“ffoulis,” corrected Gav silkily, with the gentlest of smiles. And the incident closed.
But it was enough to show his quality. And the mot was bruited around the whole of Wallace that night before Old Tom had boomed and boomed his hundred strokes and one over the starlit spires and Athenian groves of the dream-bound colleges.[3]
[3] i.e., by 9.15 p.m. (Lit. Exec.)
Gaveston rose, distressed, but not surprised, at the scout’s omission to bring red pepper for his savoury. His neighbours, still toying with the sweet, watched with ill-concealed surprise and some envy the ease with which he drew up his figure from the awkward constriction of the long oaken bench, and the slender but masculine grace of his carriage as he paced alone towards the door.
Alone he descended the Hall steps into the cool evening air. Through the fast-gathering dusk the beetling walls flamed distantly with the fiery Virginia creeper lambent upon their crumbling stone. Underfoot, the first-fallen leaves of October lisped and whispered in a soft-stirring night-wind, and overhead a few late rooks were fluttering darkly from branch to branch. Thus had they fluttered, he reflected, just so long as the golden light had gushed forth from the high windows of Wallace Hall, and so would they flutter, ageless and perennial, over the heads of generations still unweaned and yet unborn. The Wallace rooks … nothing could affright them, nothing surprise them.… They, too, had found the secret.
Dinner was over, but the night held further possibilities. There was still the Dean.
But no one, of course, called him the Dean.
No one of consequence called him by his own name even. The name of Archibald Arundel was all but unknown in Oxford. It appeared occasionally on lecture lists, and sometimes over an article, charged with learning and grace, in one of the quarterlies. Postmen and college porters knew it, and at the foot of staircase XXXIV, which crept spirally up an ivy-clad tower, the surprising legend was still decipherable, in faint letters of an outworn mode, constant amid the ever-changing list above and below it—
6. MR. ARUNDEL.