Chapter XXXVII (2)

And when Papa Laval came back an hour after to his daughter’s house he found her busy making coffee for the corporal and one other man—the only ones left, as it turned out, from the six who had billeted there. The corporal’s head was tied up, his sleeve and shirt-sleeve were slit their full length and stained a dull brown from a wound, the red-wet bandage of which showed round his upper arm when the slit sleeve fell back from it.

But he was quite cheerful and turned triumphantly to Papa Laval when he came in. ‘Wot did I tell you, Daddy? Ici noos restey, eh?’

‘You ’ave spik true,’ said Papa warmly. ‘Ze Anglais—ah, zey are ze brav mans—mos’ brav—magnifique. I no tink it posseebl’—it was not posseebl’, but zey do heem, zis imposseebl’, and make ze victoire.’

‘It was a good scrap,’ assented the corporal modestly. The Frenchman assented warmly after he had had the meaning of ‘scrap’ explained to him.

‘Good, good, ver’ good,’ he said. ‘I, Papa Laval, who have seen much fighting in ’70 and ’71, say it was ver’ good. So much Allemands an’ so leetle—so not-much Anglais an’ so fatigue, so tire they. Ver’ much kill, ver’ much blessés, what you say wounds, but zey fight on an’ zey make victoire. I see ze Anglais to-morrow—no, yesterday—an’ I say ze grande armée anglaise is feenish, is defeat. Mais, now I onnerstand heem no defeat, heem yet make ze good fight.’

‘Oh, we’ll make a fight all right when the time comes,’ said the corporal.

By now the coffee was ready, and the two men drank it hurriedly and ate hastily of the meal the woman set before them. Papa Laval was concerned about this haste. He would have had them sit down and wait till a good breakfast was cooked and then eat it at leisure and in comfort. The corporal shuffled a little uneasily. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we got to be movin’ on. Orders, voo savvy—les instruckshions à marchey; noos continuey le moshion à la sud.’

Papa stared at him in bewilderment. ‘Mais—zat ees ze retreat,’ he stammered. ‘Pourquoi ze retreat après la victoire?’

‘Wot’s ’e say?’ asked the other soldier through a huge mouthful of bread and butter.

‘Says why should we bolt again after lickin’ the Germans,’ explained the corporal.

‘An’ that’s exackly wot I wants to know,’ said the private disgustedly. ‘We ’as the bloomin’ company near wiped out, an’ B Company the same, and stands off the attack all right; an’ when we’ve chased ’em off good an’ handsome we has to up stick an’ run away again. Bloomin’ rot, I calls it.’

‘Steady on,’ cautioned the corporal. ‘You don’t want these bloomin’ French people to get no wrong notion about our runnin’ away. Look ’ere, Papa, it’s like this: Up there,’ he waved his hand towards the north, ‘we have le grand fight, battle. We win, voo savvy, la victoire c’est à noos. I dunno why we retreat after it—je ne comprong pas pourquoi le retreat, but—I mean, mais les instructions they says retreat. (Dashed if I know the French for “they says.”) Voo savvy, noos make le retiremong because⸺(An’ I’ve forgot the word for “because” now! Oh, dash this French language!)’

‘I onnerstand, m’sieu,’ broke in Papa. ‘The ordaire it is retreat and, parbleu! ze good soldat he obey ze ordaire. Quand ze ordaire ees fight, ze good soldat he fight; eh, is it not?’

‘Egg-zackly,’ said the corporal. ‘Certimong, Papa.’

‘Bien,’ said Papa. ‘I know you spik true. I have seen ze Anglais fight. Zey are keel, peut-être, mais nevaire—how you say it?—run away. I have seen, and I know. I go now to spik it to ze peoples in la ville who is disconsole, peut-être, when ze retreat continue.’

‘That’s it, Papa,’ said the corporal. ‘An’ you tell ’em this army is never goin’ to run away. When the order is retreat, we retreat, even though we don’t like it. But one day the order will be to advance, an’ then we’ll show ’em. You tell ’em not to be afraid. The French is bound to win this war. We’ve come over to see it through with them, an’ we’re not goin’ ’ome till we’ve chased every dash German back to Germany. You savvy, when the time comes, en avong is the order, an’ avong we goes.’

It is very doubtful if Papa caught all the meaning of this harangue, but he got the sense of it and the last words at least.

‘En avant!’ he cried, leaping to his feet. ‘Vivent les Alliés! Vivent les Anglais!’

‘If you two ’as finished ’andin’ out bookays to each other,’ said the private, ‘p’raps you’ll ask Madam ’ere if she’s got a spare loaf we can put in our ’aversacks. There’s the fall-in sounding.’

_LLEWELYN DAVIES AND THE WORKING MEN’S COLLEGE._

BY SIR CHARLES P. LUCAS, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.

