The New Warden

She was turning the pages of a paper, ostentatiously looking at the illustrations, but she was really waiting in suspense for his arrival and thinking of nothing else.

She looked up at him with a strange smile. "Back!" she said. "And you find me malingering!"

He came up to the bed. "You've been ill," he said, and he did not return her smile. "I'm very sorry, Lena."

"No, only tired," she said. "And I am already better, Jim," she went on, and now she showed great nervousness and her voice was jerky. "I have a letter for you. I want you to read it at once, dear, but not here; read it in the library. Don't stay now; go away, dear, and come and see me afterwards."

She gave him the letter with the handwriting downwards. She had thought this out beforehand. She feared the sight of his emotion. She could not bear it – just now. She was still feeling very shaky and very weak.

He took the letter and turned it over to see the handwriting. She thought he made a movement of surprise. His face she did not look at, she looked at the paper that was lying before her. She longed for him to go away, now that the letter was safely in his hands. He guessed, no doubt, what the letter was about! He must guess!

She little knew. He no more guessed its contents than he would have guessed that in order to secure his salvation some one would be allowed to rise from the dead! The letter he regarded as ominous – of some trouble, some dispute, something inevitable and miserable.

"I hope you have everything you want, Lena," he said as he walked to the door. "I hope Louise doesn't fuss you." Then he asked: "Have you ever fainted before?"

Lady Dashwood said she hadn't, but added that people over fifty generally fainted, and that she would not have gone to bed had not dear May insisted on it as well as Louise.

He went out. He found the corridor silent. He walked along with that letter in his pocket, feeling a great solitude within him. When he passed Gwendolen's door, something gripped him painfully. And then there was her door, too!

He returned to the library and sat down by the tea-table and the fire.

From his chair his eyes rested upon the great window at the end of the library. It was screened by curtains now. It was there, at that exact spot by the right-hand curtain, that Gwendolen had fancied she saw the ghost. A ghost, a thin filmy shape was probably her only conception of something Spiritual. That the story of the Barber's ghost, the story that he came as a prophet of ill tidings to the Warden of the College, seemed to fit in with recent events, the events of the last few days; this only made the whole episode more repulsive. He must train Gwendolen – if indeed she were capable of being trained! The mother would be perhaps even a greater obstacle to a sane and useful life than Gwendolen herself.

Very likely Gwendolen's letter was to announce that Lady Belinda insisted on coming at once, whether there was room for her or not; or possibly the letter contained some foolish enclosure from Lady Belinda, and Gwendolen was shy of communicating it, but had been ordered to do so.

Possibly the letter contained a cutting announcing the engagement! He had glanced through the Times yesterday and this morning very hastily. Gwendolen's mother might be capable of announcing the engagement before it had actually taken place!

He poured out a cup of tea and drank it, and then took the letter from his pocket.

He started at the opening of his door. Robinson brought in an American visitor, who came with an introduction. The introduction was lying on the desk, not yet opened. The Warden rose – escape was impossible. He put the letter back into his pocket.

"Bring fresh tea, Robinson," said the Warden.

But the stranger declined it. He had business in view. He had a string of solemn questions to ask upon world matters. He wanted the answers. He was writing a book, he wanted copy. He had come, metaphorically speaking, note-book and pencil in hand.

The Warden, with his mind upon private matters, looked gloomily at this visitor to Oxford. Even about "world" matters, with that letter in his pocket, he found it difficult to tolerate an interviewer. How was he to get through his work if he felt like this?

The American, too, became uneasy. He found the Warden unwilling to give him any dogmatic pronouncements on the subject of Literature, on the subject of Education, or the subject of Woman now and Woman in the immediate future. The Warden declined to say whether the Church of England would work for union or whether it was going to split up and dwindle into rival sects. He was also guarded in his remarks about the political situation in England. He would not prophesy the future of Labour, or the fate of Landowners. The Warden was not encouraging. With that letter in his pocket the Warden found it difficult to assume the patient attention that was due to note-book visitors from afar.

