, too, Miss Dobson, loves you.”

“But of course he does. He saw me drive past. Very few of the others,”
 she said, rising and shaking herself, “have set eyes on me. Do let us go
out and look at the Colleges. I do need change of scene. If you were a
doctor, you would have prescribed that long ago. It is very bad for me
to be here, a kind of Cinderella, moping over the ashes of my love for
you. Where is your hat?”

Looking round, she caught sight of herself in the glass. “Oh,” she
cried, “what a fright I do look! I must never be seen like this!”

“You look very beautiful.”

“I don’t. That is a lover’s illusion. You yourself told me that this
tartan was perfectly hideous. There was no need to tell me that. I
came thus because I was coming to see you. I chose this frock in the
deliberate fear that you, if I made myself presentable, might succumb at
second sight of me. I would have sent out for a sack and dressed myself
in that, I would have blacked my face all over with burnt cork, only I
was afraid of being mobbed on the way to you.”

“Even so, you would but have been mobbed for your incorrigible beauty.”

“My beauty! How I hate it!” sighed Zuleika. “Still, here it is, and I
must needs make the best of it. Come! Take me to Judas. I will change my
things. Then I shall be fit for the races.”

As these two emerged, side by side, into the street, the Emperors
exchanged stony sidelong glances. For they saw the more than normal
pallor of the Duke’s face, and something very like desperation in his
eyes. They saw the tragedy progressing to its foreseen close. Unable to
stay its course, they were grimly fascinated now.




VI

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with
their bones.” At any rate, the sinner has a better chance than the saint
of being hereafter remembered. We, in whom original sin preponderates,
find him easier to understand. He is near to us, clear to us. The saint
is remote, dim. A very great saint may, of course, be remembered through
some sheer force of originality in him; and then the very mystery that
involves him for us makes him the harder to forget: he haunts us the
more surely because we shall never understand him. But the ordinary
saints grow faint to posterity; whilst quite ordinary sinners pass
vividly down the ages.

Of the disciples of Jesus, which is he that is most often remembered
and cited by us? Not the disciple whom Jesus loved; neither of the
Boanerges, nor any other of them who so steadfastly followed Him and
served Him; but the disciple who betrayed Him for thirty pieces of
silver. Judas Iscariot it is who outstands, overshadowing those
other fishermen. And perhaps it was by reason of this precedence that
Christopher Whitrid, Knight, in the reign of Henry VI., gave the name of
Judas to the College which he had founded. Or perhaps it was because he
felt that in a Christian community not even the meanest and basest of
men should be accounted beneath contempt, beyond redemption.

At any rate, thus he named his foundation. And, though for Oxford men
the savour of the name itself has long evaporated through its local
connexion, many things show that for the Founder himself it was no empty
vocable. In a niche above the gate stands a rudely carved statue
of Judas, holding a money-bag in his right hand. Among the original
statutes of the College is one by which the Bursar is enjoined to
distribute in Passion Week thirty pieces of silver among the needier
scholars “for saike of atonynge.” The meadow adjoining the back of the
College has been called from time immemorial “the Potter’s Field.” And
the name of Salt Cellar is not less ancient and significant.

Salt Cellar, that grey and green quadrangle visible from the room
assigned to Zuleika, is very beautiful, as I have said. So tranquil is
it as to seem remote not merely from the world, but even from Oxford, so
deeply is it hidden away in the core of Oxford’s heart. So tranquil
is it, one would guess that nothing had ever happened in it. For five
centuries these walls have stood, and during that time have beheld, one
would say, no sight less seemly than the good work of weeding, mowing,
rolling, that has made, at length, so exemplary the lawn. These
cloisters that grace the south and east sides--five centuries have
passed through them, leaving in them no echo, leaving on them no
sign, of all that the outer world, for good or evil, has been doing so
fiercely, so raucously.

And yet, if you are versed in the antiquities of Oxford, you know that
this small, still quadrangle has played its part in the rough-and-tumble
of history, and has been the background of high passions and strange
fates. The sun-dial in its midst has told the hours to more than one
bygone King. Charles I. lay for twelve nights in Judas; and it was here,
in this very quadrangle, that he heard from the lips of a breathless and
blood-stained messenger the news of Chalgrove Field. Sixty years later,
James, his son, came hither, black with threats, and from one of the
hind-windows of the Warden’s house--maybe, from the very room where now
Zuleika was changing her frock--addressed the Fellows, and presented
to them the Papist by him chosen to be their Warden, instead of the
Protestant whom they had elected. They were not of so stern a stuff as
the Fellows of Magdalen, who, despite His Majesty’s menaces, had just
rejected Bishop Farmer. The Papist was elected, there and then, al
fresco, without dissent. Cannot one see them, these Fellows of Judas,
huddled together round the sun-dial, like so many sheep in a storm? The
King’s wrath, according to a contemporary record, was so appeased by
their pliancy that he deigned to lie for two nights in Judas, and at
a grand refection in Hall “was gracious and merrie.” Perhaps it was in
lingering gratitude for such patronage that Judas remained so pious to
his memory even after smug Herrenhausen had been dumped down on us for
ever. Certainly, of all the Colleges none was more ardent than Judas for
James Stuart. Thither it was that young Sir Harry Esson led, under cover
of night, three-score recruits whom he had enlisted in the surrounding
villages. The cloisters of Salt Cellar were piled with arms and stores;
and on its grass--its sacred grass!--the squad was incessantly drilled,
against the good day when Ormond should land his men in Devon. For a
whole month Salt Cellar was a secret camp. But somehow, at length--woe
to “lost causes and impossible loyalties”--Herrenhausen had wind of
it; and one night, when the soldiers of the white cockade lay snoring
beneath the stars, stealthily the white-faced Warden unbarred his
postern--that very postern through which now Zuleika had passed on the
way to her bedroom--and stealthily through it, one by one on tip-toe,
came the King’s foot-guards. Not many shots rang out, nor many swords
clashed, in the night air, before the trick was won for law and order.
Most of the rebels were overpowered in their sleep; and those who had
time to snatch arms were too dazed to make good resistance. Sir Harry
Esson himself was the only one who did not live to be hanged. He had
sprung up alert, sword in hand, at the first alarm, setting his back to
the cloisters. There he fought calmly, ferociously, till a bullet went
through his chest. “By God, this College is well-named!” were the words
he uttered as he fell forward and died.

Comparatively tame was the scene now being enacted in this place. The
Duke, with bowed head, was pacing the path between the lawn and the
cloisters. Two other undergraduates stood watching him, whispering
to each other, under the archway that leads to the Front Quadrangle.
Presently, in a sheepish way, they approached him. He halted and looked
up.

“I say,” stammered the spokesman.

“Well?” asked the Duke. Both youths were slightly acquainted with him;
but he was not used to being spoken to by those whom he had not first
addressed. Moreover, he was loth to be thus disturbed in his sombre
reverie. His manner was not encouraging.

“Isn’t it a lovely day for the Eights?” faltered the spokesman.

“I conceive,” the Duke said, “that you hold back some other question.”

The spokesman smiled weakly. Nudged by the other, he muttered “Ask him
yourself!”

The Duke diverted his gaze to the other, who, with an angry look at the
one, cleared his throat, and said “I was going to ask if you thought
Miss Dobson would come and have luncheon with me to-morrow?”

“A sister of mine will be there,” explained the one, knowing the Duke to
be a precisian.

“If you are acquainted with Miss Dobson, a direct invitation should be
sent to her,” said the Duke. “If you are not--” The aposiopesis was icy.

“Well, you see,” said the other of the two, “that is just the
difficulty. I AM acquainted with her. But is she acquainted with ME? I
met her at breakfast this morning, at the Warden’s.”

“So did I,” added the one.

“But she--well,” continued the other, “she didn’t take much notice of
us. She seemed to be in a sort of dream.”

“Ah!” murmured the Duke, with melancholy interest.

“The only time she opened her lips,” said the other, “was when she asked
us whether we took tea or coffee.”

“She put hot milk in my tea,” volunteered the one, “and upset the cup
over my hand, and smiled vaguely.”

“And smiled vaguely,” sighed the Duke.

“She left us long before the marmalade stage,” said the one.

“Without a word,” said the other.

“Without a glance?” asked the Duke. It was testified by the one and the
other that there had been not so much as a glance.

“Doubtless,” the disingenuous Duke said, “she had a headache... Was she
pale?”

“Very pale,” answered the one.

“A healthy pallor,” qualified the other, who was a constant reader of
novels.

“Did she look,” the Duke inquired, “as if she had spent a sleepless
night?”

That was the impression made on both.

“Yet she did not seem listless or unhappy?”

No, they would not go so far as to say that.

“Indeed, were her eyes of an almost unnatural brilliance?”

“Quite unnatural,” confessed the one.

“Twin stars,” interpolated the other.

“Did she, in fact, seem to be consumed by some inward rapture?”

Yes, now they came to think of it, this was exactly how she HAD seemed.

It was sweet, it was bitter, for the Duke. “I remember,” Zuleika had
said to him, “nothing that happened to me this morning till I found
myself at your door.” It was bitter-sweet to have that outline filled in
by these artless pencils. No, it was only bitter, to be, at his time of
life, living in the past.

“The purpose of your tattle?” he asked coldly.

The two youths hurried to the point from which he had diverted them.
“When she went by with you just now,” said the one, “she evidently
didn’t know us from Adam.”

“And I had so hoped to ask her to luncheon,” said the other.

“Well?”

“Well, we wondered if you would re-introduce us. And then perhaps...”

