The New Warden Part 52

"I am better already," she said, and the very faintest smile was on her face. "I am rather tired, but I shall be all right to-morrow. All I want is a good night's sleep. I want to sleep for hours, and I shall sleep for hours now that I have seen you."

A knock came on the door.

"They are looking for you, dear," said Lady Dashwood.

The Warden slowly rose from his seat. "I must go now, Lena," he said, "but I shall come in again the last thing. I shall come in without knocking if I may, because I hope you will be asleep, and I don't want to wake you."

"Very well," she said smiling. "You'll find me asleep. I feel so calm, so happy."

He bent down and kissed her and then went to the door. She turned her head and looked after him. Louise was at the door.

"Monsieur Bingham is arrived," she said; "I regret to have disturbed Monsieur."

The Warden walked slowly down the corridor. There was something that he dreaded, something that was going to happen--the first meeting of the eyes--the first moment when May Dashwood would look at him, knowing all that had happened!

He pa.s.sed the table again on which lay his letters. He would look through all that pile of correspondence after Bingham had gone.

Robinson was hovering at the stairhead. "Mr. Bingham is in the drawing-room, sir."

"Alone?" asked the Warden.

"Mrs. Dashwood is there, sir," said Robinson.

"How have you arranged the table?" asked the Warden.

"I've put Mrs. Dashwood close on your right, sir," said Robinson, secretly amazed at the question; "Mr. Bingham on your left, sir."

"Yes," said the Warden. "Yes, of course!" pa.s.sing his servant with an abstracted air.

"Shall I announce dinner, sir?" asked Robinson, hurrying behind and measuring his strength for what he was about to perform in the exercise of his duty.

"Yes," said the Warden, still moving on, and now near the drawing-room door.

Robinson made a wondrous skip, a miracle it was of service in honour of the Warden; he flew past his master like an aged but agile Mercury and pounced upon the drawing-room door handle. Then he threw the door open.

He waited till the Warden had advanced to a sufficient distance in the room towards the guests who were waiting by the fireside, and then he uttered, in his penetrating but quavering voice, the familiar and important word--

"Dinner!"

CHAPTER XXIX

DINNER

"I am sorry I'm late," said the Warden quietly, and he looked at both his guests. "I have been with Lady Dashwood. I must apologise, Bingham, for her absence. I expect Mrs. Dashwood has already told you that she is not well."

The bow with which the Warden offered his arm to May was one which included more than the mere formal invitation to go down to dinner, it meant a greeting after absence and an acknowledgment that she was acting as his hostess. It was one of those ceremonial bows which men are rarely able to make without looking pompous. He had the reputation, in Oxford, of being one of the very few men who, in his tutorial days, could present men for degrees with academic grace.

"I'm sorry, Bingham," he said; "I have only just returned, or I might have secured a fourth to dinner--yes, even in war time."

May went downstairs, wondering. Wondering how it was that the worst was so soon over, and that, after all, instead of feeling a painful pity for the man whose arm held hers in a light grasp, she felt strangely timorous of him.

She was profoundly thankful for the presence of Bingham, who was following behind, cheerful and chatty, having put aside, apparently, all recollection of the conversation of the evening before. Yes, whatever his secret thoughts might have been, Bingham appeared to have forgotten that there were any moonlight nights in the streets of Oxford. For this, May blessed him.

They entered the long dining-room and, sitting at the Warden's end of the table, formed a bright living s.p.a.ce of light and movement. Outside that bright s.p.a.ce the room gradually sombred to the dark panelled walls.

The Warden, in his high-backed chair, looked the very impersonation of Oxford. This was what struck Bingham as he glanced at his host, and the thought suggested that hater of Oxford, the Warden's relative, Bernard Boreham.

"I have just got your friend Boreham to undertake a job of work," said Bingham. "It'll do him a world of good to have work, a library to catalogue for the use of our prisoners. He wanted to shove off the job to some chaplain. I was to procure the chaplain, just as if all men weren't scarce, even chaplains!"

Composed as the Warden was, he looked at Bingham with something of eager attention on his face, as if relying on him for support and conversation.

