Chapter XXI: A Blow to Newnham

Lucy saw no more of Pamela until after Hall. She thought she had escaped--quite escaped. After all, Pamela had not seen much; she had only seen Wyatt Edgell talking to her at the gate. Other girls talked to men at the gate--brothers, cousins, even coaches sometimes--when they had anything particular to say that couldn't wait for the proper opportunity, but lovers never.

It had gone so far that Lucy was obliged to admit that he was a lover. She admitted with a sigh what other girls--what Pamela Gwatkin, what Maria Stubbs--would have given anything--everything, even renounced the higher culture--to have been able to admit.

Capability Stubbs was walking with Pamela when they came across the lovers at the gate of Newnham. Capability took in the whole scene in a moment: perhaps she took in rather more. She coloured it with her own vivid imagination; she surrounded it with an atmosphere entirely her own. There was not a detail in the picture that was not brought out distinctly by this mental process and stamped upon her memory.

She was thinking about it all the time she was at Hall. She had no appetite for her dinner. She couldn't get the picture of the lovers parting at the gate out of her eyes. She sat staring across the soup, and the entrée, and the gooseberry-tart, at the white wall opposite. Perhaps it was all photographed there: the manly figure with the great square shoulders; they were stooping now, and the head was bent--it was almost touching Lucy's hair--and his eyes were looking into hers, and his lips were smiling----Pah! what is the use of describing the lips of another girl's lover?

Miss Stubbs broke off abruptly, and began to press the gooseberry-tart upon her neighbour. She had quite forgotten until now that it was her duty to look after Pamela. All the girls who go in for a Tripos are under special surveillance during the time of their examination, and a keeper is deputed to watch over them and see that they take their food properly and go to bed at ten o'clock. It was Maria Stubbs' duty to look after Pamela. The soup had gone by and the meat, and she had never once thought about her charge. Perhaps she hadn't eaten a morsel. She was looking white and hollow-eyed, and had that starved appearance peculiar to scholars whose brains absorb all the material intended for the body. She did not look as if she had eaten a good dinner, as if she had gone conscientiously through the _menu_. In point of fact, Pamela had only trifled with her plate, and finding that her keeper was not watching, had not eaten a morsel, and now there was only the gooseberry-pie left.

Maria Stubbs pressed the pie upon her with tears in her eyes. She entreated her, if she valued her place in the Tripos, if the honour of Newnham was dear to her, to partake of that pie; but Pamela was not to be persuaded.

Conscience-stricken, Maria got up from the table and retired to her room. Half an hour later she emerged from it with a tray, and hurried down the corridor to Pamela's door. She didn't find her working as she expected--it was the very last night for work; to-morrow the examination would be over. She found her sitting at the window looking out at the sunset.

Pamela was not generally fond of sunsets, and she never sat at the window like other girls. She had no time to spare for sunsets, and she preferred the Windsor chair at her writing-table to any other chair in the room. It was empty now, and her books were closed, and her papers were all put tidily away. She had quite done with them, and she was looking out of the window.

Maria put down the cup of cocoa and the cake she had brought on a little table by Pamela's side, and watched her while she took it. She took it obediently. It was less trouble to take it than refuse it, but she didn't put any heart in it.

'It will all be over soon, dear,' Maria said by way of encouragement.

'Yes,' Pamela said wearily, and she looked out at the white gate which someone had left open. Perhaps she was thinking that she would soon pass through it, and her life here would be ended.

Maria looked in the same direction; but the gate brought something else to her mind, and she forgot all about Pamela and the cocoa.

'Oh, the pity of it!' she murmured; and her eyes lingered on the spot where Wyatt Edgell had last stood.

'The pity of what?' Pamela said impatiently. She was nervous, irritable, over-strung, and everything jarred upon her.

'Nothing, dear, nothing,' Maria said soothingly. 'I was only thinking of the man that girl is fooling. Oh, what idiots men are! Fancy a man--a real man, not a fool--throwing himself away upon that pink-and-white baby!'

Pamela was listening with an abstracted air, but the colour crept up under her skin, and her lip curled.

'You mean the St. Benedict's man?' she said, smiling with a sort of contempt.

'Yes; the man that was talking to her at the gate. Oh, Pamela, did you see his face?'

'Ye--e--s; I saw his face. I have often seen him before. He is Eric's friend. I have known him ever since he has been up.'

'He has known you--you, Pamela--for years, and yet he has chosen her?'

'There is no accounting for taste--at least, for men's taste,' Pamela said scornfully; but she did not look at the girl she was speaking to; she looked out at the sunset.

'I tell you what it is,' Miss Stubbs said with an air of conviction. 'He has been dreaming all his life about the ideal woman, and what his fancy has painted her; and with this myth, this creation of his own heated imagination in his mind, he has met this--this baby, and he has invested her with all the attributes of his ideal. It isn't Lucy Rae he's in love with; it's the ideal woman that he has been all his life imagining.'

Pamela smiled in a dreary way, but she still watched the sunset.

'Perhaps the circumstances--the very unusual circumstances--under which he first met her had something to do with it,' Maria went on in a lower voice. She was thinking of that scene in St. Benedict's that Lucy had described to her. 'Oh, you don't know what a meeting it was, Pam!'

'Yes,' said Pamela, with a little break in her voice, 'I know what it must have been to her; but no one can tell what it was to him.'

'You have heard, then! How did you hear?' Maria asked breathlessly.

'She told me. She told me the first night; she could not sleep, and I found her wandering about the corridor in a panic of fear.'

'Did she tell you all--quite all?'

'She told me everything,' Pamela said; and again her lips quivered.

'Has she told you she has promised to marry him?'

