Victorian Short Stories by Various

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'I think I've got hold of the thing pretty well now, sir.' The dunce
rose and smiled, and his tutor realized how little the dunce had to
learn in some things. He felt quite grateful to him.

'Oh, well, you'll come and see me again after lunch, won't you, if one
or two points occur to you for elucidation,' he said, feeling vaguely a
liar, and generally guilty. But when, on the departure of the dunce,
Winifred held out her arms, everything fell from him but the sense of
the exquisite moment. Their lips met for the first time, but only for an
instant. He had scarcely time to realize that this wonderful thing had
happened before the mobile creature had darted to his book-shelves and
was examining a Thucydides upside down.

'How clever to know Greek!' she exclaimed. 'And do you really talk it
with the other dons?'

'No, we never talk shop,' he laughed. 'But, Winifred, what made you come
here?'

'I had never seen Oxford. Isn't it beautiful?'

'There's nothing beautiful _here_,' he said, looking round his sober
study.

'No,' she admitted; 'there's nothing I care for here,' and had left
another celestial kiss on his lips before he knew it. 'And now you must
take me to lunch and on the river.'

He stammered, 'I have--work.'

She pouted. 'But I can't stay beyond tomorrow morning, and I want so
much to see all your celebrated oarsmen practising.'

'You are not staying over the night?' he gasped.

'Yes, I am,' and she threw him a dazzling glance.

His heart went pit-a-pat. 'Where?' he murmured.

'Oh, some poky little hotel near the station. The swell hotels are
full.'

He was glad to hear she was not conspicuously quartered.

'So many people have come down already for Commem,' he said. 'I suppose
they are anxious to see the Generals get their degrees. But hadn't we
better go somewhere and lunch?'

They went down the stone staircase, past the battalion of boots, and
across the quad. He felt that all the windows were alive with eyes, but
she insisted on standing still and admiring their ivied picturesqueness.
After lunch he shamefacedly borrowed the dunce's punt. The necessities
of punting, which kept him far from her, and demanded much adroit
labour, gradually restored his self-respect, and he was able to look the
uncelebrated oarsmen they met in the eyes, except when they were
accompanied by their parents and sisters, which subtly made him feel
uncomfortable again. But Winifred, piquant under her pink parasol, was
singularly at ease, enraptured with the changing beauty of the river,
applauding with childish glee the wild flowers on the banks, or the
rippling reflections in the water.

'Look, look!' she cried once, pointing skyward. He stared upwards,
expecting a balloon at least. But it was only 'Keats' little rosy
cloud', she explained. It was not her fault if he did not find the
excursion unreservedly idyllic.

'How stupid,' she reflected, 'to keep all those nice boys cooped up
reading dead languages in a spot made for life and love.'

'I'm afraid they don't disturb the dead languages so much as you think,'
he reassured her, smiling. 'And there will be plenty of love-making
during Commem.'

'I am so glad. I suppose there are lots of engagements that week.'

'Oh, yes--but not one per cent come to anything.'

'Really? Oh, how fickle men are!'

That seemed rather question-begging, but he was so thrilled by the
implicit revelation that she could not even imagine feminine
inconstancy, that he forebore to draw her attention to her inadequate
logic.

So childish and thoughtless indeed was she that day that nothing would
content her but attending a 'Viva', which he had incautiously informed
her was public.

'Nobody will notice us,' she urged with strange unconsciousness of her
loveliness. 'Besides, they don't know I'm not your sister.'

'The Oxford intellect is sceptical,' he said, laughing. 'It cultivates
philosophical doubt.'

But, putting a bold face on the matter, and assuming a fraternal air, he
took her to the torture-chamber, in which candidates sat dolefully on a
row of chairs against the wall, waiting their turn to come before the
three grand inquisitors at the table. Fortunately, Winifred and he were
the only spectators; but unfortunately they blundered in at the very
moment when the poor owner of the punt was on the rack. The central
inquisitor was trying to extract from him information about Becket,
almost prompting him with the very words, but without penetrating
through the duncical denseness. John Lefolle breathed more freely when
the Crusades were broached; but, alas, it very soon became evident that
the dunce had by no means 'got hold of the thing'. As the dunce passed
out sadly, obviously ploughed, John Lefolle suffered more than he. So
conscience-stricken was he that, when he had accompanied Winifred as
far as her hotel, he refused her invitation to come in, pleading the
compulsoriness of duty and dinner in Hall. But he could not get away
without promising to call in during the evening.

