Zuleika Dobson Part 19

The G.o.ds were painfully anxious, now, to humour him in trifles. His behaviour in the great emergency had so impressed them at a distance that they rather dreaded meeting him anon at close quarters. They rather wished they had not uncaged, last night, the two black owls. Too late.

What they had done they had done.

That faint monotonous sound in the stillness of the night--the Duke remembered it now. What he had thought to be only his fancy had been his death-knell, wafted to him along uncharted waves of ether, from the battlements of Tankerton. It had ceased at daybreak. He wondered now that he had not guessed its meaning. And he was glad that he had not.

He was thankful for the peace that had been granted to him, the joyous arrogance in which he had gone to bed and got up for breakfast. He valued these mercies the more for the great tragic irony that came of them. Aye, and he was inclined to blame the G.o.ds for not having kept him still longer in the dark and so made the irony still more awful. Why had they not caused the telegram to be delayed in transmission? They ought to have let him go and riddle Zuleika with his scorn and his indifference. They ought to have let him hurl through her his defiance of them. Art aside, they need not have grudged him that excursion.

He could not, he told himself, face Zuleika now. As artist, he saw that there was irony enough left over to make the meeting a fine one. As theologian, he did not hold her responsible for his destiny. But as a man, after what she had done to him last night, and before what he had to do for her to-day, he would not go out of his way to meet her. Of course, he would not actually avoid her. To seem to run away from her were beneath his dignity. But, if he did meet her, what in heaven's name should he say to her? He remembered his promise to lunch with The MacQuern, and shuddered. She would be there. Death, as he had said, cancelled all engagements. A very simple way out of the difficulty would be to go straight to the river. No, that would be like running away. It couldn't be done.

Hardly had he rejected the notion when he had a glimpse of a female figure coming quickly round the corner--a glimpse that sent him walking quickly away, across the road, towards Turl Street, blushing violently.

Had she seen him? he asked himself. And had she seen that he saw her?

He heard her running after him. He did not look round, he quickened his pace. She was gaining on him. Involuntarily, he ran--ran like a hare, and, at the corner of Turl Street, rose like a trout, saw the pavement rise at him, and fell, with a bang, p.r.o.ne.

Let it be said at once that in this matter the G.o.ds were absolutely blameless. It is true they had decreed that a piece of orange-peel should be thrown down this morning at the corner of Turl Street. But the Master of Balliol, not the Duke, was the person they had destined to slip on it. You must not imagine that they think out and appoint everything that is to befall us, down to the smallest detail. Generally, they just draw a sort of broad outline, and leave us to fill it in according to our taste. Thus, in the matters of which this book is record, it was they who made the Warden invite his grand-daughter to Oxford, and invite the Duke to meet her on the evening of her arrival.

And it was they who prompted the Duke to die for her on the following (Tuesday) afternoon. They had intended that he should execute his resolve after, or before, the boat-race of that evening. But an oversight upset this plan. They had forgotten on Monday night to uncage the two black owls; and so it was necessary that the Duke's death should be postponed. They accordingly prompted Zuleika to save him. For the rest, they let the tragedy run its own course--merely putting in a felicitous touch here and there, or vetoing a superfluity, such as that Katie should open Zuleika's letter. It was no part of their scheme that the Duke should mistake Melisande for her mistress, or that he should run away from her, and they were genuinely sorry when he, instead of the Master of Balliol, came to grief over the orange-peel.

Them, however, the Duke cursed as he fell; them again as he raised himself on one elbow, giddy and sore; and when he found that the woman bending over him was not she whom he dreaded, but her innocent maid, it was against them that he almost foamed at the mouth.

"Monsieur le Duc has done himself harm--no?" panted Melisande. "Here is a letter from Miss Dobson's part. She say to me 'Give it him with your own hand.'"

The Duke received the letter and, sitting upright, tore it to shreds, thus confirming a suspicion which Melisande had conceived at the moment when he took to his heels, that all English n.o.blemen are mad, but mad, and of a madness.