The death of John Llewelyn Davies in May last took from us a man of great strength of character and power of mind. He was in his ninety-first year when he died, and had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. Through his long life he was known to the few rather than to the many; but to those who knew him he was a notable figure, connoting high and pure aims, firm will, deep religious faith, and elimination of self in the service of his fellow-men. The outer man in his case did not tell the full story of his nature. No one had a warmer or kinder heart, a greater fund of sympathy, or more real and abiding enthusiasm for the causes in which he believed, and for which he zealously contended. Fire was there and humour too, but there was no effusiveness in manner or in speech. Strong feeling was held in restraint by stronger self-control.

He was a man of varied interests and claims to distinction, without being in the ordinary sense a many-sided man. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as in later years were three of his sons; and he took his degree in company with a singularly able body of men, comprising, for instance, Bishop Westcott, the great Latin scholar Professor Mayor, and Lord Stanley, as he then was, afterwards Lord Derby, Foreign Minister under Disraeli, Colonial Minister under Gladstone. Four years later the soundness of his scholarship was abundantly proved by giving to the world the well-known translation of Plato’s ‘Republic,’ used and implicitly trusted as hardly any other translation of a classical author before or since. His colleague in the work was the Rev. David Vaughan, brother of the great headmaster of Harrow, who was afterwards Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff. Llewelyn Davies and David Vaughan had been bracketed in the Tripos, and as Llewelyn Davies was one of the Founders of the Working Men’s College in London, so Vaughan a little later founded a Working Men’s College at Leicester on the same lines.

As a theologian, he belonged to the sane, masculine Cambridge school, which included his friends Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, and others—a race of men who were not afraid to bring scholarly criticism to bear upon theological writings and doctrines, strengthening the faith by broadening its basis. On sacred subjects, as on Plato, he wrote with acknowledged authority. The man whom he followed above all others, and whose views he embodied, was Frederick Denison Maurice. He read the last words over Maurice’s grave, and, until he himself was laid to rest, he preached and practised the life which Maurice led and taught.

Virile in mind, he was virile in body also. One of the original members of the Alpine Club, and a pioneer in some notable ascents, he lived to attend the jubilee dinner of the Club, and was well over eighty when he visited Switzerland for the last time. A hard-working clergyman of the Church of England, hard-working whether in town or country, for his benefices ranged from Whitechapel and Marylebone to Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland, he was all the time not a clergyman only, but a citizen, holding that the one implied the other; that the preacher of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man must practise what he preaches; that you cannot guide the people unless you know them, not as a member of an exclusive caste, but being among them as one that serveth. At one time he was a member of the London School Board: he was a staunch supporter of the co-operative movement: he laboured for the cause of women, was Principal of Queen’s College, Harley Street, and Chairman of the governing body of the Working Women’s College. So strong was his sense of public duty that a friend described him as the only man who had ever been known to take a positive pleasure in paying rates and taxes.

Like Maurice, he was wholly indifferent to worldly gain, and the last man to solicit preferment in any shape. His own words on the subject were, that he would rather that people asked why he was not made a bishop than why he was. The story goes that Mr. Gladstone once attended his church in Marylebone, in order to judge for himself of the vicar’s fitness for promotion. The Prime Minister was so depressed by the discourse which he heard and the small attendance, that all chance of promotion vanished. The great man did not know that, as a matter of fact, he had been listening to another preacher altogether, that, as it happened, Llewelyn Davies was away on a holiday and not in the church that day. It is true that the latter was somewhat cold in manner and measured in address, not by any means a preacher to electrify large congregations and appeal to popular audiences, one who convinced rather than attracted—a guide to thinking men, not a master of the rhetoric which moves the multitude. Still, in a worldly sense, he never received his due. Our Church of England seems to have considerable capacity for leaving its best and wisest sons out in the cold. Maurice and Llewelyn Davies kept numbers in the faith who would otherwise have drifted from it, because their teaching and their lives proved to demonstration that breadth of view, intellectual power, and democratic sympathies are wholly compatible with intense religious belief, conspicuous before all men every day and all day.

He took his degree in what he himself styled the ‘fateful year’ 1848, a time of social and industrial upheaval. Then it was that what was known as the Christian Socialist Movement came into being, and six years later, in 1854, the Christian Socialists founded the Working Men’s College. Llewelyn Davies was one of them; and when he died, the last of the founders passed away after nearly sixty-two years of the life of the College. They were a great band of men, these Christian Socialists. Charles Kingsley was prominent among them. So was John Ruskin, so were Tom Hughes, John Malcolm Ludlow, the father of Friendly Societies, Professor Westlake, the International lawyer, and many other men of note. They were poles asunder from one another in character, in pursuits, in a hundred ways; but they all had the betterment of their fellow-men in mind, and one man held them all together, the greatest but most humble-minded of them all, Maurice, a leader in spite of himself. I came into the College years after Maurice had died, but I found that some rare and potent influence had been and still was at work, that some personality had left an impress, which was different in kind and greater in degree than anything in ordinary life. Men of all religions and of no religion seemed to have become infected with a kind of noble contagion, and in turn to be infecting others. One old student explained to me that the secret of Maurice’s influence was his transparent truthfulness, that he taught ‘No lie ever had done or ever could do any conceivable good in the world.’ Another found the explanation in his burning sense of brotherhood. The truth was that a man had come among them who, as no other man they ever saw or heard of, gave the message and lived the life of Christ.

