Christians Mistake | Page 9

was written, plain as in a book, on the face of Christian's husband, as he watched her, still silently, for another mile, till the early winter sun-set, bursting through the leaden-colored, snowy sky, threw a faint light in at the carriage window.
Christian looked up, and closed her eyes again in a passive hopelessness sad to see.
Her husband watched her still. Once he sighed--a rather sad sigh for a bridegroom, and then a light, better and holier than love, or rather the essence of all love, self-denial and self-forgetfullness, brightened up his whole countenance.
"How very tired she is; but I shall take care of her, my poor child!"
The words were as gentle as if he had been speaking to one of his own children, and he drew her to him with a tender, protecting fatherliness which seemed the natural habit of his life, such as never, in her poor, forlorn life, had any one shown to Christian Oakley. It took away all her doubts, all her fears. For the moment she forgot she was married, forgot everything but his goodness, his tenderness, his care over her, and her great and sore need of the same. She turned and clung to him, weeping passionately.
"I have nobody in the world but you. Oh, be kind to me!"
"I will," said Arnold Grey.
Chapter 2
"You'll love me yet! And I can tarry Your love's protracted growing: June reaped that bunch of flowers you carry From seeds of April's sowing."
Saint Bede's is one of the most ancient of the minor colleges of Avonsbridge. Its foundress's sweet, pale, suffering face, clad in the close coif of the time of the wars of the Roses, still smiles over the fellow's table in hall, and adorns the walls of combination-room. The building itself has no great architectural beauty except the beauty of age. Its courts are gray and still, and its grounds small; in fact, it possesses only the Lodge garden, and a walk between tall trees on the other side of the Avon, which is crossed by a very curious bridge. The Lodge itself is so close to the river, that from its windows you may drop a stone into the dusky, slowly rippling, sluggish water, which seems quieter and deeper there than at any other college past which it flows.
Saint Bede's is, as I said, a minor college, rarely numbering more than fifty gownsmen at a time, and maintaining, both as to sports and honors, a mild mediocrity. For years it had not sent any first-rate man either to boat-race, or cricket-ground, or senate-house. Lately, however, it had boasted one, quite an Admirable Crichton in his way, who, had his moral equaled his mental qualities, would have carried all before him. As it was, being discovered in offenses not merely against University authority, but obnoxious to society at large, he had been rusticated. Though the matter was kept as private as possible, its details being known only to the master, dean and tutor, still it made a nine-day's talk, not only in the college, but in the town--until the remorseless wave of daily life, which so quickly closes over the head of either ill-doer or well-doer, closed completely over that of Edwin Uniacke.
Recovering from the shock of his turpitude, the college now reposed in peace upon its slender list of well-conducted and harmless undergraduates, its two or three tutors, and its dozen or so of gray old fellows, who dozed away their evenings in combination-room. Even such an event as the master's second marriage had scarcely power to stir Saint Bede's from its sleepy equanimity.
It was, indeed, a peaceful place. It had no grand entrance, but in a narrow back street you came suddenly upon its ancient gateway, through which you passed into a mediaeval world. The clock tower and clock, with an upright sundial affixed below it, marked the first court, whence, through a passage which, as is usual in colleges, had the hall on one hand and the buttery on the other, you entered the second court, round three sides of which ran cloisters of very ugly, very plain, but very ancient architecture. In a corner of these cloisters was the door of the Lodge--the master's private dwelling.
Private it could hardly be called; for, like all these lodges of colleges, it had an atmosphere most anti-home like, which at first struck you as extremely painful. Its ancientness, both of rooms and furniture, added to this feeling. When you passed through the small entrance hall, up the stone staircase, and into a long, narrow, mysterious gallery, looking as it must have looked for two centuries at least, you felt an involuntary shiver, as of warm, human, daily life brought suddenly into contact with the pale ghosts of the past. You could not escape the haunting thought that