Oxford Days; or, How Ross Got His Degree

by F. E. Weatherly

It was a soft, sweet evening, that of June 30th, and Frank, having finished his packing, slipped out unnoticed after dinner. It was a difficult matter to avoid the prying eyes of his brothers, but the dessert that evening was unusually absorbing, and long after Mr. and Mrs. Ross had left the table, the boys were diligently making themselves ill. Seizing the opportunity, he was three fields beyond the paddock before his absence was even mentioned.

He was sad, down-hearted, romantically melancholy. And yet he had a delightful tour through Switzerland in store. Porchester had never seemed such a lovely little place. No Swiss mountains could ever have such beauty as those soft hills yonder; no glaciers the charm of the gently flowing river; no Alpine forests the sweetness of these English meadows, now silvering with the evening dew, and softening in the falling mist. He stopped by a gate. He found his initials cut there, just in one corner out of sight; and near them one other letter. Three years ago he had broken his best knife, and cut his finger, over that little work. And there it was still—lichened over now, but still legible. He would not touch it. He wondered if it would still be there when he came back. When he came back! Was the boy going to India for twenty years, or to the North Pole? Who would touch the letters? Who would even read them? Who that came by this way would be likely to stop by that uninteresting gate, and draw aside those great dock-leaves merely to see F. R. and R. clumsily carved? And who, if they saw them, would trouble to deface them?

But Frank was in love and was proportionately melancholy. And lo! as in answer to his thoughts, softly over the new-cut grass comes the vicar’s daughter.

It should be clearly understood that the pathway along which Rose came so opportunely was public, though seldom frequented. It led from the village of Porchester to a ferry, and this carried you to a hamlet, Wood Green, that lay within the vicar’s ministrations. Just now there was illness in the hamlet, and Rose used daily to visit the sick. Frank, on no such journeys bent, passed many hours of those last days of June about the fields, and crossing and re-crossing in the ferry-boat. Luckily this was worked by a marvellous contrivance of wheels, ropes, and poles, and there was no observant Charon to wonder at, and then report, the strange and repeated passages of the lawyer’s son. Last evening, at the same time and place, he had met Rose: had told her he was leaving for Switzerland: had gone so far as to ask her if she was going to Wood Green the next evening; and she, because she was Rose, told him yes. Perhaps there was another reason, the cause of which lay in him. But she never speculated. He had asked her, and she had told him. She was going to Wood Green, and why not say so?

They walked slowly, oh! so slowly, across the misty meadows. They crossed, as lazily as the stream would suffer them, the little ferry. They reached Wood Green. It was only a basket and a message that Rose had to deliver to-night, and Frank had not long to wait at the little white wicket at Vowles’s cottage. Then back again, across the ferry, and up the fields; and then, just by the gateway where they had met, they stopped, and he showed her something, pulling aside the gigantic dock-leaves—three letters, rudely cut, and covered with lichen.

“I cut them three years ago,” he said. “Was it very silly?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“I loved you then, Rose,” he said softly, taking her hand, “but I love you a thousand times more now, darling.”

And Rose has told him something that makes him utterly happy—something they have known these many weeks, but neither has dared to express. They are but children, but why should they not be happy? Only boy and girl, but is that any reason why their love should not be true? And so they walk back through the deepening summer night, he as proud as knight of old, and she as happy as any “fair ladye.” And then by the vicarage garden-gate they say good-bye. They have not thought of the future. The present is theirs, and that is enough. She is a simple little village girl, and he an undergraduate; that is all. But “all” is a great deal to them.

At six o’clock in the evening of July 1st, Edwards and his six pupils dined at the Grosvenor, wisely and not too well, in view of the passage that night. The party consisted of Hoskins of Brasenose, reading for Honours in Law; Lang and Kingdon of Christ Church, Maude of John’s, and Royds of Exeter, reading for the Final Pass Schools; and Frank, who had thus one companion only in work. Edwards was quite a young man. He had been married about two years, but left his wife and child at home. He was just of an age not to be “donnish,” and yet old enough to command a certain amount of necessary respect.