There was a pause. The Duke was touched to kindness for these
fellow-lovers. He would fain preserve them from the anguish that beset
himself. So humanising is sorrow.

“You are in love with Miss Dobson?” he asked.

Both nodded.

“Then,” said he, “you will in time be thankful to me for not affording
you further traffic with that lady. To love and be scorned--does Fate
hold for us a greater inconvenience? You think I beg the question? Let
me tell you that I, too, love Miss Dobson, and that she scorns me.”

To the implied question “What chance would there be for you?” the reply
was obvious.

Amazed, abashed, the two youths turned on their heels.

“Stay!” said the Duke. “Let me, in justice to myself, correct an
inference you may have drawn. It is not by reason of any defect in
myself, perceived or imagined, that Miss Dobson scorns me. She scorns me
simply because I love her. All who love her she scorns. To see her is
to love her. Therefore shut your eyes to her. Strictly exclude her from
your horizon. Ignore her. Will you do this?”

“We will try,” said the one, after a pause.

“Thank you very much,” added the other.

The Duke watched them out of sight. He wished he could take the good
advice he had given them... Suppose he did take it! Suppose he went
to the Bursar, obtained an exeat, fled straight to London! What just
humiliation for Zuleika to come down and find her captive gone! He
pictured her staring around the quadrangle, ranging the cloisters,
calling to him. He pictured her rustling to the gate of the College,
inquiring at the porter’s lodge. “His Grace, Miss, he passed through a
minute ago. He’s going down this afternoon.”

Yet, even while his fancy luxuriated in this scheme, he well knew that
he would not accomplish anything of the kind--knew well that he would
wait here humbly, eagerly, even though Zuleika lingered over her toilet
till crack o’ doom. He had no desire that was not centred in her. Take
away his love for her, and what remained? Nothing--though only in the
past twenty-four hours had this love been added to him. Ah, why had
he ever seen her? He thought of his past, its cold splendour and
insouciance. But he knew that for him there was no returning. His boats
were burnt. The Cytherean babes had set their torches to that flotilla,
and it had blazed like match-wood. On the isle of the enchantress he was
stranded for ever. For ever stranded on the isle of an enchantress who
would have nothing to do with him! What, he wondered, should be done in
so piteous a quandary? There seemed to be two courses. One was to pine
slowly and painfully away. The other...

Academically, the Duke had often reasoned that a man for whom life holds
no chance of happiness cannot too quickly shake life off. Now, of a
sudden, there was for that theory a vivid application.

“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer” was not a point by which he,
“more an antique Roman than a Dane,” was at all troubled. Never had he
given ear to that cackle which is called Public Opinion. The judgment
of his peers--this, he had often told himself, was the sole arbitrage he
could submit to; but then, who was to be on the bench? Peerless, he was
irresponsible--the captain of his soul, the despot of his future. No
injunction but from himself would he bow to; and his own injunctions--so
little Danish was he--had always been peremptory and lucid. Lucid and
peremptory, now, the command he issued to himself.

“So sorry to have been so long,” carolled a voice from above. The Duke
looked up. “I’m all but ready,” said Zuleika at her window.

That brief apparition changed the colour of his resolve. He realised
that to die for love of this lady would be no mere measure of
precaution, or counsel of despair. It would be in itself a passionate
indulgence--a fiery rapture, not to be foregone. What better could
he ask than to die for his love? Poor indeed seemed to him now
the sacrament of marriage beside the sacrament of death. Death was
incomparably the greater, the finer soul. Death was the one true bridal.

He flung back his head, spread wide his arms, quickened his pace almost
to running speed. Ah, he would win his bride before the setting of the
sun. He knew not by what means he would win her. Enough that even now,
full-hearted, fleet-footed, he was on his way to her, and that she heard
him coming.

When Zuleika, a vision in vaporous white, came out through the postern,
she wondered why he was walking at so remarkable a pace. To him, wildly
expressing in his movement the thought within him, she appeared as his
awful bride. With a cry of joy, he bounded towards her, and would have
caught her in his arms, had she not stepped nimbly aside.

“Forgive me!” he said, after a pause. “It was a mistake--an idiotic
mistake of identity. I thought you were...”

Zuleika, rigid, asked “Have I many doubles?”

“You know well that in all the world is none so blest as to be like you.
I can only say that I was over-wrought. I can only say that it shall not
occur again.”

She was very angry indeed. Of his penitence there could be no doubt. But
there are outrages for which no penitence can atone. This seemed to be
one of them. Her first impulse was to dismiss the Duke forthwith and for
ever. But she wanted to show herself at the races. And she could not go
alone. And except the Duke there was no one to take her. True, there was
the concert to-night; and she could show herself there to advantage; but
she wanted ALL Oxford to see her--see her NOW.

“I am forgiven?” he asked. In her, I am afraid, self-respect outweighed
charity. “I will try,” she said merely, “to forget what you have done.”
 Motioning him to her side, she opened her parasol, and signified her
readiness to start.

They passed together across the vast gravelled expanse of the Front
Quadrangle. In the porch of the College there were, as usual, some
chained-up dogs, patiently awaiting their masters. Zuleika, of course,
did not care for dogs. One has never known a good man to whom dogs were
not dear; but many of the best women have no such fondness. You will
find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has
failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are
mere dumb and restless brutes--possibly dangerous, certainly soulless.
Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a
man enslaved by her. Even Zuleika, it seems, was not above this rather
obvious device for awaking envy. Be sure she did not at all like the
look of the very big bulldog who was squatting outside the porter’s
lodge. Perhaps, but for her present anger, she would not have stooped
endearingly down to him, as she did, cooing over him and trying to pat
his head. Alas, her pretty act was a failure. The bulldog cowered away
from her, horrifically grimacing. This was strange. Like the majority
of his breed, Corker (for such was his name) had ever been wistful to
be noticed by any one--effusively grateful for every word or pat, an
ever-ready wagger and nuzzler, to none ineffable. No beggar, no burglar,
had ever been rebuffed by this catholic beast. But he drew the line at
Zuleika.

Seldom is even a fierce bulldog heard to growl. Yet Corker growled at
Zuleika.




VII

The Duke did not try to break the stony silence in which Zuleika walked.
Her displeasure was a luxury to him, for it was so soon to be dispelled.
A little while, and she would be hating herself for her pettiness. Here
was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach
of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand. He stole a sidelong
look at her, and could not repress a smile. His features quickly
composed themselves. The Triumph of Death must not be handled as a
cheap score. He wanted to die because he would thereby so poignantly
consummate his love, express it so completely, once and for all...
And she--who could say that she, knowing what he had done, might not,
illogically, come to love him? Perhaps she would devote her life to
mourning him. He saw her bending over his tomb, in beautiful humble
curves, under a starless sky, watering the violets with her tears.

Shades of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel and other despicable
maunderers! He brushed them aside. He would be practical. The point was,
when and how to die? Time: the sooner the better. Manner:.. less easy to
determine. He must not die horribly, nor without dignity. The manner of
the Roman philosophers? But the only kind of bath which an undergraduate
can command is a hip-bath. Stay! there was the river. Drowning (he had
often heard) was a rather pleasant sensation. And to the river he was
even now on his way.

It troubled him that he could swim. Twice, indeed, from his yacht,
he had swum the Hellespont. And how about the animal instinct of
self-preservation, strong even in despair? No matter! His soul’s set
purpose would subdue that. The law of gravitation that brings one to the
surface? There his very skill in swimming would help him. He would swim
under water, along the river-bed, swim till he found weeds to cling to,
weird strong weeds that he would coil round him, exulting faintly...

As they turned into Radcliffe Square, the Duke’s ear caught the sound of
a far-distant gun. He started, and looked up at the clock of St. Mary’s.
Half-past four! The boats had started.

He had heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment,
the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself. He did not
wish Zuleika to store up yet more material for penitence. And so “I am
sorry,” he said. “That gun--did you hear it? It was the signal for the
race. I shall never forgive myself.”

“Then we shan’t see the race at all?” cried Zuleika.

“It will be over, alas, before we are near the river. All the people
will be coming back through the meadows.”

“Let us meet them.”

“Meet a torrent? Let us have tea in my rooms and go down quietly for the
other Division.”

“Let us go straight on.”

Through the square, across the High, down Grove Street, they passed.
The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton, “os oupot authis alla nyn
paunstaton.” Strange that to-night it would still be standing here,
in all its sober and solid beauty--still be gazing, over the roofs and
chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its rightful bride. Through untold
centuries of the future it would stand thus, gaze thus. He winced.
Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loth to
regard his doom as trivial.

Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are
far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the
railed pathway to Christ Church meadow, were all a-swaying and a-nodding
to the Duke as he passed by. “Adieu, adieu, your Grace,” they were
whispering. “We are very sorry for you--very sorry indeed. We never
dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great
tragedy. Adieu! Perhaps we shall meet in another world--that is, if the
members of the animal kingdom have immortal souls, as we have.”

The Duke was little versed in their language; yet, as he passed between
these gently garrulous blooms, he caught at least the drift of their
salutation, and smiled a vague but courteous acknowledgment, to the
right and the left alternately, creating a very favourable impression.

No doubt, the young elms lining the straight way to the barges had seen
him coming; but any whispers of their leaves were lost in the murmur of
the crowd returning from the race. Here, at length, came the torrent
of which the Duke had spoken; and Zuleika’s heart rose at it. Here was
Oxford! From side to side the avenue was filled with a dense procession
of youths--youths interspersed with maidens whose parasols were as
flotsam and jetsam on a seething current of straw hats. Zuleika neither
quickened nor slackened her advance. But brightlier and brightlier shone
her eyes.