"Nom de Dieu," she cried, wringing her hands, "what shall I tell to Mademoiselle?"

"Tell her--" the Duke choked back a phrase of which the memory would have shamed his last hours. "Tell her," he subst.i.tuted, "that you have seen Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage," and limped quickly away down the Turl.

Both his hands had been abraded by the fall. He tended them angrily with his handkerchief. Mr. Druce, the chemist, had anon the privilege of bathing and plastering them, also of balming and binding the right knee and the left shin. "Might have been a very nasty accident, your Grace,"

he said. "It was," said the Duke. Mr. Druce concurred.

Nevertheless, Mr. Druce's remark sank deep. The Duke thought it quite likely that the G.o.ds had intended the accident to be fatal, and that only by his own skill and lightness in falling had he escaped the ignominy of dying in full flight from a lady's-maid. He had not, you see, lost all sense of free-will. While Mr. Druce put the finishing touches to his shin, "I am utterly purposed," he said to himself, "that for this death of mine I will choose my own manner and my own--well, not 'time' exactly, but whatever moment within my brief span of life shall seem aptest to me. Unberufen," he added, lightly tapping Mr. Druce's counter.

The sight of some bottles of Cold Mixture on that hospitable board reminded him of a painful fact. In the clash of the morning's excitements, he had hardly felt the gross ailment that was on him.

He became fully conscious of it now, and there leapt in him a hideous doubt: had he escaped a violent death only to succ.u.mb to "natural causes"? He had never hitherto had anything the matter with him, and thus he belonged to the worst, the most apprehensive, cla.s.s of patients.

He knew that a cold, were it neglected, might turn malignant; and he had a vision of himself gripped suddenly in the street by internal agonies--a sympathetic crowd, an ambulance, his darkened bedroom; local doctor making hopelessly wrong diagnosis; eminent specialists served up hot by special train, commending local doctor's treatment, but shaking their heads and refusing to say more than "He has youth on his side"; a slight rally at sunset; the end. All this flashed through his mind. He quailed. There was not a moment to lose. He frankly confessed to Mr.

Druce that he had a cold.

Mr. Druce, trying to insinuate by his manner that this fact had not been obvious, suggested the Mixture--a teaspoonful every two hours. "Give me some now, please, at once," said the Duke.

He felt magically better for the draught. He handled the little gla.s.s lovingly, and eyed the bottle. "Why not two teaspoonfuls every hour?"

he suggested, with an eagerness almost dipsomaniacal. But Mr. Druce was respectfully firm against that. The Duke yielded. He fancied, indeed, that the G.o.ds had meant him to die of an overdose.

Still, he had a craving for more. Few though his hours were, he hoped the next two would pa.s.s quickly. And, though he knew Mr. Druce could be trusted to send the bottle round to his rooms immediately, he preferred to carry it away with him. He slipped it into the breast-pocket of his coat, almost heedless of the slight extrusion it made there.

Just as he was about to cross the High again, on his way home, a butcher's cart dashed down the slope, recklessly driven. He stepped well back on the pavement, and smiled a sardonic smile. He looked to right and to left, carefully gauging the traffic. Some time elapsed before he deemed the road clear enough for transit.

Safely across, he encountered a figure that seemed to loom up out of the dim past. Oover! Was it but yesternight that Oover dined with him? With the sensation of a man groping among archives, he began to apologise to the Rhodes Scholar for having left him so abruptly at the Junta. Then, presto!--as though those musty archives were changed to a crisp morning paper agog with terrific head-lines--he remembered the awful resolve of Oover, and of all young Oxford.

"Of course," he asked, with a lightness that hardly hid his dread of the answer, "you have dismissed the notion you were toying with when I left you?"

Oover's face, like his nature, was as sensitive as it was ma.s.sive, and it instantly expressed his pain at the doubt cast on his high seriousness. "Duke," he asked, "d'you take me for a skunk?"

