These thoughts, and others like them, floated by day and night through the boy’s mind; and he wove them into the symphony he was writing. Tragedy, passion, melody,—these have been the Polish heritage in music; they breathe through the Polish peasant songs, as through the genius of a Chopin; they are bound up with the long agony of Polish history, with the melancholy and monotony of the Polish landscape. They spoke again through the beautiful thwarted gift of this boy of twenty, through his foreboding of early death, and through that instinctive exercise of his creative gift, which showed itself not in music alone, but in the shaping of two lives—Falloden’s and Connie’s.
And Constance too was living and learning, with the intensity that comes of love and pity and compunction. She was dropping all her spoilt-child airs; and the bower-bird adornments with which she had filled her little room in Medburn Hall had been gradually cleared away, to Nora’s great annoyance, till it was almost as bare as Nora’s own. Amid the misty Oxford streets and the low-ceiled Oxford rooms, she was played upon by the unseen influences of that ‘august place,’ where both the great and the forgotten dead are always at work, shaping the life of the present. In those days Oxford was still praising ‘famous men, and the fathers who begat’ her. Their shades still walked her streets. Pusey was not long dead. Newman, the mere ghost of himself, had just preached a tremulous last sermon within her bounds, returning as a kind of spiritual Odysseus for a few passing hours to the place where he had once reigned as the most adored son of Oxford. Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University a generation before.
In Balliol, there sat a chubby-faced, quiet-eyed man, with very white hair, round whom the storms of orthodoxy had once beaten, like the surges on a lighthouse; and at Christ Church and in St. Mary’s the beautiful presence and the wonderful gift of Liddon kept the old fires burning in pious hearts.
And now into this old, old place, with its thick soil of dead lives and deeds, there had come a new seed, as to which no one could tell how it would flower. Women students were increasing every term in Oxford. Groups of girl graduates in growing numbers went shyly through the streets, knowing that they had still to justify their presence in this hitherto closed world—made by men for men. There were many hostile eyes upon them, watching for mistakes. But all the generous forces in Oxford were behind them. The ablest men in the University were teaching women how to administer—how to organise. Some lecture-rooms were opening to them; some still entirely declined to admit them. And here and there were persons who had a clear vision of the future to which was trending this new eagerness of women to explore regions hitherto forbidden them in the House of Life.
Connie had no such vision, but she had a boundless curiosity and a thrilling sense of great things stirring in the world. Under Nora’s lead she had begun to make friends among the women-students, and to find her way into their little bed-sitting-rooms at tea-time. They all seemed to her superhumanly clever, and superhumanly modest. She had been brought up indeed by two scholars; but examinations dazzled and appalled her. How they were ever passed she could not imagine. She looked at the girls who had passed them with awe, quite unconscious the while of the glamour she herself possessed for these untravelled students—as one familiar from her childhood with the sacred places of history—Rome, Athens, Florence, Venice, Sicily. She had seen, she had trodden; and quiet eyes—sometimes spectacled—would flame, while her easy talk ran on.
But all the time there were very critical notions in her, hidden deep down.
‘Do they never think about a man?’ some voice in her seemed to be asking. ‘As for me, I am always thinking about a man!’ And the colour would flush into her cheeks, as she meekly asked for another cup of tea.
Sometimes she would go with Nora to the Bodleian, and sit patiently beside her while Nora copied Middle-English poetry from an early manuscript, worth a king’s ransom. Nora got sevenpence a ‘folio,’ of seventy-two words, for her work. Connie thought the pay scandalous for so much learning; but Nora laughed at her, and took far more pleasure in the small cheque she received at the end of term from the University Press than Connie in her quarterly dividends.
But Connie knew very well by this time that Nora was not wholly absorbed in Middle English. Often, as they emerged from the Bodleian to go home to lunch, they would come across Sorell hurrying along the Broad, his master’s gown floating behind him. And he would turn his fine ascetic face towards them, and wave his hand to them from the other side of the street. And Connie would flash a look at Nora,—soft, quick, malicious—of which Nora was well aware.
But Connie rarely said a word. She was handling the situation indeed with great discretion, though with an impetuous will. She herself had withdrawn from the Greek lessons, on the plea that she was attending some English history lectures; that she must really find out who fought the battle of Hastings; and was too lazy to do anything else. Sometimes she would linger in the schoolroom till Sorell arrived, and then he would look at her wistfully, when she prepared to depart, as though to say—‘Was this what I bargained for?’