The vanguard of the procession was pausing now, swaying, breaking at
sight of her. She passed, imperial, through the way cloven for her. All
a-down the avenue, the throng parted as though some great invisible
comb were being drawn through it. The few youths who had already
seen Zuleika, and by whom her beauty had been bruited throughout the
University, were lost in a new wonder, so incomparably fairer was she
than the remembered vision. And the rest hardly recognised her from the
descriptions, so incomparably fairer was the reality than the hope.

She passed among them. None questioned the worthiness of her escort.
Could I give you better proof the awe in which our Duke was held? Any
man is glad to be seen escorting a very pretty woman. He thinks it adds
to his prestige. Whereas, in point of fact, his fellow-men are saying
merely “Who’s that appalling fellow with her?” or “Why does she go about
with that ass So-and-So?” Such cavil may in part be envy. But it is a
fact that no man, howsoever graced, can shine in juxtaposition to a very
pretty woman. The Duke himself cut a poor figure beside Zuleika. Yet not
one of all the undergraduates felt she could have made a wiser choice.

She swept among them. Her own intrinsic radiance was not all that
flashed from her. She was a moving reflector and refractor of all the
rays of all the eyes that mankind had turned on her. Her mien told the
story of her days. Bright eyes, light feet--she trod erect from a vista
whose glare was dazzling to all beholders. She swept among them, a
miracle, overwhelming, breath-bereaving. Nothing at all like her had
ever been seen in Oxford.

Mainly architectural, the beauties of Oxford. True, the place is no
longer one-sexed. There are the virguncules of Somerville and Lady
Margaret’s Hall; but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be
allied. There are the innumerable wives and daughters around the Parks,
running in and out of their little red-brick villas; but the indignant
shade of celibacy seems to have called down on the dons a Nemesis which
precludes them from either marrying beauty or begetting it. (From the
Warden’s son, that unhappy curate, Zuleika inherited no tittle of
her charm. Some of it, there is no doubt, she did inherit from the
circus-rider who was her mother.)

But the casual feminine visitors? Well, the sisters and cousins of an
undergraduate seldom seem more passable to his comrades than to himself.
Altogether, the instinct of sex is not pandered to in Oxford. It is not,
however, as it may once have been, dormant. The modern importation of
samples of femininity serves to keep it alert, though not to gratify it.
A like result is achieved by another modern development--photography.
The undergraduate may, and usually does, surround himself with
photographs of pretty ladies known to the public. A phantom harem! Yet
the houris have an effect on their sultan. Surrounded both by plain
women of flesh and blood and by beauteous women on pasteboard, the
undergraduate is the easiest victim of living loveliness--is as a fire
ever well and truly laid, amenable to a spark. And if the spark be such
a flaring torch as Zuleika?--marvel not, reader, at the conflagration.

Not only was the whole throng of youths drawing asunder before her:
much of it, as she passed, was forming up in her wake. Thus, with the
confluence of two masses--one coming away from the river, the other
returning to it--chaos seethed around her and the Duke before they were
half-way along the avenue. Behind them, and on either side of them, the
people were crushed inextricably together, swaying and surging this way
and that. “Help!” cried many a shrill feminine voice. “Don’t push!” “Let
me out!” “You brute!” “Save me, save me!” Many ladies fainted, whilst
their escorts, supporting them and protecting them as best they could,
peered over the heads of their fellows for one glimpse of the divine
Miss Dobson. Yet for her and the Duke, in the midst of the terrific
compress, there was space enough. In front of them, as by a miracle
of deference, a way still cleared itself. They reached the end of the
avenue without a pause in their measured progress. Nor even when they
turned to the left, along the rather narrow path beside the barges, was
there any obstacle to their advance. Passing evenly forward, they alone
were cool, unhustled, undishevelled.

The Duke was so rapt in his private thoughts that he was hardly
conscious of the strange scene. And as for Zuleika, she, as well she
might be, was in the very best of good humours.

“What a lot of house-boats!” she exclaimed. “Are you going to take me on
to one of them?”

The Duke started. Already they were alongside the Judas barge. “Here,”
 he said, “is our goal.”

He stepped through the gate of the railings, out upon the plank, and
offered her his hand.

She looked back. The young men in the vanguard were crushing their
shoulders against the row behind them, to stay the oncoming host. She
had half a mind to go back through the midst of them; but she really did
want her tea, and she followed the Duke on to the barge, and under his
auspices climbed the steps to the roof.

It looked very cool and gay, this roof, under its awning of red and
white stripes. Nests of red and white flowers depended along either side
of it. Zuleika moved to the side which commanded a view of the bank. She
leaned her arms on the balustrade, and gazed down.

The crowd stretched as far as she could see--a vista of faces upturned
to her. Suddenly it hove forward. Its vanguard was swept irresistibly
past the barge--swept by the desire of the rest to see her at closer
quarters. Such was the impetus that the vision for each man was but
a lightning-flash: he was whirled past, struggling, almost before his
brain took the message of his eyes.

Those who were Judas men made frantic efforts to board the barge, trying
to hurl themselves through the gate in the railings; but they were swept
vainly on.

Presently the torrent began to slacken, became a mere river, a mere
procession of youths staring up rather shyly.

Before the last stragglers had marched by, Zuleika moved away to the
other side of the roof, and, after a glance at the sunlit river,
sank into one of the wicker chairs, and asked the Duke to look less
disagreeable and to give her some tea.

Among others hovering near the little buffet were the two youths whose
parley with the Duke I have recorded.

Zuleika was aware of the special persistence of their gaze. When the
Duke came back with her cup, she asked him who they were. He replied,
truthfully enough, that their names were unknown to him.

“Then,” she said, “ask them their names, and introduce them to me.”

“No,” said the Duke, sinking into the chair beside her. “That I shall
not do. I am your victim: not your pander. Those two men stand on the
threshold of a possibly useful and agreeable career. I am not going to
trip them up for you.”

“I am not sure,” said Zuleika, “that you are very polite. Certainly you
are foolish. It is natural for boys to fall in love. If these two are
in love with me, why not let them talk to me? It were an experience on
which they would always look back with romantic pleasure. They may never
see me again. Why grudge them this little thing?” She sipped her tea.
“As for tripping them up on a threshold--that is all nonsense. What harm
has unrequited love ever done to anybody?” She laughed. “Look at ME!
When I came to your rooms this morning, thinking I loved in vain, did I
seem one jot the worse for it? Did I look different?”

“You looked, I am bound to say, nobler, more spiritual.”

“More spiritual?” she exclaimed. “Do you mean I looked tired or ill?”

“No, you seemed quite fresh. But then, you are singular. You are no
criterion.”

“You mean you can’t judge those two young men by me? Well, I am only a
woman, of course. I have heard of women, no longer young, wasting away
because no man loved them. I have often heard of a young woman fretting
because some particular young man didn’t love her. But I never heard of
her wasting away. Certainly a young man doesn’t waste away for love of
some particular young woman. He very soon makes love to some other one.
If his be an ardent nature, the quicker his transition. All the most
ardent of my past adorers have married. Will you put my cup down,
please?”

“Past?” echoed the Duke, as he placed her cup on the floor. “Have any of
your lovers ceased to love you?”

“Ah no, no; not in retrospect. I remain their ideal, and all that, of
course. They cherish the thought of me. They see the world in terms of
me. But I am an inspiration, not an obsession; a glow, not a blight.”

“You don’t believe in the love that corrodes, the love that ruins?”

“No,” laughed Zuleika.

“You have never dipped into the Greek pastoral poets, nor sampled the
Elizabethan sonneteers?”

“No, never. You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life
has been drawn from life itself.”

“Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of
speech has what is called ‘the literary flavour’.”

“Ah, that is an unfortunate trick which I caught from a writer, a Mr.
Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner somewhere. I can’t break
myself of it. I assure you I hardly ever open a book. Of life, though,
my experience has been very wide. Brief? But I suppose the soul of man
during the past two or three years has been much as it was in the reign
of Queen Elizabeth and of--whoever it was that reigned over the Greek
pastures. And I daresay the modern poets are making the same old silly
distortions. But forgive me,” she added gently, “perhaps you yourself
are a poet?”

“Only since yesterday,” answered the Duke (not less unfairly to himself
than to Roger Newdigate and Thomas Gaisford). And he felt he was
especially a dramatic poet. All the while that she had been sitting by
him here, talking so glibly, looking so straight into his eyes, flashing
at him so many pretty gestures, it was the sense of tragic irony
that prevailed in him--that sense which had stirred in him, and been
repressed, on the way from Judas. He knew that she was making her effect
consciously for the other young men by whom the roof of the barge was
now thronged. Him alone she seemed to observe. By her manner, she might
have seemed to be making love to him. He envied the men she was so
deliberately making envious--the men whom, in her undertone to him, she
was really addressing. But he did take comfort in the irony. Though she
used him as a stalking-horse, he, after all, was playing with her as a
cat plays with a mouse. While she chattered on, without an inkling that
he was no ordinary lover, and coaxing him to present two quite ordinary
young men to her, he held over her the revelation that he for love of
her was about to die.

And, while he drank in the radiance of her beauty, he heard her
chattering on. “So you see,” she was saying, “it couldn’t do those young
men any harm. Suppose unrequited love IS anguish: isn’t the discipline
wholesome? Suppose I AM a sort of furnace: shan’t I purge, refine,
temper? Those two boys are but scorched from here. That is horrid; and
what good will it do them?” She laid a hand on his arm. “Cast them into
the furnace for their own sake, dear Duke! Or cast one of them, or,” she
added, glancing round at the throng, “any one of these others!”