Charles Kingsley did not take much active part in founding and fashioning the College, and after Maurice died the clerical element among the founders was represented by Llewelyn Davies. I have said that the founders were of the most divers views, in religion as in other respects. Notwithstanding, the College was cradled in religion; the influence of Maurice was paramount; and to Ludlow or Tom Hughes, laymen both, religious faith was as the breath of life. Of all the founders, other than Maurice himself, Hughes was probably Llewelyn Davies’ closest friend. The two men were of the most different types. Hughes was sanguine, trustful, impulsive, carrying on into old age all the warmth and buoyancy and charm of youth. Davies was calm, thoughtful, reserved, weighing men and things in the balance with the utmost care. But their very diversities seemed to bring them together, and they loved one another. In the Jubilee volume of the College, which Davies edited, he wrote of his friend Hughes as ‘the man of childlike heart, of knightly loyalty, of the most humane geniality, and of the simplest Christian faith.’

Hughes was Principal of the College, in succession to Maurice, when I joined it: many were the stories which he told himself, and many gathered round him. He used to tell with glee his experience as a teacher, when the College first opened its doors. Professor Westlake’s account of what happened is as follows: ‘His teaching of English law, not by his fault, but by that of the subject, never, I think, attracted the numbers which the value of the study ought to command.’ Hughes’ own account was far more racy: he took a law class, which was a complete failure, upon which he converted it into a boxing class, which was an unbounded success. One evening Hughes impressed upon us that the great object of the College was to teach what were known in old days as ‘the Humanities.’ Lord Justice Bowen, who was present and spoke after him, pertinently asked whether he included boxing among the Humanities.

A great friend of Hughes and his circle, and a warm friend of the College, was James Russell Lowell, who, it will be remembered, was at one time American ambassador in this country—not the only American ambassador to whom the College owes a debt, for Mr. Choate at a later date gave us a notable address on Benjamin Franklin. I remember an annual gathering at which both Hughes and Lowell spoke. Hughes in his speech recalled the beginnings of the College and of the co-operative movement, the two having been closely associated with each other, and told the story of a certain brushmaker who had been a student of the College. The brushmaker had fallen on evil times, and his business had collapsed. Hughes and other co-operators and Christian Socialists clubbed together to set him up again, and in gratitude the brushmaker made them all brushes which, according to Hughes, had exceedingly hard bristles. Now Hughes had a most shiny bald head, and, with his eye on that head, Lowell, who spoke afterwards, in stately and measured terms, expressed a hope that all the students of the College did their work as thoroughly and effectively as the brushmaker had done his. On this same occasion Hughes referred to the fact that some time before Nathaniel Hawthorne had come to tea at the College. Again Lowell saw and took his opportunity. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘Mr. Hughes has made a slip; it cannot have been tea that my friend Hawthorne came to, for Hawthorne was a man of robuster fibre.’

I always think of Lowell as the most accomplished master of graceful English to whom I ever listened. I should never have heard or seen him, I should never have come across Llewelyn Davies or Tom Hughes, or many other men of mark in the world, had I not gone to the College. I went there, a young Oxford man, anxious to ‘do my bit,’ and thinking that I could confer benefits on others by teaching them. My experience is—and numbers of young University men have had the same experience—that I received infinitely more than I ever gave. Apart from friendships made for life, apart from having become, I hope, infected with the contagion of which I have spoken, simply and solely from the point of view of getting on in the world, it was a distinct gain to a young man to be thrown into association with great men or the intimate friends of great men, and to be constantly in an atmosphere of wide interests, high aims, and tolerant views. My start in the teaching line was even more unlucky than Tom Hughes’. Apparently he got some kind of class together, who then deserted him until he took to boxing. My recollection is that I put out an elaborate prospectus of what I was going to teach, and that no class turned up at all. Subsequently, however, I did manage to scrape together a small class, and supplemented teaching, not by boxing, but by becoming an active member of the Maurice Cricket Club, the President of which was Alfred Lyttelton, who, like Hughes, took a law class, but with much greater success.

If, as some people fondly imagine and like to insist, there is a difference between the Oxford and Cambridge type of man and cast of mind, Hughes and Llewelyn Davies may be taken as excellent representatives of their respective Universities. Oxford gave to the Working Men’s College the more emotional Hughes, with his all-round views and interests. Davies contributed the thoroughness and accuracy of Cambridge thought and methods. On the other hand, Charles Kingsley, another Cambridge man, would certainly be classed with Tom Hughes rather than with Llewelyn Davies. The author of ‘Westward Ho!’ might well have written ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays,’ or vice versa; but it is impossible to picture Llewelyn Davies as the author of ‘Tom Brown,’ or Hughes as the translator of Plato’s ‘Republic.’ In a later generation at the College, the counterpart of Hughes, with less genius but greater practical ability, was again a Cambridge man, the dearly loved Alfred Lyttelton, to whom I have already referred. The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities, and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its models. Year after year Oxford and Cambridge have welcomed parties of Working Men’s College students; and year after year, without any intermission, a constant stream of new teachers has flowed in from the two Universities—sometimes in greater volume from the one, sometimes from the other. It would be impossible to decide to which University we owe the greater debt. Maurice himself can be claimed by both, though Cambridge has the prior and, I think, the stronger claim to him. Of four past Principals, Maurice is in the balance, Lord Avebury belonged to neither University, and the other two, Tom Hughes, and Professor Dicey most admirable and effective of Principals, must be credited to Oxford. On the whole, perhaps, I must, as an Oxford man, reluctantly but gratefully acknowledge that Trinity College, Cambridge, stands out in our annals as having been from first to last our greatest benefactor. The two latest survivors of the founders, Westlake and Llewelyn Davies, had both been Fellows of Trinity.

