The master of St. Benedict's, Vol. 1 (of 2)St. Aubyn, Alan
General
The master of St. Benedict's, Vol. 1 (of 2)
St. Aubyn, Alan
Cambridge (England) -- Fiction; School principals -- Fiction; Students -- Fiction
The choir and the Master came in directly after Lucy had taken her
seat. The Master looked across his wife and Mary, who sat between them,
and nodded to Lucy.
'Very glad to see you, my dear,' he said in quite an audible voice.
It was a longer service than usual at St. Benedict's on Sunday
mornings. The Master read the Litany, and he took a long time in
reading it, and Lucy had plenty of opportunity of looking among the men
for Pamela Gwatkin's brother.
He was a twin brother, she had learned from Annabel Crewe, who knew all
about Pamela, and therefore he ought to be exactly like her. Tall and
fair and thin-lipped, with clear, steady eyes--blue ought to be the
colour, or gray, she was not sure which; but she could not mistake the
profile. There could be no doubt about that clear-cut face, without an
ounce of superfluous flesh upon it.
Lucy looked at the men eagerly one after the other; she looked at
every man in the chapel. The Senior Tutor from his stall on the other
side saw her looking down at the men. She didn't look at him, and he
wondered at the change in her. Her eyes were not wont to rove over the
faces of the men sitting below in that eager way; they might have all
been sticks and stones for the notice Lucy had hitherto vouchsafed them.
Was this the outcome of a week at Newnham? Had she seen so much--so
very, very much--of women in her new developments that she was
thirsting for the sight of man?
Cousin Mary saw her looking down at the undergraduates in the seat
below, too, and sighed. She remembered the time when she used to look
across the benches. She had seen so many generations of undergraduates
come and go in fifteen years. She may have looked more than once in all
that time to see if among them there was that one face that was to be
her beacon through life; she had ceased to look for it now.
Lucy had decided before she left the chapel that the man in the third
row near the top was Pamela's brother. A tall man with a thin, fair,
fresh-coloured face and firm lips--a capable face, a face quite worthy
of the brother of Pamela Gwatkin.
Lucy watched the men file out of chapel, and the man in the last seat
of the last row naturally came out last. She refused to go into the
lodge with Mary. She let the old Master and his wife toddle off down
the cloisters together, and she stood holding Mary back and begging her
to wait 'just a minute.'
The man in the back seat came out at last and took off his cap to the
Master's nieces as he passed.
'There!' said Lucy breathlessly, 'this is the man I waited for. Is he
Eric Gwatkin?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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