THE VICARAGE GATE.
The old Master of St. Benedict's had not found the Vicarage gate when Lucy got back to the lodge. He had been searching for it all through the long June day, and he had not found it yet. He was lying back propped up with pillows when Lucy went into his room, and the sunset light was falling on his face. All the hard lines had been smoothed out of it; the furrows that years of work and thought had stamped upon it were all smoothed out, and it was like the face of a little child.
His eyes were open, and Lucy thought he was watching the sunset. It had already slipped off the grass in the court below, and it had climbed the chapel wall and reached the gray battlements at the top, where the bits of blue sky could be seen between. She went to the window and drew up the blind that he could follow it still higher, and he watched it with a strange wistfulness as it slid off the chapel roof, and lingered for a few moments on the spire.
Everything had slipped out of his life like the sunset light, and now that, too, was fast slipping away. He watched it until it had faded quite away, and then he closed his eyes with a sigh. Lucy watched beside him through the early part of the night; she was to call Nurse Brannan at daylight. He lay very quiet, wanting no watching, until past midnight, and Lucy thought he was sleeping. She was conscious of no overwhelming sorrow. Perhaps she could not feel things deeply like some people. He had lived his life—his useful, honourable life—and now he would pass away full of days and honour.
She wondered vaguely as she sat beside the bed in the silent room—so silent that she could hear the ticking of the Master's watch on the dressing-table—what would become of her. Things might have been different—so different; but she did not dare to think of that now. It was unreasonable of Pamela Gwatkin and Maria to blame her. No one in their senses would blame her.
Lucy could not help repeating to herself, as she sat there thinking over the events of the miserable day, Pamela's question, 'Not if you had loved him?' 'No,' she told herself impatiently, 'she would not be justified in making such a sacrifice, however much she loved him. Nothing could justify it. Girls were not expected to make such sacrifices for their lovers. No girl in her senses would think of it.'
Lucy's meditation was disturbed by the Master's rambling monologue. He had been dozing through all the early part of the night, and about midnight he awoke and began talking to himself in low, disconnected sentences, his mind wandering off in strange fancies and old recollections, which escaped from his lips in broken sentences. He had forgotten the Vicarage gate now, where Rachel used to wait for him in those far-off days when he came back term after term from college. He had gone back in memory to an earlier time. He was a boy again in his father's fields; the old faces of his infancy and childhood were about him. He was a boy again in the old humble home, among the old humble folk.
He babbled in his rambling, disconnected way about things and people that Lucy had never heard of, only now and then she caught a familiar name that his memory had gone far back to seek. She didn't shrink now from the mention of her humble progenitors: the dear old rustic with a hayband round his legs, the dairywoman who kept the stall in the butter-market. At this solemn time these distinctions seemed but a small matter. The years had rolled back, and the rustic in his furrow and the Master of St. Benedict's were again boys together in their father's field. There were no distinctions now to separate them; there would be no distinctions ever again. They had all slipped away with the labour and the learning of the intervening years; with the well-earned honours—the scarlet gown and the doctor's hood; they were all among the things that had been. There was nothing left but love and tender trust—the heart of a little child.
The hours dragged wearily on; it seemed to Lucy as if the sweet June night would never end. There was not a light in a single window in the college court, and there were no stars in the sky, only the clouds hurrying on their noiseless way. The silence of the darkened room seemed to the frightened watcher to grow more oppressive as the night wore on. She could hear the rapid tick, tick of the Master's watch on the dressing-table; it could not beat the moments out fast enough. Oh, it was dreadful to hear it hurrying on, and to know that it was ticking off at every beat the few remaining moments of a human life!