I have spoken of Davies’ strong sense of civic duty. To compare him again with Hughes, there was as great devotion to duty in the latter, but with a somewhat different colouring. In Hughes’ case the sense of duty was not so sharply defined, or clearly thought out, nor so much a matter of reason. With him it was rather a feeling, an instinct, part of his nature, such a sense of duty as comes into being at a great public school, in the form of _esprit de corps_, loyalty to a community of comrades and friends. All these men had this sense of obligation in different shades and forms; all heard the call of duty, each in his own way—the clergyman, the scholar, the public official, the merchant, the lawyer, the artist—and all obeyed the call by giving of their own particular store of knowledge.

To the Greeks of old duty and goodness presented themselves in the guise of the beautiful, and this may be one reason why so many artists of fame gave their help to the College. In the list of art teachers of the past are the names of Ruskin, D. G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Burne Jones, Thomas Woolner, Stacy Marks, and others. One of the longest lived and best loved of the founders was Lowes Dickinson, who taught in the art class for many years, and, as all who knew him will testify, never lost sight of the connection between goodness and beauty. But it was not to be expected that the students, or would-be students, would be all of this type, until they had been duly inoculated. For instance, in the account of art teaching at the College in early days, which is given in the Jubilee volume, there is a story of a man coming to Ruskin’s class with a request to be taught how to draw a cart-wheel. He explained that he was a wheelwright, and that it would pay him in his business if he could draw a wheel as it looked lying on the ground. He wanted no art or anything of the kind, but simply to learn how to draw a wheel. This limited aspiration was not at all to Ruskin’s mind, and the wheelwright appears to have gone away sorrowing. The man came, quite naturally and laudably, in order to obtain some technical instruction, which would bring him in more money. No set of men were ever more anxious than the Founders of the College that their poorer brethren should rise and prosper, hence their staunch support of the Co-operative Movement. But they did not found it to give technical instruction; they founded it to teach the ‘humanities’ in the widest sense (including boxing), to give to poor men more human lives, to widen and multiply their interests, to open their understanding, to make them better citizens. They were democrats, but not democrats of the utilitarian type. They taught duty, the faith that was in them, more than rights or claims. They never taught the working man to try everything by the test question, What am I going to get by it in pounds, shillings, and pence? nor did they for one moment appeal to the manual workers as a class with interests distinct from those of the community. The spirit of class was to them anathema, the negation of brotherhood and of true citizenship, the enemy of the State. They taught that men should have their full living wage, if they earned it; that true citizen life implied conditions under which honest labour would always ensure to the labourer sufficiency of good food and a decent home; but they taught also that pounds, shillings, and pence are not the one thing needful; that possessions mean something more and something better than lands or wealth; that knowledge and wisdom, the manifold interests which come from knowledge, the intelligent appreciation of the world around, of men and things, are what life has to give, and are available to poor as well as to rich; that, if a man has knowledge, with bread to eat and a human home, it is a matter of indifference whether he is rich or whether he is poor: he is an equal among equals. So they taught, and so the students learnt and lived their lives accordingly.

These men founded a college. Here is Maurice’s conception of a college, as given by Llewelyn Davies: ‘The name College had a significance on which Maurice loved to dwell.... A college was an association of teachers and learners; and that was what Maurice desired the Working Men’s College to be. It was not to be an institution to which the uneducated might resort, to pick up knowledge which might be of pecuniary benefit to them. The idea of fellowship was to run through all its work; every teacher was to assume that he might learn as well as teach; every student was to be made to feel that, in coming to the College, he was entering into a society in which he might hope to become more of a citizen and more of a man.’ This was no conception of a visionary, which ended in a dream. These were the lines laid down for practical guidance and application, and on these lines to this day the College lives and moves and has its being. My experience of the world at large has been that the rich man is apt to patronise the poor, and that working men in their turn are somewhat inclined to look askance upon would-be benefactors with good intent. But when I first went to the College a great many years ago, I found no signs of patronising, or being patronised. Nothing of the kind was in the minds of students or teachers: it was all natural. They were not troubling their heads as to social standing or worldly equipment; nor, on the other hand, was there the slightest affectation of studied equality or absence of the ordinary courtesies of life. There they were in their own College, friends among friends, all engaged in the same pursuit, the pursuit of knowledge, all ready to help and grateful for being helped. I found that a large proportion of the teachers were, as is still the case, student teachers; men who, having owed to the College all their store of knowledge, and much more also, had come back to repay the debt in kind, taking classes for years together, usually after a heavy day’s work in their trade or profession; and I found, again, that there was an attachment to the place, an _animus revertendi_—at least as strong as in the case of the old Public Schools or Universities. To put it bluntly, the Working Men’s College was founded to turn out gentlemen in the truest and best sense of the term, and it is turning them out, according to the original sample, to the present time.