The prospect of this visit was with him all through dinner, at once
tempting and terrifying. Assuredly there was a skeleton at his feast, as
he sat at the high table, facing the Master. The venerable portraits
round the Hall seemed to rebuke his romantic waywardness. In the
common-room, he sipped his port uneasily, listening as in a daze to the
discussion on Free Will, which an eminent stranger had stirred up. How
academic it seemed, compared with the passionate realities of life. But
somehow he found himself lingering on at the academic discussion,
postponing the realities of life. Every now and again, he was impelled
to glance at his watch; but suddenly murmuring, 'It is very late,' he
pulled himself together, and took leave of his learned brethren. But in
the street the sight of a telegraph office drew his steps to it, and
almost mechanically he wrote out the message: 'Regret detained. Will
call early in morning.'

When he did call in the morning, he was told she had gone back to London
the night before on receipt of a telegram. He turned away with a bitter
pang of disappointment and regret.

IV

Their subsequent correspondence was only the more amorous. The reason
she had fled from the hotel, she explained, was that she could not
endure the night in those stuffy quarters. He consoled himself with the
hope of seeing much of her during the Long Vacation. He did see her once
at her own reception, but this time her husband wandered about the two
rooms. The cosy corner was impossible, and they could only manage to
gasp out a few mutual endearments amid the buzz and movement, and to
arrange a _rendezvous_ for the end of July. When the day came, he
received a heart-broken letter, stating that her husband had borne her
away to Goodwood. In a postscript she informed him that 'Quicksilver was
a sure thing'. Much correspondence passed without another meeting being
effected, and he lent her five pounds to pay a debt of honour incurred
through her husband's 'absurd confidence in Quicksilver'. A week later
this horsey husband of hers brought her on to Brighton for the races
there, and hither John Lefolle flew. But her husband shadowed her, and
he could only lift his hat to her as they passed each other on the
Lawns. Sometimes he saw her sitting pensively on a chair while her lord
and thrasher perused a pink sporting-paper. Such tantalizing proximity
raised their correspondence through the Hove Post Office to fever heat.
Life apart, they felt, was impossible, and, removed from the sobering
influences of his cap and gown, John Lefolle dreamed of throwing
everything to the winds. His literary reputation had opened out a new
career. The Winifred lyrics alone had brought in a tidy sum, and though
he had expended that and more on despatches of flowers and trifles to
her, yet he felt this extravagance would become extinguished under daily
companionship, and the poems provoked by her charms would go far towards
their daily maintenance. Yes, he could throw up the University. He would
rescue her from this bully, this gentleman bruiser. They would live
openly and nobly in the world's eye. A poet was not even expected to be
conventional.

She, on her side, was no less ardent for the great step. She raged
against the world's law, the injustice by which a husband's cruelty was
not sufficient ground for divorce. 'But we finer souls must take the law
into our own hands,' she wrote. 'We must teach society that the ethics
of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment.' But
somehow the actual time and place of the elopement could never get
itself fixed. In September her husband dragged her to Scotland, in
October after the pheasants. When the dramatic day was actually fixed,
Winifred wrote by the next post deferring it for a week. Even the few
actual preliminary meetings they planned for Kensington Gardens or
Hampstead Heath rarely came off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of
express letters of excuse, and telegrams that transformed the situation
from hour to hour. Not that her passion in any way abated, or her
romantic resolution really altered: it was only that her conception of
time and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable.

But after nigh six months of palpitating negotiations with the adorable
Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment of dejection, penned the prose
apophthegm, 'It is of no use trying to change a changeable person.'

V

But at last she astonished him by a sketch plan of the elopement, so
detailed, even to band-boxes and the Paris night route _via_ Dieppe,
that no further room for doubt was left in his intoxicated soul, and he
was actually further astonished when, just as he was putting his
hand-bag into the hansom, a telegram was handed to him saying: 'Gone to
Homburg. Letter follows.'

He stood still for a moment on the pavement in utter distraction. What
did it mean? Had she failed him again? Or was it simply that she had
changed the city of refuge from Paris to Homburg? He was about to name
the new station to the cabman, but then, 'letter follows'. Surely that
meant that he was to wait for it. Perplexed and miserable, he stood with
the telegram crumpled up in his fist. What a ridiculous situation! He
had wrought himself up to the point of breaking with the world and his
past, and now--it only remained to satisfy the cabman!

He tossed feverishly all night, seeking to soothe himself, but really
exciting himself the more by a hundred plausible explanations. He was
now strung up to such a pitch of uncertainty that he was astonished for
the third time when the 'letter' did duly 'follow'.

