“She is amusing him,” said Miss Wenlock, looking rather bewildered. “They are generally so afraid of him.”
The Master put his head into the drawing-room.
“I am taking Lady Constance into the garden, my dear. Will you three follow when you like?”
He took her through the old house, with the dim faces of former masters and college worthies shining softly on its panelled walls, in the golden lights from the level sun outside, and presently they emerged upon the garden which lay like an emerald encased on three sides by surfaces of silver-grey stone, and overlooked by a delicate classical tower designed by the genius of Christopher Wren. Over one-half of the garden lay an exquisite shadow; the other was in vivid light. The air seemed to be full of bells—a murmurous voice—the voice of Oxford; as though the dead generations were perpetually whispering to the living—“We who built these walls, and laid this turf for you—we, who are dead, call to you who are living—carry on our task, continue our march:
“On to the bound of the waste—
On to the City of God!”
A silence fell upon Constance as she walked beside the Master. She was thinking involuntarily of that absent word dropped by her uncle—“Oxford is a place of training”—and there was a passionate and troubled revolt in her. Other ghostly wills seemed to be threatening her—wills that meant nothing to her. No!—her own will should shape her own life! As against the austere appeal that comes from the inner heart of Oxford, the young and restless blood in her sang defiance. “I will ride with him to-morrow—I will—I will!”
But the Master merely thought that she was feeling the perennial spell of the Oxford beauty.
“You are going to like Oxford, I hope?”
“Yes—” said Constance, a little reluctantly. “Oh, of course I shall like it. But it oppresses me—rather.”
“I know!” he said eagerly—always trying to place himself in contact with the young mind and life, always seeking something from them in which he was constantly disappointed. “Yes, we all feel that! We who are alive must always fight the past, though we owe it all we have. Oxford has been to me often a witch—a dangerous—almost an evil witch. I seemed to see her—benumbing the young forces of the present. And the scientific and practical men, who would like to scrap her, have sometimes seemed to me right. And then one changes—one changes!”