To take one among numberless examples which might be given of the College spirit, I call to mind an old student who was a very great favourite with us all and a constant attendant at the College, until age and infirmity limited the number of his visits. He was a wood-turner by trade; always a poor man, but the happiest, as he was the friendliest, of men, for he was master of a science which he needed no riches to follow up: he was a most expert botanist, and when not earning his bread, he was studying his subject or collecting new specimens on country walks. What did he care about class distinctions or political parties or social upheavals? Nothing at all. On the other hand, he illustrated the truth that a live and wholesome community, which is at unity with itself, is a most fruitful field for good stories and humorous sayings. He had the most delightful gift of dry humour. A man of portly carriage, he had been listening at one of our festive gatherings to a speaker who enlarged on the subject of all-round men—I forget in what connection, but presumably on the product which was to be expected from the College. Speaking later, my old friend described himself as not an all-round man but bulging out on one side. On another occasion the Lubbock Field Club—the natural history club of the College—gathered to do him honour, and the speakers indulged in exuberance of sentiment. In acknowledging his reception, the honoured guest botanically remarked, ‘The Field Club is all heart, like winter cabbages.’

Ever setting duty and citizenship before their own eyes, and the eyes of those whom they guided and taught, the Founders of the College were intensely good Englishmen and whole-hearted lovers of their country without any reservations. That the claims of class should ever compete with duty to the State would have been abhorrent to them. Nor were they scared by any bogey of militarism. The members of the College entered heart and soul into the Volunteer movement of 1859, and a corps was formed, one of the earliest of all the volunteer corps, which became the 19th Middlesex. As might be expected, Tom Hughes was the commandant; prominent among the officers were John Martineau, pupil and intimate friend of Charles Kingsley, and the Anglo-Saxon scholar, Dr. Furnivall, most bellicose of men; while Maurice himself became chaplain of the regiment. In these days of conscientious objectors, many might with advantage read a letter which Maurice wrote to his soldier son, afterwards the distinguished military writer, Sir Frederick Maurice, and in which the nobility of the soldier’s calling is set forth by one who had been brought up in tenets of a widely different kind, but had renounced them on the principles which governed his whole life—duty to man and fear of God. The letter is published in the memoir of Sir Frederick Maurice by his son, now also General Maurice, who in the third generation is adding new distinction to a great and honoured name.

During his thirty-six years of parish work in London, Llewelyn Davies had little time to give to the teaching or management of the College; and for the nineteen years when he held the living of Kirkby Lonsdale, he was necessarily cut off from it, save for occasional visits, as was Tom Hughes in his County Court Judgeship at Chester. He had taken a Bible class in early days, in 1866; and after he came back from Westmorland to end his days in retirement in London, again, a very old but still vigorous man, he took the Bible class for a short time. His last words spoken at the College were at our annual supper in the Maurice Hall, in December 1910. He testified that ‘the College had always opened its arms to those who came to it with the idea of not merely getting personal advantage, but of becoming better citizens of their country, and better members of the great human family, and who desired to serve their country and kind to the best of their power’; and he claimed that ‘every one who had been associated with the College, either as teacher or as student, had felt in some degree that they were honoured by their connection with it.’ It probably never entered into his head that the College was honoured by association with him. His speech ended with what he said and felt might be a parting benediction, ‘God bless the Working Men’s College.’ He was never able to come among us again, but as each Founder’s Day came round we remembered him, and he remembered us. And we shall ever remember him and his work. He lies in Hampstead Churchyard, as his master, Maurice, at Highgate. The line of founders has now died out, but their memorial is a living memorial—better and nobler lives of men.

_THE PORTRAIT OF THE BELOVED._

The tall, young, frock-coated librarian came into the ladies’ reading-room with a noiseless, gliding step and an air of apology. He moved a library ladder against the high shelves of calf-bound volumes, ran up the ladder with a gentle swiftness, selected a tall folio from the top shelf and came down again, leaving the room by the half-glass door as unobtrusively as he had entered it.

There were only two people in the reading-room. One was an elderly woman, who sat in front of a splendid fire, dozing, her head to one side. She rested her cheek in her hand. She was elderly and had a disordered, tousled look. Her hair, which had been a colourless fair, and was now an indeterminate grey, was falling loose about her ears. Yet there was a suggestion of lost beauty and grace, something evanescent, something of youth, of the wreck of loveliness, about the drooped head and the huddled figure.