This was a bad beginning, surely! How was the future to be met?

The American was about to take his leave, considerably disappointed with the Heads of Oxford colleges, but he suspected that American neutrality might be at the bottom of the Warden's reticence.

"I am not one of those Americans," he said, rising, "who regard President Woodrow Wilson as the only statesman in the world at this present moment."

The Warden threw his cigarette into the fire. "Wilson has one qualification for statesmanship," he said, rising and speaking as if he was suddenly roused to interest by this highly contentious subject.

The American was surprised. "I presume, coming from you, Professor, that you speak of the President's academic training?" he said.

"I am not a Professor," said the Warden, at last sufficiently awakened from his preoccupation to make a correction that he should have made before. "The University has not conferred that honour upon me. Yes, I mean an academic training. When a man who is trained to think meets a new problem in politics he pauses to consider it; he takes time; and for this the crowd jeer at him! The so-called practical man rarely pauses; he doesn't see, unless he has genius, that he mustn't treat a new problem as if it were an old one. He decides at once, and for this the crowd admire him. 'He knows his own mind,' they say!"

The Warden spoke with a ring of sarcasm in his voice. It was a sarcasm secretly directed against himself. That letter in his pocket was the cause.

He had been confronted in the small world of his own life with a new problem – marriage, and he ought to have understood that it was new, new to himself, complicated by his position and needing thought; and he had not thought, he had acted. He had belied the use and dignity of his training. Had he any excuse? There was the obligation to marry, and there was "pity." Were these excuses? They were miserable excuses.

But he had no time to argue further with himself, the inexorable voice of the man standing opposite to him broke in.

"In your view, Warden, the practical man is too previous?" said the American, making notes (in his own mind).

"He is too confident," said the Warden. "It is difficult enough to make an untrained man accept a new fact. It is still more difficult to make him think out a new method!"

"I opine," said the American, "that in your view President Wilson has only one qualification for statesmanship?"

"I didn't say that," said the Warden. "He may have the other, I mean character. Wilson may have the moral courage to act in accordance with his mental insight, and if so, if he has both the mental and moral force necessary, he might well be, what you do not yourself hold, the only living statesman in the world. Time will tell."

Here the Warden smiled a curious smile and made a movement to indicate that the visit must come to an end. He must be alone – he needed to think – alone. How was he at this moment showing "character, moral courage?" Here he was, unable to bear the friction of an ordinary interview. Here he was, almost inclined to be discourteous. Here he was, determined to bear no longer with his visitor.

When the door closed upon the stranger, the Warden, sick with himself and sick with the world, turned to his desk. His letters must be looked through at once. Very well, let him begin with the letter in his pocket.

But he first sorted his other letters, throwing away advertisements and useless papers. Then he took the letter from his pocket. The very handwriting showed incapacity and slackness. At dinner he would have the writer of this letter on one side of him, and on the other – he dared not think! The Warden ground his teeth and tore open the letter, and then a knock came at his door.

"Come in," he said almost fiercely.

Robinson came in. "I was to remind you, sir, that Mr. Bingham would be here to dinner."

So much the better. "Very well, Robinson," he said.

Robinson withdrew.

The letter was a long one. It was addressed at the top "Potten End."

"Potten End," said the Warden, half aloud. This was strange! Then she was not in the house!

The letter began —

"Dear Dr. Middleton,

"When you get this letter I shall have left your house and I shan't return. I hope you will forgive me. I don't know how to tell you, but I have broken off our engagement – "

The Warden stared at the words. There were more to come, but these – these that he had read! Were they true?

"My God!" he exclaimed, below his breath, "I don't deserve it!" and he made some swift strides in the room; "I don't deserve it!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

ALMA MATER

The Warden went to the door and turned the key. Why, he did not know. He simply did it instinctively. Then he finished reading the letter; and having read it through, read it again a second time. He was a free man, and he had obtained his freedom through a circumstance that was pitifully silly, a circumstance almost incredibly sordid and futile.

