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
She was only going to the old study to find some books, but she had to
pass through the picture-gallery to reach it. The gallery of the lodge
of St. Benedict's was very much like the galleries of most college
lodges, only it was narrower--a long, low, narrow old room extending
the length of one side of the cloistered court. It had been built
when the cloisters beneath had been built, and it had suffered few
changes since. The walls were panelled to the ceiling with oak, and
it was lighted with deep, old-fashioned bay-windows; not particularly
well lighted, as the diamond panes were darkened with painted arms of
founders and benefactors, and old, dead and forgotten Fellows. The
walls of the long gallery were hung with portraits from end to end.
They began in the right-hand corner by the door in the fourteenth
century--flat, angular, awful presentments of men and women whose
names are household words in Cambridge, and they went on and on until
it seemed that they would never cease. The walls were so full that it
would be difficult to find room for another Fellow.
Lucy paused on her way to the study, and looked round with quite a new
feeling on these old painted faces. They represented something to her
to-day that they had not represented before.
She began dimly to understand what had made Cambridge the power it
is in the land. It was these still faces looking down from the walls
who had built up this great Cambridge. It was the men, after all, the
patient men of old, whose toil had accomplished so much; and now the
women were entering into their labours.
There were not many portraits at Newnham; it was only in its infancy.
There would be plenty by-and-by. Lucy ran over in her mind the women
whose portraits would hang upon those white walls between the windows.
She could not in that brief retrospect think of any who were doing such
great work that they would earn that distinction, only Pamela Gwatkin.
She was sure Pamela would one day hang on the walls. She would be an
old woman then, most likely, a lean, wrinkled, hard-visaged old woman,
with gray hair and spectacles, and she would have a big book beside
her--a book she had written or explained--and she would wear--what
would she wear?
She would have gone quite bald by that time, like the old Fellows
on the walls; her head would be bald and shining. She would wear it
covered, of course, with--with a scholar's cap, with a long tassel
depending over her nose, or a velvet Doctor's cap, which would be more
becoming, and she would wear a scarlet Doctor's gown and hood. The
picture would look lovely on the white walls of Newnham.
Lucy had just settled to her satisfaction how Pamela Gwatkin was to be
handed down by a future Herkomer to another generation, when the Senior
Tutor entered the gallery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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