Outside, the streets were miserable. The flagged courtyard beneath the windows showed a dull surface of glimmering wet reflection. No hope of its clearing. The skies were muddy, and beyond the courtyard in the narrow street there passed now and again an oilskinned figure under an umbrella, or a depressed cab-horse, behind an ancient driver and disgracefully rickety vehicle—himself, poor beast, only fit for the knacker’s yard. It was comfortable in the ladies’ reading-room, where very few people came except the two who now occupied it. There was something that appealed to Esther Denison, the younger of the two ladies, in the rooms which had been undisturbed since Lord Edward Fitzgerald had moved about them, his head full of rare dreams, more than a century ago.

That was the Beloved himself in the portrait above the magnificently carved mantelpiece, set amid the backs of the old volumes on their shelves, glimmering out of the soberly rich surroundings with a suggestion of eternal gaiety and tender charm.

Such colour and vivacity! The brown eyes of the portrait drew Esther Denison from her books and manuscripts, in spite of herself. She was working at ‘Middle Irish’ for a University studentship. Now and again she had to tinkle the little bell for a librarian to find something she wanted. There were several librarians, but it was always the same one who answered her bell. She was hardly conscious of him while she thanked him so sweetly for finding what she wanted. She was hardly aware how painstaking he was, how anxious to help. There never was more than a murmured word between them. They observed the rule of silence of the reading-room, although there was never anyone there but Esther Denison, and that queer old Miss Brooke, who in her waking hours read nothing but eighteenth-century memoirs, with now and again a volume of poetry or a romance.

The ladies’ reading-room was a very good place for such work as Esther Denison’s. The quiet was unbroken, because of the thick walls and the retired situation of the great house between the courtyard and the gardens at the back. All the corridors were lined with books,—such books as no one ever asks to read—old calf and leather-bound volumes, which were never taken from their shelves. Those Transactions of Parliament had been there when the Beloved was young and in love, when he went to and fro between this house and the House of Commons in College Green. The deep walls of books seemed to deaden all rumour of life in the ladies’ reading-room, while downstairs the men’s reading-room was crowded, and the swing-doors went from morn till even.

Esther Denison used to forget that there was any presence in the room but her own while she worked. The work absorbed her: she delighted in it, difficult as it was. Hour after hour she would sit there, her delicate Muse-like head bent over the abstruse page. Her face was as soft in colour, as delicately and firmly moulded, as a pink sweet-pea. She wore her fair hair plaited, and twisted like a laurel-wreath around her small head. She never looked round, nor glanced up, when the librarian came in noiselessly. He went away carrying with him an impression of the pure profile, the softly opening lips, the head filleted with pale gold, which drew him to return against his will.

Little by little something of intimacy sprang up between Esther Denison and Miss Brooke. At first the girl had sent the elder woman a pitying glance and thought. She was half crazed or whole crazed, poor thing. She talked in her sleep, and she was often asleep. When she woke up, she talked to herself or to the picture above the fireplace. Some girls might have been afraid of this strange companion. Not so Esther Denison. She had become accustomed to the odd figure sitting in the chair in front of the fire. She would have missed it if it had not been there.

One very grey, very dull afternoon, the fire sank low in the grate while Miss Brooke slept. Esther realised with a start that the room was cold. She had opened a window and the damp chill had entered. It was nearly time for the lights. She stood up and went to replenish the fire, putting on the coal gently, bit by bit, so as not to disturb the sleeper.

Kneeling between her and the fire, Miss Brooke’s face seemed to glimmer out of the dark. The rooms were always full of mysterious shadows. Glancing at her, as a little flame sprang up in the grate and died away, Esther Denison had a queer illusion. The withered face was for the moment the face of a girl, soft and round and purely tinted—not so unlike the face of which she had caught a careless glimpse in the glass as she arranged her hat before coming out that morning. Then the illusion vanished. Miss Brooke woke up with a weary sigh and shivered. She was elderly and cracked-looking again. Esther stirred up the fire and went to the window, which she closed before returning to her work.

Every afternoon, about five, a bright face would appear framed in the glass of the door, and there would come a sharp little tapping on the pane. Then Esther would nod, close her book, and lay it aside; gather her things together and go off home through the wet streets—they were nearly always wet that winter—with her brother, Bobby, who was a student at Trinity College. Bobby would wait, cooling his heels in the corridor, while his sister put on her outdoor things in an inner room of the ladies’ reading-room. That too had its roaring fire and deep, shabby, easy chairs. It also was walled with books. The ordinary reader, whenever she came—which was seldom—seemed unaware of the inner room which you entered by a door that simulated book-shelves, continuing the long line of books by dummy backs, painted on the door. People had occasionally been startled to see that door open.

Esther would go home with her brother to the house in the suburbs and the pretty faded mother, who lamented that she had a blue-stocking for a daughter.

‘You grow old-maidish already,’ she would say. ‘Your indifference has cooled off the men your pretty face attracted. You will be old before your time, working in that fusty room at something that will never be any good to you. Men hate a blue-stocking.’