“For their own sake?” he echoed, withdrawing his arm. “If you were not,
as the whole world knows you to be, perfectly respectable, there might
be something in what you say. But as it is, you can but be an engine for
mischief; and your sophistries leave me unmoved. I shall certainly keep
you to myself.”

“I hate you,” said Zuleika, with an ugly petulance that crowned the
irony.

“So long as I live,” uttered the Duke, in a level voice, “you will
address no man but me.”

“If your prophecy is to be fulfilled,” laughed Zuleika, rising from her
chair, “your last moment is at hand.”

“It is,” he answered, rising too.

“What do you mean?” she asked, awed by something in his tone.

“I mean what I say: that my last moment is at hand.” He withdrew
his eyes from hers, and, leaning his elbows on the balustrade, gazed
thoughtfully at the river. “When I am dead,” he added, over his
shoulder, “you will find these fellows rather coy of your advances.”

For the first time since his avowal of his love for her, Zuleika found
herself genuinely interested in him. A suspicion of his meaning had
flashed through her soul.--But no! surely he could not mean THAT! It
must have been a metaphor merely. And yet, something in his eyes... She
leaned beside him. Her shoulder touched his. She gazed questioningly at
him. He did not turn his face to her. He gazed at the sunlit river.

The Judas Eight had just embarked for their voyage to the
starting-point. Standing on the edge of the raft that makes a floating
platform for the barge, William, the hoary bargee, was pushing them off
with his boat-hook, wishing them luck with deferential familiarity.
The raft was thronged with Old Judasians--mostly clergymen--who were
shouting hearty hortations, and evidently trying not to appear so old
as they felt--or rather, not to appear so startlingly old as their
contemporaries looked to them. It occurred to the Duke as a strange
thing, and a thing to be glad of, that he, in this world, would never be
an Old Judasian. Zuleika’s shoulder pressed his. He thrilled not at all.
To all intents, he was dead already.

The enormous eight young men in the thread-like skiff--the skiff that
would scarce have seemed an adequate vehicle for the tiny “cox” who sat
facing them--were staring up at Zuleika with that uniformity of impulse
which, in another direction, had enabled them to bump a boat on two of
the previous “nights.” If to-night they bumped the next boat, Univ.,
then would Judas be three places “up” on the river; and to-morrow Judas
would have a Bump Supper. Furthermore, if Univ. were bumped to-night,
Magdalen might be bumped to-morrow. Then would Judas, for the first
time in history, be head of the river. Oh tremulous hope! Yet, for
the moment, these eight young men seemed to have forgotten the awful
responsibility that rested on their over-developed shoulders. Their
hearts, already strained by rowing, had been transfixed this afternoon
by Eros’ darts. All of them had seen Zuleika as she came down to the
river; and now they sat gaping up at her, fumbling with their oars. The
tiny cox gaped too; but he it was who first recalled duty. With piping
adjurations he brought the giants back to their senses. The boat moved
away down stream, with a fairly steady stroke.

Not in a day can the traditions of Oxford be sent spinning. From all the
barges the usual punt-loads of young men were being ferried across
to the towing-path--young men naked of knee, armed with rattles,
post-horns, motor-hooters, gongs, and other instruments of clangour.
Though Zuleika filled their thoughts, they hurried along the
towing-path, as by custom, to the starting-point.

She, meanwhile, had not taken her eyes off the Duke’s profile. Nor
had she dared, for fear of disappointment, to ask him just what he had
meant.

“All these men,” he repeated dreamily, “will be coy of your advances.”
 It seemed to him a good thing that his death, his awful example, would
disinfatuate his fellow alumni. He had never been conscious of
public spirit. He had lived for himself alone. Love had come to him
yesternight, and to-day had waked in him a sympathy with mankind. It
was a fine thing to be a saviour. It was splendid to be human. He looked
quickly round to her who had wrought this change in him.

But the loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see
it suddenly, eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.
It was thus that the Duke saw Zuleika’s: a monstrous deliquium a-glare.
Only for the fraction of an instant, though. Recoiling, he beheld the
loveliness that he knew--more adorably vivid now in its look of eager
questioning. And in his every fibre he thrilled to her. Even so had she
gazed at him last night, this morning. Aye, now as then, her soul was
full of him. He had recaptured, not her love, but his power to please
her. It was enough. He bowed his head; and “Moriturus te saluto” were
the words formed silently by his lips. He was glad that his death would
be a public service to the University. But the salutary lesson of
what the newspapers would call his “rash act” was, after all, only a
side-issue. The great thing, the prospect that flushed his cheek, was
the consummation of his own love, for its own sake, by his own death.
And, as he met her gaze, the question that had already flitted through
his brain found a faltering utterance; and “Shall you mourn me?” he
asked her.

But she would have no ellipses. “What are you going to do?” she
whispered.

“Do you not know?”

“Tell me.”

“Once and for all: you cannot love me?”

Slowly she shook her head. The black pearl and the pink, quivering, gave
stress to her ultimatum. But the violet of her eyes was all but hidden
by the dilation of her pupils.

“Then,” whispered the Duke, “when I shall have died, deeming life a vain
thing without you, will the gods give you tears for me? Miss Dobson,
will your soul awaken? When I shall have sunk for ever beneath these
waters whose supposed purpose here this afternoon is but that they be
ploughed by the blades of these young oarsmen, will there be struck from
that flint, your heart, some late and momentary spark of pity for me?”

“Why of course, of COURSE!” babbled Zuleika, with clasped hands and
dazzling eyes. “But,” she curbed herself, “it is--it would--oh, you
mustn’t THINK of it! I couldn’t allow it! I--I should never forgive
myself!”

“In fact, you would mourn me always?”

“Why yes!.. Y-es-always.” What else could she say? But would his answer
be that he dared not condemn her to lifelong torment?

“Then,” his answer was, “my joy in dying for you is made perfect.”

Her muscles relaxed. Her breath escaped between her teeth. “You are
utterly resolved?” she asked. “Are you?”

“Utterly.”

“Nothing I might say could change your purpose?”

“Nothing.”

“No entreaty, howsoever piteous, could move you?”

“None.”

Forthwith she urged, entreated, cajoled, commanded, with infinite
prettiness of ingenuity and of eloquence. Never was such a cascade of
dissuasion as hers. She only didn’t say she could love him. She never
hinted that. Indeed, throughout her pleading rang this recurrent motif:
that he must live to take to himself as mate some good, serious, clever
woman who would be a not unworthy mother of his children.

She laid stress on his youth, his great position, his brilliant
attainments, the much he had already achieved, the splendid
possibilities of his future. Though of course she spoke in undertones,
not to be overheard by the throng on the barge, it was almost as though
his health were being floridly proposed at some public banquet--say,
at a Tenants’ Dinner. Insomuch that, when she ceased, the Duke half
expected Jellings, his steward, to bob up uttering, with lifted hands, a
stentorian “For-or,” and all the company to take up the chant: “he’s--a
jolly good fellow.” His brief reply, on those occasions, seemed always
to indicate that, whatever else he might be, a jolly good fellow he was
not. But by Zuleika’s eulogy he really was touched. “Thank you--thank
you,” he gasped; and there were tears in his eyes. Dear the thought that
she so revered him, so wished him not to die. But this was no more than
a rush-light in the austere radiance of his joy in dying for her.

And the time was come. Now for the sacrament of his immersion in
infinity.

“Good-bye,” he said simply, and was about to swing himself on to the
ledge of the balustrade. Zuleika, divining his intention, made way for
him. Her bosom heaved quickly, quickly. All colour had left her face;
but her eyes shone as never before.

Already his foot was on the ledge, when hark! the sound of a distant
gun. To Zuleika, with all the chords of her soul strung to the utmost
tensity, the effect was as if she herself had been shot; and she
clutched at the Duke’s arm, like a frightened child. He laughed. “It was
the signal for the race,” he said, and laughed again, rather bitterly,
at the crude and trivial interruption of high matters.

“The race?” She laughed hysterically.

“Yes. ‘They’re off’.” He mingled his laughter with hers, gently seeking
to disengage his arm. “And perhaps,” he said, “I, clinging to the weeds
of the river’s bed, shall see dimly the boats and the oars pass over me,
and shall be able to gurgle a cheer for Judas.”

“Don’t!” she shuddered, with a woman’s notion that a jest means levity.
A tumult of thoughts surged in her, all confused. She only knew that
he must not die--not yet! A moment ago, his death would have been
beautiful. Not now! Her grip of his arm tightened. Only by breaking her
wrist could he have freed himself. A moment ago, she had been in the
seventh-heaven... Men were supposed to have died for love of her. It
had never been proved. There had always been something--card-debts,
ill-health, what not--to account for the tragedy. No man, to the best
of her recollection, had ever hinted that he was going to die for her.
Never, assuredly, had she seen the deed done. And then came he, the
first man she had loved, going to die here, before her eyes, because she
no longer loved him. But she knew now that he must not die--not yet!

All around her was the hush that falls on Oxford when the signal for the
race has sounded. In the distance could be heard faintly the noise of
cheering--a little sing-song sound, drawing nearer.

Ah, how could she have thought of letting him die so soon? She gazed
into his face--the face she might never have seen again. Even now, but
for that gun-shot, the waters would have closed over him, and his soul,
maybe, have passed away. She had saved him, thank heaven! She had him
still with her.

Gently, vainly, he still sought to unclasp her fingers from his arm.

“Not now!” she whispered. “Not yet!”