Her humiliation was his humiliation, for had he not chosen her to be his companion for life? Had he not at this time, when the full responsibility of manhood was placed on every man, had he not chosen as the mother of his children, a moral weakling?

He locked the letter up in his desk and paced the length of the room once or twice. Then he threw himself into a chair and, clasping his head in his hands, remained there motionless. Could he be the same man who had a few days ago, of his own free will, without any compulsion, without any kind of necessity, offered himself for life to a girl of whom he knew absolutely nothing, except that she had had a miserable upbringing and an heredity that he could not respect? Was it her slender beauty, her girlishness, that had made him so passionately pitiful?

From an ordinary man this action would have been folly, but from him it was an offence! A very great offence, now, in these times. On the desk lay some pages of notes – notes of a course of public lectures he was about to give, lectures on the responsibility of citizenship, in which he was going to make a strong appeal to his audience for a more conscious philosophy of life. He was going to urge the necessity for greater reverence for education. He was going to speak not only of the burden of Empire, but of the new burden, the burden of Democracy, a Democracy that is young, independent, and feeling its way. He was going to speak of the true meaning of a free Democracy, no chaotic meaningless freedom, but the sane and ordered freedom of educated men, Democracy open-eyed and training itself, like a strong man, to run a race for some far-off, some desired goal to which "all creation moves."

He was in these lectures going to pose not only as a practical man but as a preacher, one of those who "point the way"; and meanwhile he had bound himself to a girl who not only would be unable to grasp the meaning of any strenuous moral effort, but who would have to be herself guarded from every petty temptation that came in her way. He was (so he said to himself, as he groaned in his spirit) one of those many preachers who, in all ages, have talked of moral progress, and who have missed the road that they themselves have pointed out!

He was fiercely angry with himself because he had called the emotion that he had felt for Gwendolen in her mischance a "passionate pity." It was a very different emotion from that which wrung him when his old pupils, one by one, gave up their youth and hope in the service of their country. That indeed was a passionate pity, a pity full of remorseful gratitude, full of great pride in their high purpose and their noble self-sacrifice. On his mantelpiece, within arm's length of him, lay an open book. It was a book of poems, and there were verses that the Warden had read more than once.

"City of hope and golden dreaming."

A farewell to Oxford. It was the farewell of youth in its heyday to

"All the things we hoped to do."

And then followed the lines that pierced him now with poignant sadness as he thought of them —

"Dreams that will never be clothed in being,

Mother, your sons have left with you."

The Warden groaned within himself. He was part of that Alma Mater; that city left behind in charge of that sacred gift!

He loathed himself, and this deep self-humiliation of a scrupulous gentleman was what his sister had shrunk from witnessing. It was this deep humiliation that May Dashwood fled from when she hid herself in her room that afternoon.

The Warden was not a man who spent much time in introspection. He had no subtlety of self-analysis, but what insight he had was spent in condemning himself, not in justifying himself. But now he added this to his self-accusations, that if May Dashwood had not suddenly stepped across his path and revealed to him true womanhood, gilded – yes, he used that term sardonically – gilded by beauty, he might not have seen the whole depth of his offence until now, when the crude truth about Gwendolen was forced upon him by her letter.

The Warden sat on, crushed by the weight of his humiliation. And he had been forgiven, he had been rescued from his own folly. His mistake had been wiped out, his offence pardoned.

And what about Gwendolen herself? What about this poor solitary foolish girl? What was to be her future? Swiftly she had come into his life and swiftly gone! What, indeed, was to become of her and her life?

And so the Warden sat on till the dressing-bell rang, and then he got up from his chair blindly.

He had been forgiven and rescued too easily. He did not deserve it. How was it that he had dared to quote to May Dashwood those solemn, awful words —

"And the glory of the Lord is all in all!"

It must have seemed to her a piece of arrogant self-righteousness.

And she had said: "What is the glory of the Lord?" and had answered the question herself. Her answer had condemned him; the glory of the Lord was not merely self-restraint, stoical resignation, it was something more, it was "Love" that "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."

