Lex’s handsome face was a study when the fitness and beauty of class distinctions in the halls of learning was made patent to him by the civil guide. By the way, he wore a student’s gown, and was, we surmised, a servitor of the college.
“How much light these entertaining items cast upon quotations we have heard, all our lives, without comprehending,” said the audacious youth, eying the informant with ingenuous admiration. “‘High life and below stairs!’ ‘Briton’s sons shall ne’er be slaves!’ ‘Free-born Englishmen’—and the rest of it! There’s nothing else like an old-world education, after all, for adjusting society. Under professors like the Tudors and Stuarts, of course! Why, do you know, we ignoramuses over the water would set Bright and Gladstone at the same table with the most empty-pated lord of the lot, and never suspect that we were insulting one of them?”
Caput pulled him away.
“You rascal!” he said, as we followed the servitor to the kitchen. “How dare you make fun of the man to his face?”
“He never guessed it,” replied the other coolly. “It takes a drill and a blast of powder to get a joke into an English skull.”
The kitchen is a vast vault, planned also by Wolsey, whose antecedents should have made him an authority in the culinary kingdom in an era when loins were knighted and entrées an unknown quantity in the composition of good men’s feasts. The high priest of the savory mysteries met us upon the threshold, the grandest specimen, physically, of a man we saw abroad. Herculean in stature and girth, he had a noble head and face, was straight as a Norway pine, and was robed in a voluminous white bib-apron. His voice was singularly deep and musical, his carriage majestic. I wish I could add that he was as conversant with the natural history and rights of the letter H as with the details of his profession and the story of his realm from 1520 downward. He exhibited the Brobdingnagian gridiron used in the time of James I., on which an hundred steaks could be broiled at one and the same time, and enlarged upon the improvements that had superseded the rusty bars and smoky jacks, kept now as curiosities. In one pantry was a vast vessel of ripe apricots, ready-sugared for jam; a huge pasty, hot and fragrant from the oven, stood upon a dresser, encircled by a cohort of tarts.
“H’out h’of term-time we ’ave comparatively little to do,” said the splendid giant. “Therefore I ’ave given most h’of my h’employees a vacation. But there h’are a few h’undergraduates and a tutor h’or two ’ere still, and”—apologetically for mortal frailty—“the h’inner man, h’even h’of scholars must be h’entertained. ’Ence these”—waving a mighty arm toward the pastry.
He pleased us prodigiously, even to the sublime graciousness with which he accepted a douceur at parting. We turned at the end of the passage to look at him—a white-robed Colossus, in the dusky arch of the kitchen doorway. The light from a window touched his hoary hair and the jet-black brows that darkened the full, serious eyes. He was gazing after us, too, and bowed gravely without changing his place.
“Are there photographs of him for sale?” asked we of our guide. “Surely he is one of the college lions?”
“I beg your pardon!”