And the noise of the cheering, and of the trumpeting and rattling, as
it drew near, was an accompaniment to her joy in having saved her lover.
She would keep him with her--for a while! Let all be done in order. She
would savour the full sweetness of his sacrifice. Tomorrow--to-morrow,
yes, let him have his heart’s desire of death. Not now! Not yet!

“To-morrow,” she whispered, “to-morrow, if you will. Not yet!”

The first boat came jerking past in mid-stream; and the towing-path,
with its serried throng of runners, was like a live thing, keeping pace.
As in a dream, Zuleika saw it. And the din was in her ears. No heroine
of Wagner had ever a louder accompaniment than had ours to the surging
soul within her bosom.

And the Duke, tightly held by her, vibrated as to a powerful electric
current. He let her cling to him, and her magnetism range through him.
Ah, it was good not to have died! Fool, he had meant to drain off-hand,
at one coarse draught, the delicate wine of death. He would let his lips
caress the brim of the august goblet. He would dally with the aroma that
was there.

“So be it!” he cried into Zuleika’s ear--cried loudly, for it seemed as
though all the Wagnerian orchestras of Europe, with the Straussian ones
thrown in, were here to clash in unison the full volume of right music
for the glory of the reprieve.

The fact was that the Judas boat had just bumped Univ., exactly opposite
the Judas barge. The oarsmen in either boat sat humped, panting, some of
them rocking and writhing, after their wholesome exercise. But there
was not one of them whose eyes were not upcast at Zuleika. And the
vocalisation and instrumentation of the dancers and stampers on the
towing-path had by this time ceased to mean aught of joy in the victors
or of comfort for the vanquished, and had resolved itself into a wild
wordless hymn to the glory of Miss Dobson. Behind her and all around her
on the roof of the barge, young Judasians were venting in like manner
their hearts through their lungs. She paid no heed. It was as if she
stood alone with her lover on some silent pinnacle of the world. It was
as if she were a little girl with a brand-new and very expensive doll
which had banished all the little other old toys from her mind.

She simply could not, in her naive rapture, take her eyes off her
companion. To the dancers and stampers of the towing-path, many of whom
were now being ferried back across the river, and to the other youths
on the roof of the barge, Zuleika’s air of absorption must have seemed
a little strange. For already the news that the Duke loved Zuleika, and
that she loved him not, and would stoop to no man who loved her, had
spread like wild-fire among the undergraduates. The two youths in whom
the Duke had deigned to confide had not held their peace. And the effect
that Zuleika had made as she came down to the river was intensified by
the knowledge that not the great paragon himself did she deem worthy of
her. The mere sight of her had captured young Oxford. The news of her
supernal haughtiness had riveted the chains.

“Come!” said the Duke at length, staring around him with the eyes of one
awakened from a dream. “Come! I must take you back to Judas.”

“But you won’t leave me there?” pleaded Zuleika. “You will stay to
dinner? I am sure my grandfather would be delighted.”

“I am sure he would,” said the Duke, as he piloted her down the steps of
the barge. “But alas, I have to dine at the Junta to-night.”

“The Junta? What is that?”

“A little dining-club. It meets every Tuesday.”

“But--you don’t mean you are going to refuse me for that?”

“To do so is misery. But I have no choice. I have asked a guest.”

“Then ask another: ask me!” Zuleika’s notions of Oxford life were rather
hazy. It was with difficulty that the Duke made her realise that he
could not--not even if, as she suggested, she dressed herself up as a
man--invite her to the Junta. She then fell back on the impossibility
that he would not dine with her to-night, his last night in this world.
She could not understand that admirable fidelity to social engagements
which is one of the virtues implanted in the members of our aristocracy.
Bohemian by training and by career, she construed the Duke’s refusal as
either a cruel slight to herself or an act of imbecility. The thought of
being parted from her for one moment was torture to him; but “noblesse
oblige,” and it was quite impossible for him to break an engagement
merely because a more charming one offered itself: he would as soon have
cheated at cards.

And so, as they went side by side up the avenue, in the mellow light
of the westering sun, preceded in their course, and pursued, and
surrounded, by the mob of hoarse infatuate youths, Zuleika’s face was
as that of a little girl sulking. Vainly the Duke reasoned with her. She
could NOT see the point of view.

With that sudden softening that comes to the face of an angry woman who
has hit on a good argument, she turned to him and asked “How if I hadn’t
saved your life just now? Much you thought about your guest when you
were going to dive and die!”

“I did not forget him,” answered the Duke, smiling at her casuistry.
“Nor had I any scruple in disappointing him. Death cancels all
engagements.”

And Zuleika, worsted, resumed her sulking. But presently, as they neared
Judas, she relented. It was paltry to be cross with him who had resolved
to die for her and was going to die so on the morrow. And after all, she
would see him at the concert to-night. They would sit together. And all
to-morrow they would be together, till the time came for parting. Hers
was a naturally sunny disposition. And the evening was such a lovely
one, all bathed in gold. She was ashamed of her ill-humour.

“Forgive me,” she said, touching his arm. “Forgive me for being horrid.”
 And forgiven she promptly was. “And promise you will spend all to-morrow
with me.” And of course he promised.

As they stood together on the steps of the Warden’s front-door, exalted
above the level of the flushed and swaying crowd that filled the whole
length and breadth of Judas Street, she implored him not to be late for
the concert.

“I am never late,” he smiled.

“Ah, you’re so beautifully brought up!”

The door was opened.

“And--oh, you’re beautiful besides!” she whispered; and waved her hand
to him as she vanished into the hall.




VIII

A few minutes before half-past seven, the Duke, arrayed for dinner,
passed leisurely up the High. The arresting feature of his costume was
a mulberry-coloured coat, with brass buttons. This, to any one versed in
Oxford lore, betokened him a member of the Junta. It is awful to think
that a casual stranger might have mistaken him for a footman. It does
not do to think of such things.

The tradesmen, at the doors of their shops, bowed low as he passed,
rubbing their hands and smiling, hoping inwardly that they took no
liberty in sharing the cool rosy air of the evening with his Grace. They
noted that he wore in his shirt-front a black pearl and a pink. “Daring,
but becoming,” they opined.

The rooms of the Junta were over a stationer’s shop, next door but one
to the Mitre. They were small rooms; but as the Junta had now, besides
the Duke, only two members, and as no member might introduce more than
one guest, there was ample space.

The Duke had been elected in his second term. At that time there were
four members; but these were all leaving Oxford at the end of the summer
term, and there seemed to be in the ranks of the Bullingdon and the
Loder no one quite eligible for the Junta, that holy of holies. Thus it
was that the Duke inaugurated in solitude his second year of membership.
From time to time, he proposed and seconded a few candidates, after
“sounding” them as to whether they were willing to join. But always,
when election evening--the last Tuesday of term--drew near, he began to
have his doubts about these fellows. This one was “rowdy”; that one
was over-dressed; another did not ride quite straight to hounds; in the
pedigree of another a bar-sinister was more than suspected. Election
evening was always a rather melancholy time. After dinner, when the two
club servants had placed on the mahogany the time-worn Candidates’ Book
and the ballot-box, and had noiselessly withdrawn, the Duke, clearing
his throat, read aloud to himself “Mr. So-and-So, of Such-and-Such
College, proposed by the Duke of Dorset, seconded by the Duke of
Dorset,” and, in every case, when he drew out the drawer of the
ballot-box, found it was a black-ball that he had dropped into the urn.
Thus it was that at the end of the summer term the annual photographic
“group” taken by Messrs. Hills and Saunders was a presentment of the
Duke alone.

In the course of his third year he had become less exclusive. Not
because there seemed to be any one really worthy of the Junta; but
because the Junta, having thriven since the eighteenth century, must
not die. Suppose--one never knew--he were struck by lightning, the Junta
would be no more. So, not without reluctance, but unanimously, he had
elected The MacQuern, of Balliol, and Sir John Marraby, of Brasenose.

To-night, as he, a doomed man, went up into the familiar rooms, he was
wholly glad that he had thus relented. As yet, he was spared the tragic
knowledge that it would make no difference.*

   * The Junta has been reconstituted. But the apostolic line was
     broken, the thread was snapped; the old magic is fled.

The MacQuern and two other young men were already there.

“Mr. President,” said The MacQuern, “I present Mr. Trent-Garby, of
Christ Church.”

“The Junta is honoured,” said the Duke, bowing.

Such was the ritual of the club.

The other young man, because his host, Sir John Marraby, was not yet on
the scene, had no locus standi, and, though a friend of The MacQuern,
and well known to the Duke, had to be ignored.

A moment later, Sir John arrived. “Mr. President,” he said, “I present
Lord Sayes, of Magdalen.”

“The Junta is honoured,” said the Duke, bowing.

Both hosts and both guests, having been prominent in the throng that
vociferated around Zuleika an hour earlier, were slightly abashed in
the Duke’s presence. He, however, had not noticed any one in particular,
and, even if he had, that fine tradition of the club--“A member of the
Junta can do no wrong; a guest of the Junta cannot err”--would have
prevented him from showing his displeasure.

A Herculean figure filled the doorway.

“The Junta is honoured,” said the Duke, bowing to his guest.

“Duke,” said the newcomer quietly, “the honour is as much mine as
that of the interesting and ancient institution which I am this night
privileged to inspect.”

Turning to Sir John and The MacQuern, the Duke said “I present Mr.
Abimelech V. Oover, of Trinity.”

“The Junta,” they replied, “is honoured.”

“Gentlemen,” said the Rhodes Scholar, “your good courtesy is just such
as I would have anticipated from members of the ancient Junta. Like most
of my countrymen, I am a man of few words. We are habituated out there
to act rather than talk. Judged from the view-point of your beautiful
old civilisation, I am aware my curtness must seem crude. But,
gentlemen, believe me, right here--”

“Dinner is served, your Grace.”