* * * * *

'Dearest,' it ran, 'as I explained in my telegram, my husband became
suddenly ill'--('if she _had_ only put that in the telegram,' he
groaned)--'and was ordered to Homburg. Of course it was impossible to
leave him in this crisis, both for practical and sentimental reasons.
You yourself, darling, would not like me to have aggravated his illness
by my flight just at this moment, and thus possibly have his death on my
conscience.' ('Darling, you are always right,' he said, kissing the
letter.) 'Let us possess our souls in patience a little longer. I need
not tell you how vexatious it will be to find myself nursing him in
Homburg--out of the season even--instead of the prospect to which I had
looked forward with my whole heart and soul. But what can one do? How
true is the French proverb, 'Nothing happens but the unexpected'! Write
to me immediately _Poste Restante_, that I may at least console myself
with your dear words.'

The unexpected did indeed happen. Despite draughts of Elizabeth-brunnen
and promenades on the Kurhaus terrace, the stalwart woman beater
succumbed to his malady. The curt telegram from Winifred gave no
indication of her emotions. He sent a reply-telegram of sympathy with
her trouble. Although he could not pretend to grieve at this sudden
providential solution of their life-problem, still he did sincerely
sympathize with the distress inevitable in connection with a death,
especially on foreign soil.

He was not able to see her till her husband's body had been brought
across the North Sea and committed to the green repose of the old
Hampstead churchyard. He found her pathetically altered--her face wan
and spiritualized, and all in subtle harmony with the exquisite black
gown. In the first interview, he did not dare speak of their love at
all. They discussed the immortality of the soul, and she quoted George
Herbert. But with the weeks the question of their future began to force
its way back to his lips.

'We could not decently marry before six months,' she said, when
definitely confronted with the problem.

'Six months!' he gasped.

'Well, surely you don't want to outrage everybody,' she said, pouting.

At first he was outraged himself. What! She who had been ready to
flutter the world with a fantastic dance was now measuring her
footsteps. But on reflection he saw that Mrs. Glamorys was right once
more. Since Providence had been good enough to rescue them, why should
they fly in its face? A little patience, and a blameless happiness lay
before them. Let him not blind himself to the immense relief he really
felt at being spared social obloquy. After all, a poet could be
unconventional in his _work_--he had no need of the practical outlet
demanded for the less gifted.

VI

They scarcely met at all during the next six months--it had, naturally,
in this grateful reaction against their recklessness, become a sacred
period, even more charged with tremulous emotion than the engagement
periods of those who have not so nearly scorched themselves. Even in her
presence he found a certain pleasure in combining distant adoration with
the confident expectation of proximity, and thus she was restored to
the sanctity which she had risked by her former easiness. And so all was
for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

When the six months had gone by, he came to claim her hand. She was
quite astonished. 'You promised to marry me at the end of six months,'
he reminded her.

'Surely it isn't six months already,' she said.

He referred her to the calendar, recalled the date of her husband's
death.

'You are strangely literal for a poet,' she said. 'Of course I _said_
six months, but six months doesn't mean twenty-six weeks by the clock.
All I meant was that a decent period must intervene. But even to myself
it seems only yesterday that poor Harold was walking beside me in the
Kurhaus Park.' She burst into tears, and in the face of them he could
not pursue the argument.

Gradually, after several interviews and letters, it was agreed that they
should wait another six months.

'She _is_ right,' he reflected again. 'We have waited so long, we may as
well wait a little longer and leave malice no handle.'

The second six months seemed to him much longer than the first. The
charm of respectful adoration had lost its novelty, and once again his
breast was racked by fitful fevers which could scarcely calm themselves
even by conversion into sonnets. The one point of repose was that
shining fixed star of marriage. Still smarting under Winifred's reproach
of his unpoetic literality, he did not intend to force her to marry him
exactly at the end of the twelve-month. But he was determined that she
should have no later than this exact date for at least 'naming the day'.
Not the most punctilious stickler for convention, he felt, could deny
that Mrs. Grundy's claim had been paid to the last minute.

The publication of his new volume--containing the Winifred lyrics--had
served to colour these months of intolerable delay. Even the reaction of
the critics against his poetry, that conventional revolt against every
second volume, that parrot cry of over-praise from the very throats that
had praised him, though it pained and perplexed him, was perhaps really
helpful. At any rate, the long waiting was over at last. He felt like
Jacob after his years of service for Rachel.

The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of
Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he
had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his
publisher's salon. How much older he was now than then--and yet how much
younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had
vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut
out a clear line for his future through the confusion of life.

