The New Warden Part 57

May took her place opposite the coffee. He watched her, and then went and sat down at the opposite end of the table in his own seat. Then he got up and went to the side table.

Try as they would they were painfully conscious of each other's movements. Everything seemed strangely, cruelly important at that meal.

May poured out the Warden's cup, and that in itself was momentous. He would come and take it, of course! She moved the cup a little. He waited on her from the side table and then looked at his coffee.

"Is this for me?" he asked.

"Yes," said May; "it is yours."

He took up the cup and went round with it to his place, as if he was carrying something rare and significant.

They sat opposite each other, these two, alone together, and for the last time--possibly. They talked stiffly in measured sentences to each other, talk that merely served as a defence. And behind this talk both were painfully aware that the precious moments were slipping away, and yet nothing could be done to stay them. It was only when the meal was over, and there was nothing left for them to do but to rise and go, that they stopped talking and looked at each other apprehensively.

"You are not going till the afternoon?" he questioned.

"Not till the afternoon," she answered, but she did not say whether she was going early or late. She rose from the table and stood by it.

"The reason why I ask," he said, rising too, "is that I cannot be at home for lunch, and afterwards there is hospital business with which I am concerned."

May had as yet only vaguely decided on her train, though she knew the trains by heart. She had now to fix it definitely, it was wrung from her.

"I may not be able to get back in time to go with you to the station, but I hope to be in time to meet you there, to see you off," he said; and he added: "I hope to be in time," as if he doubted it nevertheless.

"You mustn't make a point of seeing me off," said May. "And don't you think railway-stations are places which one avoids as much as possible?"

She asked the question a little tremulously and smiled, but did not look at him.

"Ours is pretty bad," he said, without a smile. "But I hope it won't have the effect of making you forget that there is any beauty in our old city. I hope you will carry away with you some regret at parting--some memory of us."

"Of course I shall," said May; and detecting the plaintiveness of her own voice, she added: "I shall have to come and see it again--as I said--perhaps ten years hence, when--when it will be different! It will be most interesting."

He moved slowly away as if he was going out, and then stopped.

"I shall manage to be in time to see you off," he said, as if some alteration in his plans suddenly occurred to him. "I shall manage it."

"You mustn't put off anything important for me," May called softly after him. "In these days women don't expect to be looked after; we are getting mighty independent," and there was much courage in her voice.

He wavered at the door. "You don't forbid me to come?" he questioned, and he turned and looked at her.

"Of course not," said May, and she turned away quickly and went to the window and looked out. "I hope I am not brazenly independent!" She added this last sentence airily at the window and stared out of it, as if attracted by something in the quadrangle.

She heard him go out and shut the door.

She waited some little time doing nothing, standing still by the window--very still. Then she went out of the room, up the staircase and into the corridor towards her aunt's bedroom.

She knocked and went in.

Lady Dashwood turned round and looked at her. Something in May's face arrested her.

"A lovely morning, May. Just the day for seeing Oxford at its best."

And this forced May to say, at once, what she was going to say. She was going away in the afternoon.

Lady Dashwood received May's news quietly. She gave May a look of meek resignation that was harder to bear than any expostulation would have been.

"Everybody is going," she said slowly, and lying back on her pillows with a sigh. "I must be going directly, as soon as I am up and about. I can't leave your Uncle John alone any longer, and there is so much that even an old woman can do, and that I had to put aside to come here."

May was standing at the foot of the bed looking at her very gravely.

"I can't imagine you not doing a lot," she said.

"I shall be all right in a couple of days," said Lady Dashwood. "What was wrong with me, dear, was nerves, nerves, nothing but nerves, and I am ashamed of it. When I am bouncing with vigour again, May, I shall go.

I shall leave Oxford. I shall leave Jim."

"I suppose you will have to," said May, vaguely.

"Jim will be horribly lonely," said Lady Dashwood.

"I'm afraid so," said May, slowly.

"Imagine," said Lady Dashwood, "Jim seeing me off at the station and then coming back here. Imagine him coming back alone, crunching over the gravel and going up the steps into the hall. You know what the hall is like--a sweet place--and those dim portraits on the walls all looking down at him out of their faded eyes! All men!"

May looked at her Aunt Lena gravely.

"Then see him look round! Silence--n.o.body there. Then see him go up that staircase. He looks into the drawing-room, that big empty room. n.o.body, my dear, but that fast-looking clergyman over the fireplace. That's not all, May. I can see him go out and go to his library. n.o.body there--everything silent--books--the Cardinal--and the ghost."

"Oh!" said May. She did not smile.

"Now, my dear," said Lady Dashwood, "I'm not going to think about it any more! I've done with it. Let's talk of something else." That, indeed, was the last that Lady Dashwood said about it.

When lunch time came May found herself seized with a physical contraction over her heart that prevented food from taking its usual course downward. She endured as long as she could, but at last she got up from the long silent table just as Robinson was about to go for a moment into the pantry. She threw a hurried excuse for going at his thin stooping back. She said she found she "hadn't time," and she examined her watch ostentatiously as she went out of the room.

"I'm going to take my last farewell of Oxford," May said, looking for a moment into Lady Dashwood's room. "I'm going for a walk. I am going to look at the High and at Magdalen Bridge."

Lady Dashwood smiled rather sadly. "Ah, yes," she said.

May found Louise packing with a slowness and an elaborate care that was a reproof somehow in itself. It seemed to say: "Ungrateful! All is thrown away on you. You care not----"

May put on her hat, and through the mirror she saw Louise rolling up Saint Joseph with some roughness in a silk m.u.f.fler.

"Madame does not like Oxford?" said Louise, drily, as she stuffed the saint into a hat.

"I care for it very much, Louise," said May, hastily putting on her coat. "Oxford is a place one can never forget."

"Eh, bien oui," said Louise, enigmatically.

Then May went out and said farewell to the towers and spires and the ancient walls, and went to look at the trees weeping by Magdalen Bridge.

It was all photographed on her memory. In the squalid streets of London, where her work lay, she would remember all this beauty and this ancient peace. There would be no possibility of her forgetting it! She would dream of it at night. It would form the background of her life.