Thus interrupted, Mr. Oover, with the resourcefulness of a practised
orator, brought his thanks to a quick but not abrupt conclusion. The
little company passed into the front room.

Through the window, from the High, fading daylight mingled with the
candle-light. The mulberry coats of the hosts, interspersed by the black
ones of the guests, made a fine pattern around the oval table a-gleam
with the many curious pieces of gold and silver plate that had accrued
to the Junta in course of years.

The President showed much deference to his guest. He seemed to listen
with close attention to the humorous anecdote with which, in the
American fashion, Mr. Oover inaugurated dinner.

To all Rhodes Scholars, indeed, his courtesy was invariable. He went out
of his way to cultivate them. And this he did more as a favour to Lord
Milner than of his own caprice. He found these Scholars, good fellows
though they were, rather oppressive. They had not--how could they
have?--the undergraduate’s virtue of taking Oxford as a matter of
course. The Germans loved it too little, the Colonials too much. The
Americans were, to a sensitive observer, the most troublesome--as being
the most troubled--of the whole lot. The Duke was not one of those
Englishmen who fling, or care to hear flung, cheap sneers at America.
Whenever any one in his presence said that America was not large
in area, he would firmly maintain that it was. He held, too, in his
enlightened way, that Americans have a perfect right to exist. But
he did often find himself wishing Mr. Rhodes had not enabled them to
exercise that right in Oxford. They were so awfully afraid of having
their strenuous native characters undermined by their delight in the
place. They held that the future was theirs, a glorious asset, far more
glorious than the past. But a theory, as the Duke saw, is one thing, an
emotion another. It is so much easier to covet what one hasn’t than to
revel in what one has. Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic
about what exists than about what doesn’t. The future doesn’t exist. The
past does. For, whereas all men can learn, the gift of prophecy has died
out. A man cannot work up in his breast any real excitement about what
possibly won’t happen. He cannot very well help being sentimentally
interested in what he knows has happened. On the other hand, he owes a
duty to his country. And, if his country be America, he ought to try to
feel a vivid respect for the future, and a cold contempt for the past.
Also, if he be selected by his country as a specimen of the best moral,
physical, and intellectual type that she can produce for the astounding
of the effete foreigner, and incidentally for the purpose of raising
that foreigner’s tone, he must--mustn’t he?--do his best to astound,
to exalt. But then comes in this difficulty. Young men don’t like to
astound and exalt their fellows. And Americans, individually, are of
all people the most anxious to please. That they talk overmuch is often
taken as a sign of self-satisfaction. It is merely a mannerism. Rhetoric
is a thing inbred in them. They are quite unconscious of it. It is as
natural to them as breathing. And, while they talk on, they really do
believe that they are a quick, businesslike people, by whom things are
“put through” with an almost brutal abruptness. This notion of theirs is
rather confusing to the patient English auditor.

Altogether, the American Rhodes Scholars, with their splendid native
gift of oratory, and their modest desire to please, and their not less
evident feeling that they ought merely to edify, and their constant
delight in all that of Oxford their English brethren don’t notice, and
their constant fear that they are being corrupted, are a noble, rather
than a comfortable, element in the social life of the University. So, at
least, they seemed to the Duke.

And to-night, but that he had invited Oover to dine with him, he could
have been dining with Zuleika. And this was his last dinner on earth.
Such thoughts made him the less able to take pleasure in his guest.
Perfect, however, the amenity of his manner.

This was the more commendable because Oover’s “aura” was even more
disturbing than that of the average Rhodes Scholar. To-night, besides
the usual conflicts in this young man’s bosom, raged a special one
between his desire to behave well and his jealousy of the man who had
to-day been Miss Dobson’s escort. In theory he denied the Duke’s right
to that honour. In sentiment he admitted it. Another conflict, you see.
And another. He longed to orate about the woman who had his heart; yet
she was the one topic that must be shirked.

The MacQuern and Mr. Trent-Garby, Sir John Marraby and Lord Sayes, they
too--though they were no orators--would fain have unpacked their hearts
in words about Zuleika. They spoke of this and that, automatically, none
listening to another--each man listening, wide-eyed, to his own heart’s
solo on the Zuleika theme, and drinking rather more champagne than was
good for him. Maybe, these youths sowed in themselves, on this night,
the seeds of lifelong intemperance. We cannot tell. They did not live
long enough for us to know.

While the six dined, a seventh, invisible to them, leaned moodily
against the mantel-piece, watching them. He was not of their time. His
long brown hair was knotted in a black riband behind. He wore a pale
brocaded coat and lace ruffles, silken stockings, a sword. Privy to
their doom, he watched them. He was loth that his Junta must die. Yes,
his. Could the diners have seen him, they would have known him by his
resemblance to the mezzotint portrait that hung on the wall above him.
They would have risen to their feet in presence of Humphrey Greddon,
founder and first president of the club.

His face was not so oval, nor were his eyes so big, nor his lips so
full, nor his hands so delicate, as they appeared in the mezzotint. Yet
(bating the conventions of eighteenth-century portraiture) the likeness
was a good one. Humphrey Greddon was not less well-knit and graceful
than the painter had made him, and, hard though the lines of the face
were, there was about him a certain air of high romance that could not
be explained away by the fact that he was of a period not our own. You
could understand the great love that Nellie O’Mora had borne him.

Under the mezzotint hung Hoppner’s miniature of that lovely and
ill-starred girl, with her soft dark eyes, and her curls all astray from
beneath her little blue turban. And the Duke was telling Mr. Oover her
story--how she had left her home for Humphrey Greddon when she was but
sixteen, and he an undergraduate at Christ Church; and had lived for him
in a cottage at Littlemore, whither he would ride, most days, to be with
her; and how he tired of her, broke his oath that he would marry her,
thereby broke her heart; and how she drowned herself in a mill-pond; and
how Greddon was killed in Venice, two years later, duelling on the Riva
Schiavoni with a Senator whose daughter he had seduced.

And he, Greddon, was not listening very attentively to the tale. He
had heard it told so often in this room, and he did not understand
the sentiments of the modern world. Nellie had been a monstrous pretty
creature. He had adored her, and had done with her. It was right that
she should always be toasted after dinner by the Junta, as in the days
when first he loved her--“Here’s to Nellie O’Mora, the fairest witch
that ever was or will be!” He would have resented the omission of that
toast. But he was sick of the pitying, melting looks that were always
cast towards her miniature. Nellie had been beautiful, but, by God! she
was always a dunce and a simpleton. How could he have spent his life
with her? She was a fool, by God! not to marry that fool Trailby, of
Merton, whom he took to see her.

Mr. Oover’s moral tone, and his sense of chivalry, were of the American
kind: far higher than ours, even, and far better expressed. Whereas the
English guests of the Junta, when they heard the tale of Nellie O’Mora,
would merely murmur “Poor girl!” or “What a shame!” Mr. Oover said in a
tone of quiet authority that compelled Greddon’s ear “Duke, I hope I am
not incognisant of the laws that govern the relations of guest and host.
But, Duke, I aver deliberately that the founder of this fine old
club; at which you are so splendidly entertaining me to-night, was an
unmitigated scoundrel. I say he was not a white man.”

At the word “scoundrel,” Humphrey Greddon had sprung forward, drawing
his sword, and loudly, in a voice audible to himself alone, challenged
the American to make good his words. Then, as this gentleman took no
notice, with one clean straight thrust Greddon ran him through the
heart, shouting “Die, you damned psalm-singer and traducer! And so die
all rebels against King George!”* Withdrawing the blade, he wiped it
daintily on his cambric handkerchief. There was no blood. Mr. Oover,
with unpunctured shirt-front, was repeating “I say he was not a white
man.” And Greddon remembered himself--remembered he was only a ghost,
impalpable, impotent, of no account. “But I shall meet you in Hell
to-morrow,” he hissed in Oover’s face. And there he was wrong. It is
quite certain that Oover went to Heaven.

   * As Edward VII. was at this time on the throne, it must have been
     to George III. that Mr. Greddon was referring.

Unable to avenge himself, Greddon had looked to the Duke to act for him.
When he saw that this young man did but smile at Oover and make a vague
deprecatory gesture, he again, in his wrath, forgot his disabilities.
Drawing himself to his full height, he took with great deliberation a
pinch of snuff, and, bowing low to the Duke, said “I am vastly obleeged
to your Grace for the fine high Courage you have exhibited in the behalf
of your most Admiring, most Humble Servant.” Then, having brushed away
a speck of snuff from his jabot, he turned on his heel; and only in the
doorway, where one of the club servants, carrying a decanter in each
hand, walked straight through him, did he realise that he had not
spoilt the Duke’s evening. With a volley of the most appalling
eighteenth-century oaths, he passed back into the nether world.

To the Duke, Nellie O’Mora had never been a very vital figure. He had
often repeated the legend of her. But, having never known what love was,
he could not imagine her rapture or her anguish. Himself the quarry of
all Mayfair’s wise virgins, he had always--so far as he thought of
the matter at all--suspected that Nellie’s death was due to thwarted
ambition. But to-night, while he told Oover about her, he could see
into her soul. Nor did he pity her. She had loved. She had known the
one thing worth living for--and dying for. She, as she went down to the
mill-pond, had felt just that ecstasy of self-sacrifice which he himself
had felt to-day and would feel to-morrow. And for a while, too--for a
full year--she had known the joy of being loved, had been for Greddon
“the fairest witch that ever was or will be.” He could not agree with
Oover’s long disquisition on her sufferings. And, glancing at her
well-remembered miniature, he wondered just what it was in her that had
captivated Greddon. He was in that blest state when a man cannot believe
the earth has been trodden by any really beautiful or desirable lady
save the lady of his own heart.