"Without pretending to be quite sure what a skunk is," said the Duke, "I take you to be all that it isn't. And the high esteem in which I hold you is the measure for me of the loss that your death would be to America and to Oxford."

Oover blushed. "Duke" he said "that's a bully testimonial. But don't worry. America can turn out millions just like me, and Oxford can have as many of them as she can hold. On the other hand, how many of YOU can be turned out, as per sample, in England? Yet you choose to destroy yourself. You avail yourself of the Unwritten Law. And you're right, Sir. Love transcends all."

"But does it? What if I told you I had changed my mind?"

"Then, Duke," said Oover, slowly, "I should believe that all those yarns I used to hear about the British aristocracy were true, after all. I should aver that you were not a white man. Leading us on like that, and then--Say, Duke! Are you going to die to-day, or not?"

"As a matter of fact, I am, but--"

"Shake!"

"But--"

Oover wrung the Duke's hand, and was pa.s.sing on. "Stay!" he was adjured.

"Sorry, unable. It's just turning eleven o'clock, and I've a lecture.

While life lasts, I'm bound to respect Rhodes' intentions." The conscientious Scholar hurried away.

The Duke wandered down the High, taking counsel with himself. He was ashamed of having so utterly forgotten the mischief he had wrought at large. At dawn he had vowed to undo it. Undo it he must. But the task was not a simple one now. If he could say "Behold, I take back my word.

I spurn Miss Dobson, and embrace life," it was possible that his example would suffice. But now that he could only say "Behold, I spurn Miss Dobson, and will not die for her, but I am going to commit suicide, all the same," it was clear that his words would carry very little force.

Also, he saw with pain that they placed him in a somewhat ludicrous position. His end, as designed yesterday, had a large and simple grandeur. So had his recantation of it. But this new compromise between the two things had a fumbled, a feeble, an ign.o.ble look. It seemed to combine all the disadvantages of both courses. It stained his honour without prolonging his life. Surely, this was a high price to pay for snubbing Zuleika... Yes, he must revert without more ado to his first scheme. He must die in the manner that he had blazoned forth. And he must do it with a good grace, none knowing he was not glad; else the action lost all dignity. True, this was no way to be a saviour. But only by not dying at all could he have set a really potent example.... He remembered the look that had come into Oover's eyes just now at the notion of his unfaith. Perhaps he would have been the mock, not the saviour, of Oxford. Better dishonour than death, maybe. But, since die he must, he must die not belittling or tarnishing the name of Tanville-Tankerton.

Within these bounds, however, he must put forth his full might to avert the general catastrophe--and to punish Zuleika nearly well enough, after all, by intercepting that vast nosegay from her outstretched hands and her distended nostrils. There was no time to be lost, then. But he wondered, as he paced the grand curve between St. Mary's and Magdalen Bridge, just how was he to begin?

Down the flight of steps from Queen's came lounging an average undergraduate.

"Mr. Smith," said the Duke, "a word with you."

"But my name is not Smith," said the young man.

"Generically it is," replied the Duke. "You are Smith to all intents and purposes. That, indeed, is why I address you. In making your acquaintance, I make a thousand acquaintances. You are a short cut to knowledge. Tell me, do you seriously think of drowning yourself this afternoon?"

"Rather," said the undergraduate.

"A meiosis in common use, equivalent to 'Yes, a.s.suredly,'" murmured the Duke. "And why," he then asked, "do you mean to do this?"

"Why? How can you ask? Why are YOU going to do it?"

"The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play. Please answer my question, to the best of your ability."

"Well, because I can't live without her. Because I want to prove my love for her. Because--"

"One reason at a time please," said the Duke, holding up his hand. "You can't live without her? Then I am to a.s.sume that you look forward to dying?"

"Rather."

"You are truly happy in that prospect?"

"Yes. Rather."