Read Ebook: Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History by Horne Charles F Charles Francis Editor

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 806 lines and 108826 words, and 17 pages

The Senior Tutor looked grave; the question had come into his head as he stood speaking to Mary, what should he do with this girl of Cousin Dick's when he occupied the Master's place? Of course Mary would stay, and Mrs. Rae--he could not separate the old woman from her niece during her few declining years; she would certainly remain an inmate of the lodge; but this girl? he could not make the college lodge an asylum for all the female members of the Rae family.

It was an idiotic question to arise; he was ashamed of it the next moment.

'I think you ought to go to Thorpe Regis,' he said, 'and be with your poor young cousin at this trying time. I will look after the Master while you are away, if that will make the going easier.'

'Ye--es,' said Mary slowly, 'it will make it easier. You really think I ought to go?'

There was a hesitation in her tone he could not but note; he put it down at once to her reluctance to leave the old Master.

'Most certainly you ought to go,' he said promptly. 'I will come over to the lodge every day. I will fill your place as far as I can. You are not afraid to leave the Master with me?'

'She may be attractive,' said the Senior Tutor with a laugh, 'and turn all our heads. I think, in spite of her attractions, her place is here with you and under her uncle's roof. We must protect ourselves against the wiles of this siren. We must not wear our hearts on our sleeves for Cousin Dick's little daughter to peck at.'

DICK'S LITTLE DAUGHTER.

The Senior Tutor need have been under no apprehension for the men of St. Benedict's. They had no occasion to cover up their sleeves with their academical gowns. Cousin Dick's little daughter showed no inclination to peck at their too susceptible hearts, whether they wore them skewered on to their sleeves or out of sight in their accustomed places.

Lucy Rae was too full of her recent loss, the great sorrow that had fallen upon her and swept away all her household gods, to have a thought to spare for the undergraduates of St. Benedict's.

It had almost swept away all her moorings, too, but not quite; she still clung tenaciously to one idea--it was all she had left of the old life to cling to: she still desired to be a governess.

It was not a very ambitious idea. She wanted to be independent, and earn her own living in the only way that was open to her. She accepted the shelter of the Master's lodge thankfully, but she had no idea of settling down in the dependent position of a poor relation. When she had recovered from this shock, and the horizon cleared, she would find something to do, she told herself, and go away.

She was a soft, shy little thing to be so independent. She only looked like a girl to be kissed and petted and comforted; she didn't look at all fit to stand in the front of the battle.

She talked over her prospects--her little, humble prospects--with her cousin Mary a few days after her arrival at the lodge. Mary was sitting at the Master's writing-table in the library of the lodge--she was writing some letters on college business--and Lucy was sewing in the window.

It was a big gloomy room, and it was not at all a cheerful place for girls to sit in on a chilly spring afternoon. There was a fire burning in the old-fashioned grate behind the brass fire-guard--there were wire guards to all the fires at the lodge since that last seizure of the Master's--but it had burnt low; Mary, who was sitting near it, had been too occupied to notice it, and Lucy's mind was full of her prospects.

There had been no sound in the room for some time but the scratching of Mary's pen as it travelled over the paper, and Lucy sewed on in silence. She didn't like sewing, and she put down her work two or three times and yawned or looked out of the window. The window looked out into the Fellows' garden. The sun was shining on the lawn beneath, which was already green with the new green of the year, and the crocuses were aflame in the borders, and the primroses were in bloom.

An old Fellow was hobbling slowly and painfully round the garden--a bent, drooping figure in a particularly shabby coat and a tall silk hat of a bygone date. He was lame, Lucy remarked, and dragged one leg behind him. He had a long, lean, sallow face with deep eye-sockets, and his hair was long and gray--it didn't look as if it had been cut for years. Lucy wondered vaguely at seeing this shabby old cripple in the grounds of the lodge; if she had seen him anywhere else she would have taken him for a tramp. He had been a Senior Wrangler in his day, and had taken a double-first; perhaps he was paying the penalty.

'I am very dull company, child,' Mary said, as she blotted her last letter and pushed the writing materials aside. 'I have left you to your thoughts for a whole hour, and we have sat the fire out. What have you been thinking about, Lucy, all this time?'

'Oh, the old thing,' said Lucy, looking up from her work. 'I have been thinking what I can do.'

'Well, and what conclusion have you come to?'

'There is but one conclusion--that--that I can do nothing!'

The work dropped from the girl's fingers, and her eyes overflowed. She had wanted an excuse for weeping for the last hour, and now she had got it.

'Oh yes, you can,' Mary said cheerfully; 'the case is not quite so bad as that. You can sew, for one thing. See how nicely you are sewing that frill!'

'I hate sewing! And I shall never wear that frill when I have hemmed it! I can only do useless trumpery things!'

Lucy let the poor little bit of white frilling she had been hemming fall to the ground, and she got up and began to walk up and down the room.

Mary watched her in silence. It was not the first time her young cousin had shown impatience, but it was the first time she had shown temper--just a little bit of temper.

Mary had praised her in the wrong place: she was hurt and angry at this learned, superior cousin implying, with her misplaced praise, that she was only fit to do work--mere woman's work!