"For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"

The Warden dressed, moving about automatically, not thinking of what he was doing. When he left his bedroom he passed the head of the staircase. There were letters lying on the table, just as letters had lain waiting for him on that evening, on that Monday evening, when he found Gwendolen reading the letter from her mother and crying over it. Within those few short days he had risked the happiness and the usefulness of his whole life, and – God had forgiven him.

He passed the table and went on. Lena must have been waiting for him, expecting him! Perhaps she had been worrying. The thought made him walk rapidly along the corridor.

He knocked at her door. Louise opened it.

"Entrez, Monsieur," she said, in the tone and manner of one who mounts guard and whose permission must be obtained.

She stood aside to let him pass, and then went out and pulled the door to after her.

The Warden walked up to the bed.

Lady Dashwood's face was averted from him. "Jim," she said wistfully, and she put her hand over her eyes and waited for the sound of his voice.

She was there, waiting for him to show her what sort of sympathy he needed. He did not speak. He came round to the side of the bed where she was lying, by the windows. There he stood for a moment looking down upon her. She did not look up. She looked, indeed, like a culprit, like one humbled, who longed for pardon but did not like to ask for it. And it was this profound humble sympathy that smote his heart through and through. What if anything had happened to this dear sister of his? What if her unhappiness had been too great a strain upon her?

He knelt down by the bed and laid his face on her shoulder, just as he used to do when he was a child. Neither of them spoke. She moved her hand and clasped his arm that he placed over her, and they remained like this for some minutes, while a great peace enclosed them. In those few minutes it seemed as if years dropped away from them and they were young again. She the motherly young woman, and he the motherless boy to whom she stood as mother. All the interval was forgotten and there they were still, mother and son.

When at last he raised himself he found that her eyes were dim with tears. As to himself, he felt strangely quieted and composed. He pulled a chair to the bedside and sat down, not facing her, but sideways, and he rested his elbow on the edge of her pillow his other hand resting on hers.

"Did you get through all you wanted to, in Town?" she asked, smiling through her tears.

"Lena!" he said in a low voice, "you want to spare me. You always do."

His voice overwhelmed her. His humility pierced her like a sword.

"It was all my fault, dear," she began; "entirely my fault."

"No," he said, in a low emphatic voice.

"It was." She reiterated this with almost a sullen persistence.

"How could it possibly be your fault?" he said, with deep self-reproach.

"It was," she said, "though I cannot make you understand it. Jim, you must forget it all, for my sake. You must forget it at once, you have things to do."

"I have things to do," he said. "I seemed in danger of forgetting those things," he said huskily. "As to forgetting, that is a difficult matter."

"You must put it aside," she said, and now she raised herself on her pillows and stared anxiously into his face. "You made a mistake such as the best man would make," she argued passionately. "How can a strong man suspect weakness in others? You know how it is, we suspect in others virtues and vices that we have ourselves. You know what I mean, dear. A drunkard always suspects other men of wanting to drink!" and she laughed a little, and her voice trembled with an excitement she found it difficult to suppress. "Thieves always suspect others of thieving. An amorous man sees sex motives in everything. Do you suppose an honourable man doesn't also suspect others of honourable intentions?"

He made no reply.

"Besides, you have always been eager to think the best of women. You've credited them, even with mental gifts that they haven't got! You have been over-loyal to them all your life! And now" – here Lady Dashwood put out her hand and laid it on his arm as if to compel him to agree – "and now you are suffering for it, or rather you have suffered. You thought you were doing your duty, that you ought to marry. You were right; you ought to marry, and I, just at that moment, thrust somebody forward who looked innocent and helpless. And how could you tell? Of course you couldn't tell," and now her voice dropped a little and she seemed suddenly to have become tired out, and she sank back on her pillows.

The Warden leant over her. Her special pleading for him was so familiar to him. She had corrected his faults, admonished him when necessary, but had always upheld his self-respect, even in small matters. She was fighting now for the preservation of his sense of honour.