Esther only laughed. She was very fond of the pretty complaining mother with whom she had so little in common. She merely remarked that the reading-room was the most comfortable place in Dublin during these winter days. By and by, when the spring came, she would go out into the fields. It did not matter to her about men. She was only interested in them when they were grey and scholarly—except, of course, Bobby, who was her darling and always stood up for her. She had not met the young man who mattered to her.

As she said it she remembered the face of the portrait in the reading-room, and her pulses quickened a little. Men like that did not live nowadays.

‘King Pandion he is dead,
All his friends are lapped in lead.’

Her lips curled a little scornfully. There were none like the Beloved in these prosperous days of a peaceful dullness. She remembered his eyes, brown as salmon-pools in their amber depths, his quick sideways smile, the light on his brown head. Why, there were moments in the high dim room full of shadows when the portrait had looked alive! It was a brilliant bit of painting—the green of the cravat, the scarlet of the waistcoat, the brown face with the touch of carmine in the cheeks. Odd, how they lit the room!

Every morning now she returned to the reading-room with an ever growing sense of pleasant anticipation. No matter how early she arrived Miss Brooke was already there, in her accustomed place. If another reader came by any chance, Miss Brooke would go off into the inner room and remain there till the intruder had gone. Her meals were brought to her in that inner room from some place outside. They were very light meals—tea, a boiled egg, a little fruit, some hot cakes.

The time came when, with an air of friendliness, she brought a cup of tea and placed it by Esther’s elbow.

‘You forget to go out for your lunch,’ she said. ‘That is not good for the young. You spend too much time over those queer characters. You will lose the brightness of your eyes; your back will bend. I like to look up and see you there when I am awake. But⸺I was once as pretty as you. Do not come here too much. This place is full of dreams. _I_ have found it worth while to give up all things, but⸺’

She would be quite sensible and coherent for a while; then she would wander off into something unintelligible.

While they were talking one day the librarian came in. He greeted Miss Brooke in a murmur as he passed on to find the thing he needed. He seemed to need many books from those otherwise undisturbed shelves.

‘That is a pleasant young man,’ Miss Brooke said as he went out, closing the door behind him. ‘He is in and out here a great deal since you began to read here, much more than formerly.’

She fixed her rather mad, bright eyes on Esther, who, to her annoyance, felt the colour come to her cheeks; she always coloured very easily.

‘Ah, that is right,’ Miss Brooke said. ‘Mr. Tyrrell is an excellent young man. You do not know him. I must make you known to each other. I was afraid that you were going to follow me. You are so exactly like a girl I once knew. I am disappointed in you, but it is best so. One should grasp at the happiness near at hand, even though grace and beauty—and more than that—are dead a hundred years.’

She stopped suddenly as though she listened, and went on again.

‘What was I talking about?’ she asked. ‘My poor head! It is full moon. I always talk nonsense when there is a full moon. Is that your brother come for you, my dear?’

It was not Bobby. It was the librarian. He brought a message from Bobby, who was unable to come for her. She was to take a cab home with her books and papers.

Having delivered his message the librarian waited while Esther put on her hat. She dressed very prettily, in the picturesque fashion of a day which had an artistic movement all to itself. Her cloak and flat cap of green velvet were like the sheathing of a flower. As she came from the inner room so attired, the librarian’s eyes fluttered as though he had seen a vision.

‘I will carry these for you,’ he said, lifting the parcel of books.

Miss Brooke did not appear to notice. She had a queer way of suddenly leaving realities behind. The librarian replenished the fire. She did not seem to notice the noise he made. Her eyes were fixed on the picture above the fireplace.

‘What time does she go home?’ Esther Denison asked, as they went out into the dim corridor where the lights were not yet on. ‘It seems so lonely, leaving her there.’

‘As a matter of fact’—the librarian had the slightest hesitation of speech, which gave him the air of a gentle deference—‘she does not go home. I do not believe she has any home to go to.’

‘Then she lives here?’

‘I believe she sleeps in front of the fire. It was a long time before we discovered that she remained here at night, after every one was gone. When we discovered—it is an irregularity of course—but—we wink at it. We could not discover that she had anywhere to go to or any friends. She does no harm. She is always about—as though she has just arrived—when the servants begin to arrange the rooms in the morning. She is not really mad, you know. She has only hallucinations. She has been coming here so long that she seems to belong to the house.’

‘It is a beautiful house to belong to,’ Esther said, as though she were talking to herself. ‘I am glad you let her stay.’

A little later a thought came to her. Supposing Miss Brooke were to be taken ill in the night? Some one, she supposed, slept on the premises. Only the front of the house—the main block, in which had been the reception-rooms—was used as library and reading-rooms. There was the underground story, in which no servant would sleep nowadays; but there was also abundant room at the back, or at the top of the house—not accessible from this part. She had already ascertained that there was no communication between these rooms and a great portion of the old house. The rooms suddenly ceased in a wall of books. The communication must have been blocked up.

She was working very hard at this time. The annoying thing was that, as the examination came near, she began to find it difficult to concentrate her thoughts. Perhaps she had been working too hard. It could not be that ‘Middle Irish’ was losing its fascination for her; but, little by little, she found that something was coming between her and the folios and manuscripts. The something was—it took the shape of—the portrait of the Beloved. Once or twice she fell asleep, just as Miss Brooke did, and slept, her face upon her folded arms, amid the scattered learning on the table.

