"That's all right!" Connie's tone was extremely cheerful. "Which means, I hope, that you'll give up that absurd copying in the Bodleian. You get about twopence halfpenny for it, and it'll cost you your first-cla.s.s.

How are you going to get a First I should like to know, with your head full of bills, and no sleep at nights?"

Nora flushed fiercely.

"I want to earn my living--I mean to earn my living! And how do you know--after all"--she held Connie at arm's length--"that Mr. Scroll's going to approve of what you've done? And father won't accept, unless he does."

Connie laughed.

"Mr. Sorell will do--exactly what pleases me. Mr. Sorell"--she began to search for a cigarette--"Mr. Sorell is an angel."

A silence. Connie looked up, rather surprised.

"Don't you agree?"

"Yes," said Nora in an odd voice.

Connie observed her. A flickering light began to play in the brown eyes.

"H'm. Have you been doing some Greek already?--stealing a march on me?"

"I had a lesson last week."

"Had you? The first I've heard of it!" Connie fluttered up and down the room in her white dressing-gown, occasionally breaking into a dance-step, as though to work off a superfluity of spirits.

Finally she stopped in front of Nora, looking her up and down.

"I dare you to hide anything again from me, Nora!"

Nora sat up.

"There is nothing to hide," she said stiffly.

Connie laughed aloud; and Nora suddenly sprang from her chair, and ran out of the room.

Connie was left panting a little. Life in Medburn House seemed certainly to be running faster than of old!

"I never gave him leave to fall in love with Nora!" she thought, with an unmistakable pang of common, ordinary jealousy. She had been so long accustomed to take her property in Sorell for granted!--and the summer months had brought her into such intimate contact with him. "And he never made love to me for one moment!--nor I to him. I don't believe he's made love to Nora--I'm sure he hasn't--yet. But why didn't he tell me of that Greek lesson?"

She stood before the gla.s.s, pulling down her hair, so that it fell all about her.

"I seem to be rather cut out for fairy-G.o.dmothering!" she said pensively to the image in the gla.s.s. "But there's a good deal to do for the post!--one must admit there's a good deal to do--Nora's got to be fixed up--and all the money business. And then--then!"

She clasped her hands behind her head. Her eyelids fell, and through her slight figure there ran a throb of yearning--of tender yet despairing pa.s.sion.

"If I could only mend things there, I might be some use. I don't want him to marry me--but just--just--"

Then her hands fell. She shook her head angrily. "You humbug!--you humbug! For whom are you posing now?"

CHAPTER XVII

Falloden had just finished a solitary luncheon in the little dining-room of the Boar's Hill cottage. There was a garden door in the room, and lighting a cigarette, he pa.s.sed out through it to the terrace outside. A landscape lay before him, which has often been compared to that of the Val d'Arno seen from Fiesole, and has indeed some common points with that incomparable mingling of man's best with the best of mountain and river. It was the last week of October, and the autumn was still warm and windless, as though there were no shrieking November to come.

Oxford, the beautiful city, with its domes and spires, lay in the hollow beneath the spectator, wreathed in thin mists of sunlit amethyst. Behind that ridge in the middle distance ran the river and the Nuneham woods; beyond rose the long blue line of the Chilterns. In front of the cottage the ground sank through copse and field to the river level, the hedge lines all held by sentinel trees, to which the advancing autumn had given that significance the indiscriminate summer green denies. The gravely rounded elms with their golden caps, the scarlet of the beeches, the pale lemon-yellow of the nearly naked limes, the splendid blacks of yew and fir--they were all there, mingled in the autumn cup of misty sunshine like melting jewels. And among them, the enchanted city shone, fair and insubstantial, from the depth below; as it were, the spiritual word and voice of all the scene.

Falloden paced up and down the terrace, smoking and thinking. That was Otto's open window. But Radowitz had not yet appeared that morning, and the ex-scout, who acted butler and valet to the two men, had brought word that he would come down in the afternoon, but was not to be disturbed till then.