"Poor old Boreham, he is a connection of mine by marriage," he said, and as the words fell from his lips, he, in his present sensitive mood, recoiled from them, for they implied that Boreham was not a friend. Why was he posing as one who was too superior to choose Boreham as a friend?

"Talking of chaplains," said Bingham, who knew nothing of what was going on in the Warden's mind, and thought this sudden stop came from dislike of any reference to Boreham--"talking of parsons, why not release all parsons in West End churches for the war?"

A smile came into May's face at the extreme sweetness of Bingham's voice; a warning that he was about to say something biting.

"Release all parsons who have smart congregations," continued Bingham, in honied tones; "parsons with congregations of jolly, well-dressed women, women who enjoy having their naughtiness slanged from the pulpit just as they enjoy having their photographs in the picture papers. Their spiritual necessities would be more than adequately provided for if they were given a dummy priest and a gramophone."

May's smile seemed to stimulate Bingham's imagination.

"To waste on them a real parson with a soul and a rudimentary intellect," he went on, "is like giving a gla.s.s of Moselle to an agricultural labourer when he would be happy with a mug of beer. But the Church wastes its energies even in this time of heartbreakings."

"I should like to see you, Bingham," said the Warden, smiling too, and turning his narrow eyes, in his slow deliberate manner, towards his guest, "as chairman to a committee of English bishops, on the Reconstruction of the Church."

"I've no quarrel with our bishops," said Bingham; "I don't want them to extol every new point of view as they pa.s.s along. I don't expect them to behave like young men. Nor do I expect them to be like the Absolute, without 'body, parts or pa.s.sions.' My indictment is not even against that mere drop in the ocean, 'good Christian souls,' but against humanity and human nature!" Bingham looked from one to the other of his listeners. "Until now, the only people we have taken quite seriously are the very well dressed and the--well, the undressed. The two cla.s.ses overlap continually. But now we've got to take everybody seriously; we are going to have a Democracy. Human nature has got a new tool, and the tool is Democracy. The new tool is to be put into the same foolish old hands, and we shall very soon discover what we shall call 'the sins of Democracy.' What is fundamentally wrong with us is what apparently we can't help: it's that we are ourselves, that we are human beings."

Bingham smiled into his plate. "We adopt Christianity, and because we are human beings we make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. We are patronising Democracy, and we shall make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy too--if we don't take care. Everything we handle becomes intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. And yet we still fancy that, if only we could get hold of the right tools, our hands would do the right work."

"The Reconstruction of Human Nature is what you are demanding," said the Warden.

"Yes, that's what we want," sighed Bingham. "When we have got rid of the Huns, we must begin to think about it."

"If you saw the children I have seen, Mr. Bingham," said May, quietly, "you would want to begin at once, and I think you would be hopeful."

There was on the Warden's face a sudden pa.s.sionate a.s.sent that Bingham detected.

"All men," said Bingham, leaning back in his chair and regarding his two listeners with veiled attention--"all men like to hear a woman say sweet, tender, hopeful things, even if they don't believe them. As for myself, Mrs. Dashwood, I admit that your 'higher optimism' haunts me too at times; at rare times when, for instance, the weather in Oxford is dry and bright and bracing."

If he had for a moment doubted it since the afternoon at the Hardings', Bingham was now sure, as sure as a man can be of what is unconfessed in words, that between this man and woman sitting at the table with him was some secret sensitive interest that was not friends.h.i.+p.

How did this conviction affect Bingham and Bingham's spirits? It certainly did not put a stop to his flow of talk. Rather, he talked the more; he was even more sweetly cynical and amiably scintillating than usual. If his heart was wounded, and he himself was not sure whether it was or not, he hid that heart successfully in a sheath of his own sparks.

A pause came when Robinson put out the light over the carving-table and withdrew with Robinson Junior. The dining-room was silent. Bingham drank some wine, the Warden mused, and May Dashwood sat with her eyes on a gla.s.s of water by her, looking at it as if she could see some vision in its transparency. The fire was glowing a deep red in the great stone chimney-piece at the further end of the room. A coal fell forward upon the hearth with a strangely solitary sound. Bingham glanced towards the fire and then round the room, and then at his host, and lastly at May Dashwood.

"I heard a rumour," he said, and he took a sip of his claret, "that your college ghost had made an appearance!"

There came another silence in the room.