The moment had come for the removal of the table-cloth. The mahogany of
the Junta was laid bare--a clear dark lake, anon to reflect in its still
and ruddy depths the candelabras and the fruit-cradles, the slender
glasses and the stout old decanters, the forfeit-box and the snuff-box,
and other paraphernalia of the dignity of dessert. Lucidly, and
unwaveringly inverted in the depths these good things stood; and, so
soon as the wine had made its circuit, the Duke rose and with uplifted
glass proposed the first of the two toasts traditional to the Junta.
“Gentlemen, I give you Church and State.”

The toast having been honoured by all--and by none with a richer
reverence than by Oover, despite his passionate mental reservation in
favour of Pittsburg-Anabaptism and the Republican Ideal--the snuff-box
was handed round, and fruit was eaten.

Presently, when the wine had gone round again, the Duke rose and with
uplifted glass said “Gentlemen, I give you--” and there halted.
Silent, frowning, flushed, he stood for a few moments, and then, with
a deliberate gesture, tilted his glass and let fall the wine to the
carpet. “No,” he said, looking round the table, “I cannot give you
Nellie O’Mora.”

“Why not?” gasped Sir John Marraby.

“You have a right to ask that,” said the Duke, still standing. “I can
only say that my conscience is stronger than my sense of what is due to
the customs of the club. Nellie O’Mora,” he said, passing his hand over
his brow, “may have been in her day the fairest witch that ever was--so
fair that our founder had good reason to suppose her the fairest witch
that ever would be. But his prediction was a false one. So at least it
seems to me. Of course I cannot both hold this view and remain President
of this club. MacQuern--Marraby--which of you is Vice-President?”

“He is,” said Marraby.

“Then, MacQuern, you are hereby President, vice myself resigned. Take
the chair and propose the toast.”

“I would rather not,” said The MacQuern after a pause.

“Then, Marraby, YOU must.”

“Not I!” said Marraby.

“Why is this?” asked the Duke, looking from one to the other.

The MacQuern, with Scotch caution, was silent. But the impulsive
Marraby--Madcap Marraby, as they called him in B.N.C.--said “It’s
because I won’t lie!” and, leaping up, raised his glass aloft and cried
“I give you Zuleika Dobson, the fairest witch that ever was or will be!”

Mr. Oover, Lord Sayes, Mr. Trent-Garby, sprang to their feet; The
MacQuern rose to his. “Zuleika Dobson!” they cried, and drained their
glasses.

Then, when they had resumed their seats, came an awkward pause. The
Duke, still erect beside the chair he had vacated, looked very grave
and pale. Marraby had taken an outrageous liberty. But “a member of the
Junta can do no wrong,” and the liberty could not be resented. The Duke
felt that the blame was on himself, who had elected Marraby to the club.

Mr. Oover, too, looked grave. All the antiquarian in him deplored
the sudden rupture of a fine old Oxford tradition. All the chivalrous
American in him resented the slight on that fair victim of the feudal
system, Miss O’Mora. And, at the same time, all the Abimelech V. in him
rejoiced at having honoured by word and act the one woman in the world.

Gazing around at the flushed faces and heaving shirt-fronts of the
diners, the Duke forgot Marraby’s misdemeanour. What mattered far more
to him was that here were five young men deeply under the spell of
Zuleika. They must be saved, if possible. He knew how strong his
influence was in the University. He knew also how strong was Zuleika’s.
He had not much hope of the issue. But his new-born sense of duty to his
fellows spurred him on. “Is there,” he asked with a bitter smile, “any
one of you who doesn’t with his whole heart love Miss Dobson?”

Nobody held up a hand.

“As I feared,” said the Duke, knowing not that if a hand had been held
up he would have taken it as a personal insult. No man really in love
can forgive another for not sharing his ardour. His jealousy for himself
when his beloved prefers another man is hardly a stronger passion than
his jealousy for her when she is not preferred to all other women.

“You know her only by sight--by repute?” asked the Duke. They signified
that this was so. “I wish you would introduce me to her,” said Marraby.

“You are all coming to the Judas concert tonight?” the Duke asked,
ignoring Marraby. “You have all secured tickets?” They nodded. “To hear
me play, or to see Miss Dobson?” There was a murmur of “Both--both.”
 “And you would all of you, like Marraby, wish to be presented to this
lady?” Their eyes dilated. “That way happiness lies, think you?”

“Oh, happiness be hanged!” said Marraby.

To the Duke this seemed a profoundly sane remark--an epitome of his own
sentiments. But what was right for himself was not right for all. He
believed in convention as the best way for average mankind. And so,
slowly, calmly, he told to his fellow-diners just what he had told a few
hours earlier to those two young men in Salt Cellar. Not knowing that
his words had already been spread throughout Oxford, he was rather
surprised that they seemed to make no sensation. Quite flat, too, fell
his appeal that the syren be shunned by all.

Mr. Oover, during his year of residence, had been sorely tried by the
quaint old English custom of not making public speeches after private
dinners. It was with a deep sigh of satisfaction that he now rose to his
feet.

“Duke,” he said in a low voice, which yet penetrated to every corner
of the room, “I guess I am voicing these gentlemen when I say that your
words show up your good heart, all the time. Your mentality, too, is
bully, as we all predicate. One may say without exaggeration that your
scholarly and social attainments are a by-word throughout the solar
system, and be-yond. We rightly venerate you as our boss. Sir, we
worship the ground you walk on. But we owe a duty to our own free and
independent manhood. Sir, we worship the ground Miss Z. Dobson treads
on. We have pegged out a claim right there. And from that location
we aren’t to be budged--not for bob-nuts. We asseverate we
squat--where--we--squat, come--what--will. You say we have no chance to
win Miss Z. Dobson. That--we--know. We aren’t worthy. We lie prone. Let
her walk over us. You say her heart is cold. We don’t pro-fess we
can take the chill off. But, Sir, we can’t be diverted out of loving
her--not even by you, Sir. No, Sir! We love her, and--shall, and--will,
Sir, with--our--latest breath.”

This peroration evoked loud applause. “I love her, and shall, and will,”
 shouted each man. And again they honoured in wine her image. Sir John
Marraby uttered a cry familiar in the hunting-field. The MacQuern
contributed a few bars of a sentimental ballad in the dialect of his
country. “Hurrah, hurrah!” shouted Mr. Trent-Garby. Lord Sayes hummed
the latest waltz, waving his arms to its rhythm, while the wine he had
just spilt on his shirt-front trickled unheeded to his waistcoat. Mr.
Oover gave the Yale cheer.

The genial din was wafted down through the open window to the
passers-by. The wine-merchant across the way heard it, and smiled
pensively. “Youth, youth!” he murmured.

The genial din grew louder.

At any other time, the Duke would have been jarred by the disgrace to
the Junta. But now, as he stood with bent head, covering his face with
his hands, he thought only of the need to rid these young men, here
and now, of the influence that had befallen them. To-morrow his tragic
example might be too late, the mischief have sunk too deep, the agony be
life-long. His good breeding forbade him to cast over a dinner-table the
shadow of his death. His conscience insisted that he must. He uncovered
his face, and held up one hand for silence.

“We are all of us,” he said, “old enough to remember vividly the
demonstrations made in the streets of London when war was declared
between us and the Transvaal Republic. You, Mr. Oover, doubtless heard
in America the echoes of those ebullitions. The general idea was that
the war was going to be a very brief and simple affair--what was called
‘a walk-over.’ To me, though I was only a small boy, it seemed that all
this delirious pride in the prospect of crushing a trumpery foe argued
a defect in our sense of proportion. Still, I was able to understand the
demonstrators’ point of view. To ‘the giddy vulgar’ any sort of victory
is pleasant. But defeat? If, when that war was declared, every one had
been sure that not only should we fail to conquer the Transvaal, but
that IT would conquer US--that not only would it make good its freedom
and independence, but that we should forfeit ours--how would the
cits have felt then? Would they not have pulled long faces, spoken in
whispers, wept? You must forgive me for saying that the noise you have
just made around this table was very like to the noise made on the verge
of the Boer War. And your procedure seems to me as unaccountable as
would have seemed the antics of those mobs if England had been plainly
doomed to disaster and to vassalage. My guest here to-night, in the
course of his very eloquent and racy speech, spoke of the need that he
and you should preserve your ‘free and independent manhood.’ That seemed
to me an irreproachable ideal. But I confess I was somewhat taken aback
by my friend’s scheme for realising it. He declared his intention of
lying prone and letting Miss Dobson ‘walk over’ him; and he advised you
to follow his example; and to this counsel you gave evident approval.
Gentlemen, suppose that on the verge of the aforesaid war, some orator
had said to the British people ‘It is going to be a walk-over for our
enemy in the field. Mr. Kruger holds us in the hollow of his hand.
In subjection to him we shall find our long-lost freedom and
independence’--what would have been Britannia’s answer? What, on
reflection, is yours to Mr. Oover? What are Mr. Oover’s own second
thoughts?” The Duke paused, with a smile to his guest.

“Go right ahead, Duke,” said Mr. Oover. “I’ll re-ply when my turn
comes.”