‘The room was so hot,’ she said apologetically to the librarian, who had wakened her and seemed more perturbed about her drowsiness than need be.

‘You are overworking,’ he answered, with a sharpness in his voice. ‘You will have to give it up, or have a nervous breakdown.’

She forgot to wonder at the something like anger in his voice.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’ she said, ‘so near the exam.! Afterwards, I shall take a good rest. I shall read nothing but novels for a month.’

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘There are cobwebs here that get into people’s brains. Look at Miss Brooke! You must go away into the country and not touch a book. The Spring will be here soon. Although it is wet to-night there is a west wind that brings the fields.’

‘I must get through my exam. first,’ she said. ‘Afterwards, I dare say it will be best for me.’

‘You will break down before,’ he replied gloomily, and she was frightened.

There came a few fine, beautiful days, when she went out and wandered in country lanes and by the sea. The librarian was taking a holiday at this time and sometimes she encountered him, and they walked together and returned to town together. The larks were singing by this time, and here and there in the fields there was a daisy. There were authentic tidings of spring blown down from the mountains and in from the fields and woods. She had listened at last to the librarian—their intimacy had grown in those country walks—and had consented to lay aside her work till the eve of the studentship exam., because she felt that she was going to fail if she stuck at it. But he could not know, she said to herself, the strain it was upon her to keep away from her work in the reading-room. She had been so happy there. There was something missing even in the fields and by the sea.

A week passed, and one evening she dined alone, her mother and Bobby having gone to a theatre. Her dinner was but a pretence. She remembered that the ladies’ reading-room was open till nine o’clock. It tempted her like a forbidden fruit. She could get in an hour’s work there while they were at the theatre. Her heart began to beat hard as the thought came to her of the walk through the wet streets, the lit windows of the great house beyond the courtyard, the hall through which she would pass so quickly, the stairs, the narrow corridor between the books. Then the ladies’ reading-room, so good after the cheerless street, its fire, the brown books with their flash of gilding, Miss Brooke sitting by the fire, the portrait—it would flash a look of welcome as she came in, wondering why she had stayed away so long.

She loved her work, and she had missed it. It was lucky Mr. Tyrrell was out of town or he might have called, as he had called once or twice lately, with a book or some other pretext for coming, and had hindered her. The rest had done her good. It was so good to be getting back to work, to be so keen.

Her pulses beat in her ears as she hurried on her way. She arrived at her destination. As she passed through the hall, she had an absurd feeling that Archie Tyrrell—she knew his name was Archie by this time—might meet her and turn her back. He had taken a masterful way with her lately. If by any unforeseen chance he should have come back!

She glanced fearfully at the swing-door of the general reading-room. Then she remembered. He was not on duty in the evenings, even if he had been in town. Few readers came in the evenings. It was a concession to poor students engaged in the daytime that kept the library and reading-room open at night till nine o’clock. She hurried along the corridor, joy in her blood and giving wings to her feet. Through the half-glass door she saw that the room was dim beyond. There was only firelight in it. She was glad. That meant she should find only Miss Brooke. The last day she had been there a couple of girls had come in: had asked for Swinburne’s poems and Rossetti’s, and had hovered over them like butterflies, dipping into a page here, a page there, till they remembered an appointment and went away. She had felt a sense of resentment against them as intruders into a place which had become so strangely dear to her.

Miss Brooke was not there, though her chair stood in front of the fire as usual. She must only just have left it, for the leather back was warm. Oddly enough, now that she was come, Esther had no inclination to work. She sat down in Miss Brooke’s chair. She leant back, looking up at the portrait. It seemed to lean towards her, smiling at her. It was as though the sun had come out.

Had she fallen asleep? She awoke with the strange sense of its being night and every one in the world asleep. The fire had gone low, was almost out. There was a little glimmer in the darkness, which she knew somehow came from the street-lamps beyond the courtyard. Somewhere there was a faint murmuring as of voices at a distance—in the rooms, not out-of-doors.

She was suddenly frightened—of the old house and all its ghosts. She remembered the Beloved. With him no woman need be afraid.

She turned to where the portrait hung for comfort; but she could see nothing. She stood up, groping in the darkness.

Somewhere a clock struck two great strokes in the silence of the sleeping town.

Where was Miss Brooke? She felt her way towards the wall of books, still but half awake. They still burnt oil-lamps in the library: electric light was not yet come into general use. She had no matches to strike a light. The darkness was very baffling. The furniture seemed to get in her way as though it were something animate that would keep her back.

At last she found the book-shelves. She groped along them for the door. It was slightly ajar. There were the whispering voices not far away.

She passed into the inner room. To her amazement, in the solid wall of books before her there was a door, which stood ajar. Beyond it was a light. The voices were in the room beyond the open door.

She went forward quickly, striking against a table as she went. Something fell with a loud noise. The whispering—it was not much more than that—went on undisturbed.