"Anyhow, darling," she said, "you must forget!"

"You are exhausted," he said, "in trying to make black white. I ought not to have come in and let you talk. Lena, what has happened this week has knocked you up. I know it, and even now you are worrying because of me. I will forget it, dear, if you will pick up again and get strong."

"I am better already," she said, and the very faintest smile was on her face. "I am rather tired, but I shall be all right to-morrow. All I want is a good night's sleep. I want to sleep for hours, and I shall sleep for hours now that I have seen you."

A knock came on the door.

"They are looking for you, dear," said Lady Dashwood.

The Warden slowly rose from his seat. "I must go now, Lena," he said, "but I shall come in again the last thing. I shall come in without knocking if I may, because I hope you will be asleep, and I don't want to wake you."

"Very well," she said smiling. "You'll find me asleep. I feel so calm, so happy."

He bent down and kissed her and then went to the door. She turned her head and looked after him. Louise was at the door.

"Monsieur Bingham is arrived," she said; "I regret to have disturbed Monsieur."

The Warden walked slowly down the corridor. There was something that he dreaded, something that was going to happen – the first meeting of the eyes – the first moment when May Dashwood would look at him, knowing all that had happened!

He passed the table again on which lay his letters. He would look through all that pile of correspondence after Bingham had gone.

Robinson was hovering at the stairhead. "Mr. Bingham is in the drawing-room, sir."

"Alone?" asked the Warden.

"Mrs. Dashwood is there, sir," said Robinson.

"How have you arranged the table?" asked the Warden.

"I've put Mrs. Dashwood close on your right, sir," said Robinson, secretly amazed at the question; "Mr. Bingham on your left, sir."

"Yes," said the Warden. "Yes, of course!" passing his servant with an abstracted air.

"Shall I announce dinner, sir?" asked Robinson, hurrying behind and measuring his strength for what he was about to perform in the exercise of his duty.

"Yes," said the Warden, still moving on, and now near the drawing-room door.

Robinson made a wondrous skip, a miracle it was of service in honour of the Warden; he flew past his master like an aged but agile Mercury and pounced upon the drawing-room door handle. Then he threw the door open. He waited till the Warden had advanced to a sufficient distance in the room towards the guests who were waiting by the fireside, and then he uttered, in his penetrating but quavering voice, the familiar and important word —

"Dinner!"

CHAPTER XXIX

DINNER

"I am sorry I'm late," said the Warden quietly, and he looked at both his guests. "I have been with Lady Dashwood. I must apologise, Bingham, for her absence. I expect Mrs. Dashwood has already told you that she is not well."

The bow with which the Warden offered his arm to May was one which included more than the mere formal invitation to go down to dinner, it meant a greeting after absence and an acknowledgment that she was acting as his hostess. It was one of those ceremonial bows which men are rarely able to make without looking pompous. He had the reputation, in Oxford, of being one of the very few men who, in his tutorial days, could present men for degrees with academic grace.

"I'm sorry, Bingham," he said; "I have only just returned, or I might have secured a fourth to dinner – yes, even in war time."

May went downstairs, wondering. Wondering how it was that the worst was so soon over, and that, after all, instead of feeling a painful pity for the man whose arm held hers in a light grasp, she felt strangely timorous of him.

She was profoundly thankful for the presence of Bingham, who was following behind, cheerful and chatty, having put aside, apparently, all recollection of the conversation of the evening before. Yes, whatever his secret thoughts might have been, Bingham appeared to have forgotten that there were any moonlight nights in the streets of Oxford. For this, May blessed him.

They entered the long dining-room and, sitting at the Warden's end of the table, formed a bright living space of light and movement. Outside that bright space the room gradually sombred to the dark panelled walls. The Warden, in his high-backed chair, looked the very impersonation of Oxford. This was what struck Bingham as he glanced at his host, and the thought suggested that hater of Oxford, the Warden's relative, Bernard Boreham.