As for Nora, being thus thrown unexpectedly into the dangerous society of that gruesome animal, the Oriel undergraduate, I think I may venture to say (from my subsequent experience) that she was not wholly disposed to regard the creature as either so objectionable or so ferocious as she had been previously led to imagine. We got on together so well that I could see the Professor growing visibly wrathful about the corners of the mouth: and by the time we reached the barges, he could barely be civil enough to say Good morning to me when we parted.
An introduction, however, no matter how obtained, is really in these matters absolutely everything. As long as you don't know a pretty girl, you don't know her, and you can't take a step in advance without an introduction. But when once you do know her, heaven and earth and aunts and fathers may try their hardest to prevent you, and yet whatever they try they can't keep you out. I was so far struck with Nora, that I boldly ventured whenever I met her out walking with her father or her aunt, to join myself to the party: and though they never hesitated to show me that my presence was not rapturously welcomed, they couldn't well say to me point-blank, "Have the goodness, Mr. Mansfield, to go away and not to speak to me again in future." So the end of it was, that before the beginning of October term, Nora and I understood one another perfectly, and had even managed, in a few minutes' tête-à-tête in the parks, to whisper to one another the ingenuous vows of sweet seventeen and two-and-twenty.
When the Professor discovered that I had actually written a letter to his daughter, marked "Private and Confidential," his wrath knew no bounds. He sent for me to his rooms, and spoke to me severely. "I've half a mind, Mansfield," he said, "to bring the matter before a college meeting. At any rate, this conduct must not be repeated. If it is, Sir,"—he didn't finish the sentence, preferring to terrify me by the effective figure of speech which commentators describe as an aposiopesis: and I left him with a vague sense that if it was repeated I should probably incur the penalties of præmunire (whatever they may be), or be hanged, drawn, and quartered, with my head finally stuck as an adornment on the acute wings of the Griffin, vice Temple Bar removed.
Next day, Nora met me casually at a confectioner's in the High, where I will frankly confess that I was engaged in experimenting upon the relative merits of raspberry cream and lemon water ices. She gave me her hand timidly, and whispered to me half under her breath, "Papa's so dreadfully angry, Owen, and I'm afraid I shall never be able to meet you any more, for he's going to send me back this very afternoon to South Kensington, and keep me away from Oxford altogether in future." I saw her eyes were red with crying, and that she really thought our little romance was entirely at an end.
"My darling Nora," I replied in an undertone, "even South Kensington is not so unutterably remote that I shall never be able to see you there. Write to me whenever you are able, and let me know where I can write to you. My dear little Nora, if there were a hundred papas and a thousand Aunt Lydias interposed in a square between us, don't you know we should manage all the same to love one another and to overcome all difficulties?"
Nora smiled and half cried at once, and then discreetly turned to order half a pound of glacé cherries. And that was the last that I saw of her for the time at Oxford.
During the next term or two, I'm afraid I must admit that the relations between my tutor and myself were distinctly strained, so much so as continually to threaten the breaking out of open hostilities. It wasn't merely that Nora was in question, but the Professor also suspected me of jeering in private at his psychical investigations. And if the truth must be told, I will admit that his suspicions were not wholly without justification. It began to be whispered among the undergraduates just then that the Professor and his sister had taken to turning planchettes, interrogating easy-chairs, and obtaining interesting details about the present abode of Shakespeare or Milton from intelligent and well-informed five-o'clock tea-tables. It had long been well known that the Professor took a deep interest in haunted houses, considered that the portents recorded by Livy must have something in them, and declared himself unable to be sceptical as to facts which had convinced such great men as Plato, Seneca, and Samuel Johnson. But the table-turning was a new fad, and we noisy undergraduates occasionally amused ourselves by getting up an amateur séance, in imitation of the Professor, and eliciting psychical truths, often couched in a surprisingly slangy or even indecorous dialect, from a very lively though painfully irreverent spirit, who discoursed to us through the material intervention of a rickety what-not. However, as the only mediums we employed were the very unprofessional ones of two plain decanters, respectively containing port and sherry, the Professor (who was a teetotaler, and who paid five guineas a séance for the services of that distinguished psychical specialist, Dr. Grade) considered the interesting results we obtained as wholly beneath the dignity of scientific inquiry. He even most unworthily endeavoured to stifle research by gating us all one evening when a materialized spirit, assuming the outer form of the junior exhibitioner, sang a comic song of the period in a loud voice with the windows open, and accompanied itself noisily with a psychical tattoo on the rickety what-not. The Professor went so far as to observe sarcastically that our results appeared to him to be rather spirituous than spiritual.
On May 11, 1873 (I will endeavour to rival the Professor in accuracy and preciseness), I got a short note from dear Nora, dated from South Kensington, which I, too (though not from psychical motives), have carefully preserved. I will not publish it, however, either here or in the Society's Proceedings, for reasons which will probably be obvious to any of my readers who happen ever to have been placed in similar circumstances themselves. Disengaging the kernel of fact from the irrelevant matter in which it was imbedded, I may state that Nora wrote me somewhat to this effect. She was going next day to the Academy with the parents of some schoolfellow; could I manage to run up to town for the day, go to the Academy myself, and meet her "quite accidentally, you know, dear," in the Water-colour room about half-past eleven?
This was rather awkward; for next day, as it happened, was precisely the Professor's morning for the Herodotus lecture; but circumstances like mine at that moment know no law. So I succeeded in excusing myself from attendance somehow or other (I hope truthfully) and took the nine a.m. express up to town. Shortly after eleven I was at the Academy, and waiting anxiously for Nora's arrival. That dear little hypocrite, the moment she saw me approach, assumed such an inimitable air of infantile surprise and innocent pleasure at my unexpected appearance that I positively blushed for her wicked powers of deception.
"You here, Mr. Mansfield!" she cried in a tone of the most apparently unaffected astonishment, "why, I thought it was full term time; surely you ought to be up at Oriel."