And why has Mrs. Le Marchant's hair turned snow-white? Had it been merely gray he would not have complained, though he would have deplored the loss of the fine smooth inky sweep he remembers. She has a fair right to be gray; Mrs. Le Marchant must be about forty-six or forty-seven, bien sonné. But white, snow-white—the hue that one connects with a venerable extremity of age. Can it be bleached? He has heard of women bleaching their hair; but not Mrs. Le Marchant, not the Mrs. Le Marchant he remembers. She would have been as incapable of bleach as of dye. Then why is she snow-haired? Because Providence has so willed it is the obvious answer. But somehow Burgoyne cannot bring himself to believe that she has come fairly by that white head.
With the morning light the might of the Devonshire memories grows weaker; and, as the day advances, the Oxford ones resume their sway. How can it be otherwise, when all day long he strays among the unaltered buildings in the sweet sedate college gardens, down the familiar "High," where, six years ago, he could not take two steps without being hailed by a jolly fresh voice, claiming his company for some new pleasure; but where now he walks ungreeted, where the smooth-faced boys he meets, and who strike him as so much more boyish than his own contemporaries had done, pass him by indifferently, unknown to the whole two thousand as he is. He feels a sort of irrational anger with them for not recognising him, though they have never seen him before.
Yes, there is no place where a man is so quickly superannuated as in Oxford. He is saying this to himself all day, is saying it still as he strolls in the afternoon down Mesopotamia, to fill up the time before the hour for college chapel. Yes, there is no place where men so soon turn into ghosts. He has been knocking up against them all day at every street-corner; they have looked out at him from every gray window in the Quad at New—jovial, athletic young ghosts, so much painfuller to meet than rusty, century-worn old ones. They are rather less plentiful in Mesopotamia than elsewhere; perhaps, because in his day, as now, Mesopotamia on Sundays was given over to the mechanic and the perambulator. Oh, that Heaven would put it into the head of some Chancellor of the Exchequer to lay a swingeing tax upon that all-accursed vehicle! But not even mechanic and perambulator can hinder Mesopotamia from being fair on a fine February day, when the beautiful floods are out, the floods that the Thames Conservators and the Oxford authorities have combined to put down, as they have most other beautiful things within their reach. But they have not yet quite succeeded. To-day, for instance, the floods are out in might.
Burgoyne is pacing along a brown walk, like a raised causeway, with a sheet of white water on either hand, rolling strong ripples to the bank. Gnarled willows stand islanded in the coldly argent water. A blackbird is flying out of the bushes, with a surprised look at finding himself turned into a sea-bird. No sun; an even sweep of dull silver to right and left. No sun; and yet as he looks, after days of rain, the "grand décorateur," as someone happily called him, rides out in royalty on a cleared sky-field, turning the whole drenched country into mother-of-pearl—a sheet of opal stretched across the drowned meadows; the distance opal too, a delicate, dainty, evanescent loveliness snatched from the ugly brown jaws of winter.
Burgoyne is leaning over the wooden bridge beneath which, in its normal state, the water of the lasher rushes down impetuously; but it is now raised to such a height that it lies level, almost flush with the planking. He is staring across the iridescent water-plain to where, in the poetic atmosphere of sun and mist, dome, and schools and soaring spires stand etherealized.
"Dear old place!" he says, under his breath, "everybody is dead; and I am dead; and Brown is deader than anyone. I am glad that you, at least, are still alive!"
Are these more ghosts coming round the corner? A man and a woman ghost strolling along, and looking about them as strangers look. When they are within a pace or two of him the woman says something—something about the floods—to her companion, and at the sound Burgoyne starts.
"She did not speak last night; if she had spoken I should have known her at once. She always had such a sweet voice."
He raises his arms from the bridge-top, and, turning, meets them face to face, eye to eye, and in an instant he has seen that both recognise him. At the same instant he is aware of a simultaneous inclination on the part of man and wife to avert their heads, and pass him without claiming his acquaintance. Perhaps, if he had had time to reflect, he would have allowed them to do so, but the impulse of the moment forbids it. Why should they wish to cut him? What has he done to deserve it? Ten years ago, they were his very good friends, and he was the familiar comrade of their children, the daily guest at their table. What has the unavoidable lapse of those years done to make him less fit for their company at twenty-nine than he was at nineteen? There must be some misconception, which a moment will set right.
"I am afraid that you do not remember me, Mrs. Le Marchant," he says, lifting his hat.