It was an unusual sound, that rapid pacing to and fro of impatient feet, in that scholarly room. The Master tottered feebly across the floor; the Master's wife moved with slow dignity; Mary walked quietly, with soft, firm footsteps that awoke no echoes. The floor creaked audibly beneath Lucy's rapid, impatient steps; the old boards that had echoed to the slow tread of scholars for so many, many years, shook and trembled--actually trembled--beneath the light impatient footsteps of Cousin Dick's little daughter.

The colour that that useless sewing had taken out of Lucy's cheek had come back, and her gray eyes were eager and shining beneath her tears.

Mary watched her pacing the room with a smile half of pity, half amused, as she sat at the Master's table. Perhaps she understood the mood. She may have been impatient herself years ago; she had nothing to be impatient for now. Everything was happening as it should do; and when a change came--well, her position would not be materially altered.

'I am sure you can do a great many useful things, dear,' she said presently, when Lucy's little bit of temper had had time to cool. 'You could not have kept your father's house so long, and done the work of the parish, without being able to do more useful things than most girls.'

'I don't mean that kind of usefulness; anyone can do housekeeping and potter about a parish. I hated parish work! I never took the least interest in it; no one could have done it worse than I did. I hated--oh, no one knows how I hated--those Bands of Hope, and Sunday-schools, and mothers' meetings, and visiting dreadful old men and women who would insist upon telling me all about their unpleasant complaints!'

Mary looked grave. She was accustomed to hear a great deal about old people's complaints, though she did not do any district visiting.

'Really,' she said gravely, 'most girls like these things! They are over now, and done with, and you will begin afresh. Tell me what you would like to do.'

'Like!' Lucy held her breath as she spoke, and her cheeks grew crimson. 'Oh, I should like to be a scholar, Cousin Mary!'

Mary looked at the girl with a kind of pity in her eyes. She had seen a good many scholars in her time, men and women; some of them were as eager once as this girl--eager and impatient with feverish haste to climb the hill of learning; they were hollow-eyed now, and narrow-chested, and their cheeks were sunken and sallow, and some limped like the old scholar in the Fellows' garden--that is, those who had lasted to the end; but some had turned back in time and regained their youth: most likely this girl would turn back.

'You would like to go to a woman's college?'

'I should love to go! I shouldn't mind whether it were Newnham or Girton, whichever uncle thought best. If I could only have three years at a woman's college, I should be provided for for life. I should want nothing further. I should be able to make my own way. Oh, Mary, do you think he will let me go?'

She was very much in earnest. She had stopped running up and down the room in that ridiculous manner. She was standing beside the table with both her hands pressed down upon it and her little lithe figure bending eagerly forward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks glowing, and her lips parted. She looked exactly as if she were making a speech.

The door opened as she was standing there, and the Senior Tutor came in. He shook hands with Mary, and he nodded across the table to Lucy. He thought he had interrupted a scene.

'I saw the Master as I came up,' he said, speaking to Mary; 'he had just finished his nap. He asked me to tell you that he was quite ready to take a turn in the garden, if you would put on your hat. I think you should go at once to catch the sunshine. You'll get it on the broad walk if you go now.'

Mary rose at once.

'It is lucky I have finished my work,' she said, glancing down at the little pile of letters, sealed and stamped ready for the post, that lay on the table. 'Poor little Lucy here was telling me about her plans. If you can spare time, Mr. Colville, sit down and talk them over with her, and advise her what she ought to do, while I am in the garden.'

The Senior Tutor could spare time; and after he had opened the door for Mary, he came back to the window that overlooked the garden and sat down.

He did not belong to the old school of Cambridge Dons. He belonged to that newer school that came in a quarter of a century ago with athletics. He was not lean and hollow-eyed, and wrinkled and yellow, like a musty old parchment, and he hadn't a stoop in his shoulders, and he didn't drag one of his legs behind him. He had rowed 'five' in his college boat, and his shoulders were as square now as ever. His shoulders were square, and his forehead was square, and his iron-gray hair was closely cut--it was only iron-gray still--and he had tremendous bushy eyebrows that, Lucy thought, made him look like an ogre, and that frightened the undergraduates dreadfully, and close-cut iron-gray whiskers, and a big red throat like a bull. His throat had not always been red; he had been mild-looking enough in his youth; but he was now a portly, pompous Don of middle age, with a florid countenance and fierce aspect.

'Well,' he said in his easy, patronizing way, as if he were speaking to a freshman who had just come up, 'and what do you propose to do, Miss Lucy?'

The colour went out of the girl's cheeks, and the long eyelashes drooped over her eager eyes, and her pretty little slender figure grew limp, and she didn't look the least like making a speech now.

'I am sure I don't know,' she said meekly, and she went back and sat on her old seat in the window on the opposite side to the Senior Tutor. It was a big bay-window, and there was a table between them littered with pamphlets and manuscripts in Semitic languages. The girl tossed them over as she sat there with a gesture of impatience. They were sealed books to her.

'What were you discussing with your cousin Ma--ry when I came in?'

He lingered over the name, and prolonged the last syllable. He seemed loath to let it go.

'I was telling her that I should like to go to a woman's college--to Newnham or Girton.'

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet