"He was a bit of an enfant terrible," said Bingham, "from the tutor's point of view."
May raised her eyes with relief; the Warden had parried the question of the ghost with skill.
"And I don't believe," said the Warden, "that any one returns who has merely roystered within our walls," and he smiled.
Bingham was now looking very attentively at the Warden out of his dark eyes.
"Jeremy Bentham," he said, "seems to have been afraid of ghosts, when he was an undergraduate here. He was afraid of barging against them on dark college staircases. It's a fear I can't grasp. I would much rather come into collision with any ghost than with the Stroke of the 'Varsity Eight, whether the staircase was dark or not."
"If there are ghosts," said the Warden, pensively, "I should expect to see Cranmer, on some wild night, wandering near the places where he endured his passion and his death. Or I should expect to see Laud pacing the streets, amazed at the order and discipline of modern Oxford. If personal attachment could bring a man from the grave," he went on, meeting Bingham's eyes with a smile, "why shouldn't that least ghostly of all scholars, your old master, Jowett—why shouldn't he walk at night when Balliol is asleep?"
"Then there was nothing in the rumour," said Bingham, "that your King's ghost has turned up?"
"The Warden doesn't believe in ghosts," said May, looking across the table eagerly. She remembered how he had stood by the bedside of Gwendolen that night. She recalled the room vividly, the gloom of the room and he alone standing in the light thrown upon him by the lamp. She could recall every tone of his voice as he said: "You thought you saw something. You made a mistake. You saw nothing, you imagined that you saw—there was nothing," and how his voice convinced her, as she stood by the fire and listened. How long ago was that—only three days—it seemed like a month.
"No," said the Warden, "I don't believe in ghosts. At least, I don't believe that our dead"—and he pronounced the last word reverently—"are such that they can return to us in human form, or through the intervention of some hired medium. But if there are ghosts in Oxford," he went on, and now he turned to Bingham, as if he were answering his question—"if there are ghosts in Oxford they will be the ghosts of those who were, in life, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. I am thinking of those men who lived and died in Oxford, recluses who knew no other world, and of whom the world knew nothing—men who used to flit like shadows from their solitary rooms to the Lecture hall and to High table and to the Common room. Those men were monks in all but name; celibates, solitaries—men to whom the laughter of youth was maddening pain."
May's eyes dropped! What the Warden was saying stabbed her, not merely because of the words he said, but because his voice conveyed the sense of that poignant pain.