“And not utterly demolish me, I hope,” said the Duke. His was the Oxford
manner. “Gentlemen,” he continued, “is it possible that Britannia would
have thrown her helmet in the air, shrieking ‘Slavery for ever’? You,
gentlemen, seem to think slavery a pleasant and an honourable state. You
have less experience of it than I. I have been enslaved to Miss Dobson
since yesterday evening; you, only since this afternoon; I, at close
quarters; you, at a respectful distance. Your fetters have not galled
you yet. MY wrists, MY ankles, are excoriated. The iron has entered into
my soul. I droop. I stumble. Blood flows from me. I quiver and curse. I
writhe. The sun mocks me. The moon titters in my face. I can stand it no
longer. I will no more of it. Tomorrow I die.”

The flushed faces of the diners grew gradually pale. Their eyes lost
lustre. Their tongues clove to the roofs of their mouths.

At length, almost inaudibly, The MacQuern asked “Do you mean you are
going to commit suicide?”

“Yes,” said the Duke, “if you choose to put it in that way. Yes. And it
is only by a chance that I did not commit suicide this afternoon.”

“You--don’t--say,” gasped Mr. Oover.

“I do indeed,” said the Duke. “And I ask you all to weigh well my
message.”

“But--but does Miss Dobson know?” asked Sir John.

“Oh yes,” was the reply. “Indeed, it was she who persuaded me not to die
till to-morrow.”

“But--but,” faltered Lord Sayes, “I saw her saying good-bye to you in
Judas Street. And--and she looked quite--as if nothing had happened.”

“Nothing HAD happened,” said the Duke. “And she was very much pleased
to have me still with her. But she isn’t so cruel as to hinder me from
dying for her to-morrow. I don’t think she exactly fixed the hour. It
shall be just after the Eights have been rowed. An earlier death would
mark in me a lack of courtesy to that contest... It seems strange to
you that I should do this thing? Take warning by me. Muster all your
will-power, and forget Miss Dobson. Tear up your tickets for the
concert. Stay here and play cards. Play high. Or rather, go back to your
various Colleges, and speed the news I have told you. Put all Oxford on
its guard against this woman who can love no lover. Let all Oxford
know that I, Dorset, who had so much reason to love life--I, the
nonpareil--am going to die for the love I bear this woman. And let no
man think I go unwilling. I am no lamb led to the slaughter. I am priest
as well as victim. I offer myself up with a pious joy. But enough
of this cold Hebraism! It is ill-attuned to my soul’s mood.
Self-sacrifice--bah! Regard me as a voluptuary. I am that. All my
baffled ardour speeds me to the bosom of Death. She is gentle and
wanton. She knows I could never have loved her for her own sake. She
has no illusions about me. She knows well I come to her because not
otherwise may I quench my passion.”

There was a long silence. The Duke, looking around at the bent heads and
drawn mouths of his auditors, saw that his words had gone home. It was
Marraby who revealed how powerfully home they had gone.

“Dorset,” he said huskily, “I shall die too.”

The Duke flung up his hands, staring wildly.

“I stand in with that,” said Mr. Oover.

“So do I!” said Lord Sayes. “And I!” said Mr. Trent-Garby; “And I!” The
MacQuern.

The Duke found voice. “Are you mad?” he asked, clutching at his throat.
“Are you all mad?”

“No, Duke,” said Mr. Oover. “Or, if we are, you have no right to be at
large. You have shown us the way. We--take it.”

“Just so,” said The MacQuern, stolidly.

“Listen, you fools,” cried the Duke. But through the open window came
the vibrant stroke of some clock. He wheeled round, plucked out his
watch--nine!--the concert!--his promise not to be late!--Zuleika!

All other thoughts vanished. In an instant he dodged beneath the sash
of the window. From the flower-box he sprang to the road beneath. (The
facade of the house is called, to this day, Dorset’s Leap.) Alighting
with the legerity of a cat, he swerved leftward in the recoil, and was
off, like a streak of mulberry-coloured lightning, down the High.

The other men had rushed to the window, fearing the worst. “No,” cried
Oover. “That’s all right. Saves time!” and he raised himself on to the
window-box. It splintered under his weight. He leapt heavily but well,
followed by some uprooted geraniums. Squaring his shoulders, he threw
back his head, and doubled down the slope.

There was a violent jostle between the remaining men. The MacQuern
cannily got out of it, and rushed downstairs. He emerged at the
front-door just after Marraby touched ground. The Baronet’s left ankle
had twisted under him. His face was drawn with pain as he hopped down
the High on his right foot, fingering his ticket for the concert. Next
leapt Lord Sayes. And last of all leapt Mr. Trent-Garby, who, catching
his foot in the ruined flower-box, fell headlong, and was, I regret to
say, killed. Lord Sayes passed Sir John in a few paces. The MacQuern
overtook Mr. Oover at St. Mary’s and outstripped him in Radcliffe
Square. The Duke came in an easy first.

Youth, youth!




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 hook 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. 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. Zuleika 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 grand-daughter?” His tone
was as of a man saying “If she is dead, don’t break it gently to me.”

“My grand-daughter?” said the Warden. “Ah, Duke, good evening.”

“She’s not ill?”

“Oh no, 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 Zuleika. He hoped the Duke had
not let her worry him with her artless prattle. “She seems to be a good,
amiable girl,” he added, in his detached way.

Sitting beside him, the Duke looked curiously at the venerable profile,
as at a mummy’s. To think that this had once been a man! To think that
his blood flowed in the veins of Zuleika! Hitherto the Duke had seen
nothing grotesque in him--had 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 never had occurred to him that the Warden had
been young once. To-night he saw the old man in a new light--saw that
he was mad. Here 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 plaints 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 church-yard 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 nugatory
than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the
devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps
expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, belike, 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 warbler suddenly ceased, staring straight in front of him as though
he saw a vision. Automatically, all heads veered in the direction of his
gaze. From the entrance, slowly along the aisle, came Zuleika, 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-gloved
forefinger, enjoining 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. Zuleika, 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?”

“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.

“Think,” said she, “how deeply I must have been brooding over you since
we parted!”

“Is this really,” he asked, pointing to the left ear-ring, “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. 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--well, of
to-morrow. And this dear sensitive pink pearl had again expressed my
soul. And there was I, in a yellow gown with green embroideries, gay
as a jacamar, jarring hideously on myself. I covered my eyes and rushed
upstairs, rang the bell and tore my things off. My maid was very cross.”

Cross! The Duke was shot through with envy of one who was in a position
to be unkind to Zuleika. “Happy maid!” he murmured. Zuleika 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 into 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 are wearing?”

In sooth, no costume could have been more beautifully Cimmerian than
Zuleika’s. And yet, thought the Duke, watching her as the concert
proceeded, the effect of her was not lugubrious. Her darkness shone.
The black satin gown she wore was a stream of shifting high-lights.
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.
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? Ah no, she was merely strong. She was one who could tread the
tragic plane 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. That 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 to-morrow, call out my name in a
loud voice, so that every one around can hear?”

“Of course I will.”

“So that no one shall ever be able to say it wasn’t for me that you
died, you know.”

“May I use simply 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 Oover 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
Zuleika 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 dais.

He had not considered what he would play tonight. 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 hearers, arose a vision. And it was as though in delicate
procession, very slowly, listless with weeping, certain figures passed
by, hooded, and drooping forasmuch 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, dust to be hidden out of sight. Very slowly, very wretchedly they
went by. But, as they went, another feeling, faint at first, an all but
imperceptible current, seemed to flow through the procession; and now
one, now another of the mourners would look wanly up, with cast-back
hood, as though 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 blithe 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 again with their sorrow, and passed on all
unsolaced, 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 Frederic 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 Marche Funebre. And
among the audience, too, there was a bowing and uplifting of heads, just
as among the figures of the mourners evoked. 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.

And Zuleika 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 to-morrow he would be dead! She was immensely glad
she had saved him this afternoon. To-morrow! There came back to her what
he had told her about the omen at Tankerton, 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 whither.” Perhaps, thought she, at
this very moment these two birds were on the battlements.

The music ceased. In the hush that followed it, her applause rang sharp
and notable. Not so Chopin’s. Of him and his intense excitement none but
his companion was aware. “Plus fin que Pachmann!” he reiterated, waving
his arms wildly, and dancing.

“Tu auras une migraine affreuse. Rentrons, petit coeur!” said George
Sand, gently but firmly.

“Laisse-moi le saluer,” cried the composer, struggling in her grasp.

“Demain soir, oui. Il sera parmi nous,” said the novelist, as she
hurried him away. “Moi aussi,” she added to herself, “je me promets un
beau plaisir en faisant la connaissance de ce jeune homme.”

Zuleika was the first to rise as “ce jeune homme” 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 that 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 Oover 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 an unit in unreason. If any one of the undergraduates had
met Miss Dobson in the desert of 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 Duke’s was a peculiar case. For him to
fall in love was itself a violent peripety, 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 the victims less of Zuleika than of the Duke’s example,
and of one another. A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all
that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in
them 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 recognised 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 Cellar.

The moon, like a gardenia in the night’s button-hole--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 whatsoever but herself,
was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly
on the sun-dial at the centre of the lawn. Never, except once, 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 wanly persisted. And this was the
more absurd in her because Salt Cellar 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 shed forth from Zuleika’s bedroom? Nothing, that she
had cleansed the lawn of all its colour, and made of it a platform of
silver-grey, fit for fairies to dance on?

If Zuleika, 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; 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 Tanville-Tankerton family. Had you accepted my offer of marriage,
you would have had the right to wear these two pearls during your
life-time. 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 Zuleika. “Yes, and you were ‘sorry’ you couldn’t dine
with me to-night. But any little niggling scruple is more to you than I
am. What old maids men 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 preternaturally solemn face of
Oover, 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 

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