At a florist's in the High Street of Hampstead he bought a costly
bouquet of white flowers, and walked airily to the house and rang the
bell jubilantly. He could scarcely believe his ears when the maid told
him her mistress was not at home. How dared the girl stare at him so
impassively? Did she not know by what appointment--on what errand--he
had come? Had he not written to her mistress a week ago that he would
present himself that afternoon?

'Not at home!' he gasped. 'But when will she be home?'

'I fancy she won't be long. She went out an hour ago, and she has an
appointment with her dressmaker at five.'

'Do you know in what direction she'd have gone?'

'Oh, she generally walks on the Heath before tea.'

The world suddenly grew rosy again. 'I will come back again,' he said.
Yes, a walk in this glorious air--heathward--would do him good.

As the door shut he remembered he might have left the flowers, but he
would not ring again, and besides, it was, perhaps, better he should
present them with his own hand, than let her find them on the hall
table. Still, it seemed rather awkward to walk about the streets with a
bouquet, and he was glad, accidentally to strike the old Hampstead
Church, and to seek a momentary seclusion in passing through its avenue
of quiet gravestones on his heathward way.

Mounting the few steps, he paused idly a moment on the verge of this
green 'God's-acre' to read a perpendicular slab on a wall, and his face
broadened into a smile as he followed the absurdly elaborate biography
of a rich, self-made merchant who had taught himself to read, 'Reader,
go thou and do likewise,' was the delicious bull at the end. As he
turned away, the smile still lingering about his lips, he saw a dainty
figure tripping down the stony graveyard path, and though he was somehow
startled to find her still in black, there was no mistaking Mrs.
Glamorys. She ran to meet him with a glad cry, which filled his eyes
with happy tears.

'How good of you to remember!' she said, as she took the bouquet from
his unresisting hand, and turned again on her footsteps. He followed her
wonderingly across the uneven road towards a narrow aisle of graves on
the left. In another instant she has stooped before a shining white
stone, and laid his bouquet reverently upon it. As he reached her side,
he saw that his flowers were almost lost in the vast mass of floral
offerings with which the grave of the woman beater was bestrewn.

'How good of you to remember the anniversary,' she murmured again.

'How could I forget it?' he stammered, astonished. 'Is not this the end
of the terrible twelve-month?'

The soft gratitude died out of her face. 'Oh, is _that_ what you were
thinking of?'

'What else?' he murmured, pale with conflicting emotions.

'What else! I think decency demanded that this day, at least, should be
sacred to his memory. Oh, what brutes men are!' And she burst into
tears.

His patient breast revolted at last. 'You said _he_ was the brute!' he
retorted, outraged.

'Is that your chivalry to the dead? Oh, my poor Harold, my poor Harold!'

For once her tears could not extinguish the flame of his anger. 'But you
told me he beat you,' he cried.

'And if he did, I dare say I deserved it. Oh, my darling, my darling!'
She laid her face on the stone and sobbed.

John Lefolle stood by in silent torture. As he helplessly watched her
white throat swell and fall with the sobs, he was suddenly struck by the
absence of the black velvet band--the truer mourning she had worn in the
lifetime of the so lamented. A faint scar, only perceptible to his
conscious eye, added to his painful bewilderment.

At last she rose and walked unsteadily forward. He followed her in mute
misery. In a moment or two they found themselves on the outskirts of the
deserted heath. How beautiful stretched the gorsy rolling country! The
sun was setting in great burning furrows of gold and green--a panorama
to take one's breath away. The beauty and peace of Nature passed into
the poet's soul.

'Forgive me, dearest,' he begged, taking her hand.

She drew it away sharply. 'I cannot forgive you. You have shown yourself
in your true colours.'

Her unreasonableness angered him again. 'What do you mean? I only came
in accordance with our long-standing arrangement. You have put me off
long enough.'

'It is fortunate I did put you off long enough to discover what you
are.'

He gasped. He thought of all the weary months of waiting, all the long
comedy of telegrams and express letters, the far-off flirtations of the
cosy corner, the baffled elopement to Paris. 'Then you won't marry me?'

'I cannot marry a man I neither love nor respect.'

'You don't love me!' Her spontaneous kiss in his sober Oxford study
seemed to burn on his angry lips.

'No, I never loved you.'

He took her by the arms and turned her round roughly. 'Look me in the
face and dare to say you have never loved me.'

His memory was buzzing with passionate phrases from her endless letters.
They stung like a swarm of bees. The sunset was like blood-red mist
before his eyes.

'I have never loved you,' she said obstinately.

'You--!' His grasp on her arms tightened. He shook her.

'You are bruising me,' she cried.

His grasp fell from her arms as though they were red-hot. He had become
a woman beater.

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