His fancy suggested the most gloomy yet plausible solutions of the mystery of her disappearance. In spite of these reflections, Maitland’s confidence in the sagacity of his old tutor was unshaken. Bielby had not been responsible for the details of the methods by which his pupil was trying to expand his character. Lastly, he reflected that if he had not taken Bielby’s advice, and left Oxford, he never would have known Mrs. St. John Deloraine, the lady of his diffident desires.
So the time passed, the minutes flitting by, like the telegraph posts, in the dark, and Maitland reached the familiar Oxford Station. He jumped into a hansom, and said, “Gatien’s.” Past Worcester, up Carfax, down the High Street, they struggled through the snow; and at last Maitland got out and kicked at the College gate. The porter (it was nearly midnight) opened it with rather a scared face:
“Horful row on in quad, sir,” he said. “The young gentlemen ‘as a bonfire on, and they’re a larking with the snow. Orful A they’re a making, sir.”
The agricultural operation thus indicated by the porter was being forwarded with great vigor. A number of young men, in every variety of garb (from ulsters to boating-coats), were energetically piling up a huge Alp of snow against the door of the Master’s lodge. Meanwhile, another band had carried into the quad all the light tables and cane chairs from a lecture-room. Having arranged these in a graceful pyramidal form, they introduced some of the fire-lighters, called “devils” by the College servants, and set a match to the whole.
Maitland stood for a moment in doubt, looking, in the lurid glare, very like a magician who has raised an army of fiends, and cannot find work for them. He felt no disposition to interfere, though the venerable mass of St Ga-tien’s seemed in momentary peril, and the noise was enough to waken the dead, let alone the Bursar of Oriel. But Maitland was a non-resident Fellow, known only to the undergraduates, where he was known at all, as a “Radical,” with any number of decorative epithets, according to the taste and fancy of the speaker. He did not think he could identify any of the rioters, and he was not certain that they would not carry him to his room, and there screw him up, according to precedent. Maitland had too much sense of personal dignity to face the idea of owing his escape from his chambers to the resources of civilization at the command of the college blacksmith. He, therefore, after a moment of irresolution, stole off under a low-browed old door-way communicating with a queer black many-sided little quadrangle; for it is by no means necessary that a quadrangle should, in this least mathematical of universities, be quadrangular. Groping and stumbling his familiar way up the darkest of spiral staircases, Maitland missed his footing, and fell, with the whole weight of his body, against the door at which he had meant to knock.
“Come in,” said a gruff voice, as if the knocking had been done in the most conventional manner.
Maitland had come in by this time, and found the distinguished Mr. Bielby, Fellow of St. Gatien’s, sitting by his fireside, attired in a gray shooting-coat, and busy with a book and a pipe. This gentleman had, on taking his degree, gone to town, and practised with singular success at the Chancery Bar. But on some sudden disgust or disappointment, he threw up his practice, returned to College, and there lived a retired life among his “brown Greek manuscripts.” He was a man of the world, turned hermit, and the first of the kind whom Maitland had ever known. He had “coached” Maitland, though he usually took no pupils, and remained his friend and counsellor.
“How are you, Maitland?” said the student, without rising. “I thought, from the way in which you knocked, that you were some of the young men, coming to ‘draw me,’ as I think they call it.”
Mr. Bielby smiled as he spoke. He knew that the undergraduates were as likely to “draw” him as boys who hunt a hare are likely to draw a fierce old bear that “dwells among bones and blood.”
Mr. Bielby’s own environment, to be sure, was not of the grisly and mortuary character thus energetically described by the poet His pipe was in his hand. His broad, bald, red face, ending in an auburn spade-shaped beard, wore the air of content. Around him were old books that had belonged to famous students of old—Scaliger, Meursius, Muretus—and before him lay the proof-sheets of his long-deferred work, a new critical edition of “Demetrius of Scepsis.”