"What lunacy made me do it?" thought Falloden, standing still at the end of the terrace which fronted the view.

He and Radowitz had been nearly three weeks together. Had he been of the slightest service or consolation to Radowitz during that time? He doubted it. That incalculable impulse which had made him propose himself as Otto's companion for the winter still persisted indeed. He was haunted still by a sense of being "under command"--directed--by a force which could not be repelled. Ill at ease, unhappy, as he was, and conscious of being quite ineffective, whether as nurse or companion, unless Radowitz proposed to "throw up," he knew that he himself should hold on; though why, he could scarcely have explained.

But the divergences between them were great; the possibilities of friction many. Falloden was astonished to find that he disliked Otto's little fopperies and eccentricities quite as much as he had ever done in college days; his finicky dress, his foreign ways in eating, his tendency to boast about his music, his country, and his forebears, on his good days, balanced by a brooding irritability on his bad days. And he was conscious that his own ways and customs were no less teasing to Radowitz; his Tory habits of thought, his British contempt for vague sentimentalisms and heroics, for all that _panache_ means to the Frenchman, or "glory" to the Slav.

"Then why, in the name of common sense, are we living together?"

He could really give no answer but the answer of "necessity"--of a spiritual need--issuing from a strange tangle of circ.u.mstance. The helpless form, the upturned face of his dying father, seemed to make the centre of it, and those faint last words, so sharply, and, as it were, dynamically connected with the hateful memory of Otto's fall and cry in the Marmion Quad, and the hateful ever-present fact of his maimed life.

Constance too--his scene with her on the river bank--her letter, breaking with him--and then the soft, mysterious change in her--and that pa.s.sionate, involuntary promise in her eyes and voice, as they stood together in her aunts' garden--all these various elements, bitter and sweet, were mingled in the influence which was shaping his own life. He wanted to forgive himself; and he wanted Constance to forgive him, whether she married him or no. A kind of sublimated egotism, he said to himself, after all!

But Otto? What had really made him consent to take up daily life with the man to whom he owed his disaster? Falloden seemed occasionally to be on the track of an explanation, which would then vanish and evade him.

He was conscious, however, that here also, Constance Bledlow was somehow concerned; and, perhaps, the Pole's mystical religion. He asked himself, indeed, as Constance had already done, whether some presentiment of doom, together with the Christian doctrines of forgiveness and vicarious suffering, were not at the root of it? There had been certain symptoms apparent during Otto's last weeks at Penfold known only to the old vicar, to himself and Sorell. The doctors were not convinced yet of the presence of phthisis; but from various signs, Falloden was inclined to think that the boy believed himself sentenced to the same death which had carried off his mother. Was there then a kind of calculated charity in his act also--but aiming in his case at an eternal reward?

"He wants to please G.o.d--and comfort Constance--by forgiving me. I want to please her--and relieve myself, by doing something to make up to him.

He has the best of it! But we are neither of us disinterested."

The manservant came out with a cup of coffee.

"How is he!" said Falloden, as he took it, glancing up at a still curtained window.

The man hesitated.

"Well, I don't know, sir, I'm sure. He saw the doctor this morning, and told me afterwards not to disturb him till three o'clock. But he rang just now, and said I was to tell you that two ladies were coming to tea."

"Did he mention their names?"

"Not as I'm aware of, sir."

Falloden pondered a moment.

"Tell Mr. Radowitz, when he rings again, that I have gone down to the college ground for some football, and I shan't be back till after six.

You're sure he doesn't want to see me?"

"No, sir, I think not. He told me to leave the blind down, and not to come in again till he rang."

Falloden put on flannels, and ran down the field paths towards Oxford and the Marmion ground, which lay on the hither side of the river. Here he took hard exercise for a couple of hours, walking on afterwards to his club in the High Street, where he kept a change of clothes. He found some old Marmion friends there, including Robertson and Meyrick, who asked him eagerly after Radowitz.

"Better come and see," said Falloden. "Give you a bread and cheese luncheon any day."