'No, she has not told me that,' Pamela said with that rising tell-tale colour in her cheeks, and a hard steely light in her gray-blue eyes, which were no longer watching the sunset; 'but I don't think she will marry him.'

'I am sure she will not marry him,' said Maria hotly; 'she will fool him and ruin his life. She is too great a coward to marry him!'

'She would be a brave woman to marry him, knowing what she knows,' Pamela said with the hot blood in her face again; 'but I don't think she will spoil his life.'

'Oh, you don't know! How should you know, you who are made on such large lines? He has placed the keeping of his life--think of it: of his life, body and soul!--in her hands. He believes that nothing but the love of a woman can save him; and he has implored her--that poor thing--to be a tower of strength to him.'

'Her!' Pamela murmured with her scornful lips, and the rising colour in her face.

'Yes, dear, he has asked _her_. He has made the mistake that men always do make: he has asked the wrong woman. He ought to have asked you or me. I don't think we should have failed him, Pam. We should not stop at the tower; we should have gone down--down into the mud and the mire. There is no depth so deep where our love would not have followed him, and we should have lifted him up. I am quite sure we should have lifted him up; we should have dragged him out of the very jaws of death and hell itself, if we had perished in doing it. Oh, I am sure that our love would have saved him! We should not have stopped at the tower.'

Maria stopped, not at the tower, but for want of breath. The red sunset light had quite faded out of the sky, and the gray night was closing in, and already the shadows were filling the silent room.

Pamela drew back from the window into the shadow.

'No,' she said hoarsely, 'we should not have stopped at the tower.'

The next day was the last, the very last, day of the examination for the Mathematical Tripos. It was the last, the very last, opportunity of making up for all the failures and mistakes of the past week. The front place of the year was to be won or lost on that last day. Its result would be final, quite final.

No wonder Maria Stubbs' conscience smote her when she remembered how she had neglected Pamela at Hall the previous day. She tried to make up for it at breakfast. She plied her with eggs and ham and porridge, but Pamela had no appetite for these dainties; she implored her with tears in her eyes to consume at least a spoonful of porridge, but Pamela was not to be moved. She went fasting to the exam., and Maria went with her so far as the door. She went quite early--girls always do go earlier than the men; they are always in their places, calm and collected, five minutes before the time, when the men generally arrive breathless at the door just as the hour is striking.

As Pamela walked up King's Parade in the sweet June sunshine, Wyatt Edgell passed her on the way from St. Benedict's to the Senate House. He was swinging along at a great pace, with the bearing of a man who was assured of an easy victory. His eyes were shining and his lips were smiling as they had smiled at Lucy. He had no eyes for any other woman; he passed the Newnham girls without seeing them. His mind was full of the ideal woman who had promised to meet him in the lane when the exam. was over.

Maria Stubbs remembered the tower, and flushed scarlet; but Pamela shivered. She was looking dreadfully pale when Maria left her at the door. She would have liked to have gone in with her and sat by her side and held her pens, or picked up the blotting-paper, or collected her papers; but the examiners were inexorable, and Maria came sadly away.

Pamela pulled off her gloves and glanced over her paper; it was about as nice a paper as the last day's paper of the Mathematical Tripos usually is. There were several questions that Pamela had got at her fingers' ends; they would have puzzled the men, doubtless, but to a Newnham girl, who had worked for her Tripos as conscientiously as Pamela had worked, they were a mere bagatelle. She pulled off her gloves and glanced over her paper, and began work in the quiet, methodical way in which the students of women's colleges take their examinations. There was no heat, no excitement, no hurry whatever, nothing to disturb or bewilder.

She ought to have done uncommonly well with those nicely fitting questions; but instead of working she sat staring at her paper. The examiner, walking up and down the room, between the tables, noticed her abstraction. Once he paused and asked her if she was not feeling well; and then suddenly it dawned upon her that the time was going on, and that she had not yet begun. She had never felt it so hard to begin before; she had never felt that strange reluctance, like a clog upon her memory, that made the wheels of that fine bit of machinery drag heavily.

The reluctance--it was nothing more--grew and grew upon her. The questions were quite easy; she could have answered them with the smallest effort, but her mind refused to grapple with them.

It was like bringing a horse to the water; the water was cool and delightful, and it had only to stoop and drink; but it would not stoop. Pamela could do nothing as she sat there with the time slipping by but think of the man she had met in King's Parade, and wonder how he was getting on at the Senate House over the way with the paper that lay before her. She followed his progress question by question, and when she had come to the end of the paper she gave a sigh of relief--a big sigh, for the examiner who was at the other end of the room heard it, and the girls sitting opposite heard it and looked up.

They saw a very common sight in an examination-room--a girl with a gray dead face slipping off a chair to the floor. Pamela had fainted.

They brought her to, somehow, though everybody was begrudging the time she spent upon her; and then somebody took her back in a fly to Newnham.

It was an awful blow to Newnham. Everybody reproached Maria Stubbs. She hadn't half looked after her. Nothing that anybody said hurt poor Maria like the prickings of her own conscience. She was guilty in the matter of that last Hall. She had forgotten all about her charge until the gooseberry-pie!

She nursed Pamela tenderly all through that wretched day. She did what she could to atone for her past neglect. She brought her little messes of Liebig and arrowroot every hour; she watched beside her with the patient fidelity of a dog, while Pamela would have given worlds to be left alone in her darkened room. She locked the door against her officious nurse once, when she had gone out to fetch the everlasting beef-tea, and Maria made such a ridiculous noise outside, that threatened to bring all the Dons upon her, that she was obliged to get up and open it again. There was nothing to be done but to turn her face to the wall, and let the faithful creature potter about her to her heart's content.