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_ That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford
station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures
in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed
idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon
sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards
they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that
antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet
whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.
At the door of the first-class waiting-room, aloof and venerable,
stood the Warden of Judas. An ebon pillar of tradition seemed he, in
his garb of old-fashioned cleric. Aloft, between the wide brim of his
silk hat and the white extent of his shirt-front, appeared those eyes
which hawks, that nose which eagles, had often envied. He supported
his years on an ebon stick. He alone was worthy of the background.
Came a whistle from the distance. The breast of an engine was
descried, and a long train curving after it, under a flight of smoke.
It grew and grew. Louder and louder, its noise foreran it. It became a
furious, enormous monster, and, with an instinct for safety, all men
receded from the platform's margin. (Yet came there with it, unknown
to them, a danger far more terrible than itself.) Into the station it
came blustering, with cloud and clangour. Ere it had yet stopped, the
door of one carriage flew open, and from it, in a white travelling
dress, in a toque a-twinkle with fine diamonds, a lithe and radiant
creature slipped nimbly down to the platform.
A cynosure indeed! A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many
hearts lost to her. The Warden of Judas himself had mounted on his
nose a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Him espying, the nymph darted in
his direction. The throng made way for her. She was at his side.
"Grandpapa!" she cried, and kissed the old man on either cheek. (Not a
youth there but would have bartered fifty years of his future for that
salute.)
"My dear Zuleika," he said, "welcome to Oxford! Have you no luggage?"
"Heaps!" she answered. "And a maid who will find it."
"Then," said the Warden, "let us drive straight to College." He
offered her his arm, and they proceeded slowly to the entrance. She
chatted gaily, blushing not in the long avenue of eyes she passed
through. All the youths, under her spell, were now quite oblivious of
the relatives they had come to meet. Parents, sisters, cousins, ran
unclaimed about the platform. Undutiful, all the youths were forming a
serried suite to their enchantress. In silence they followed her. They
saw her leap into the Warden's landau, they saw the Warden seat
himself upon her left. Nor was it until the landau was lost to sight
that they turned--how slowly, and with how bad a grace!--to look for
their relatives.
Through those slums which connect Oxford with the world, the landau
rolled on towards Judas. Not many youths occurred, for nearly all--it
was the Monday of Eights Week--were down by the river, cheering the
crews. There did, however, come spurring by, on a polo-pony, a very
splendid youth. His straw hat was encircled with a riband of blue and
white, and he raised it to the Warden.
"That," said the Warden, "is the Duke of Dorset, a member of my
College. He dines at my table to-night."
Zuleika, turning to regard his Grace, saw that he had not reined in
and was not even glancing back at her over his shoulder. She gave a
little start of dismay, but scarcely had her lips pouted ere they
curved to a smile--a smile with no malice in its corners.
As the landau rolled into "the Corn," another youth--a pedestrian, and
very different--saluted the Warden. He wore a black jacket, rusty and
amorphous. His trousers were too short, and he himself was too short:
almost a dwarf. His face was as plain as his gait was undistinguished.
He squinted behind spectacles.
"And who is that?" asked Zuleika.
A deep flush overspread the cheek of the Warden. "That," he said, "is
also a member of Judas. His name, I believe, is Noaks."
"Is he dining with us to-night?" asked Zuleika.
"Certainly not," said the Warden. "Most decidedly not."
Noaks, unlike the Duke, had stopped for an ardent retrospect. He gazed
till the landau was out of his short sight; then, sighing, resumed his
solitary walk.
The landau was rolling into "the Broad," over that ground which had
once blackened under the fagots lit for Latimer and Ridley. It rolled
past the portals of Balliol and of Trinity, past the Ashmolean. From
those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the
high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger
in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual
glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.
A moment later, a certain old don emerged from Blackwell's, where he
had been buying books. Looking across the road, he saw, to his
amazement, great beads of perspiration glistening on the brows of
those Emperors. He trembled, and hurried away. That evening, in Common
Room, he told what he had seen; and no amount of polite scepticism
would convince him that it was but the hallucination of one who had
been reading too much Mommsen. He persisted that he had seen what he
described. It was not until two days had elapsed that some credence
was accorded him.
Yes, as the landau rolled by, sweat started from the brows of the
Emperors. They, at least, foresaw the peril that was overhanging
Oxford, and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be
remembered to their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently
of them. In their lives we know, they were infamous, some of them--
"nihil non commiserunt stupri, saevitiae, impietatis." But are they
too little punished, after all? Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and
inexorably to heat and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the
rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the
abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers,
they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but
with crowns of snow; who made themselves even with the gods, they are
by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles. It
is but a little way down the road that the two Bishops perished for
their faith, and even now we do never pass the spot without a tear for
them. Yet how quickly they died in the flames! To these Emperors, for
whom none weeps, time will give no surcease. Surely, it is sign of
some grace in them that they rejoiced not, this bright afternoon, in
the evil that was to befall the city of their penance. _
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