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
'Dear Miss Rae--Lucy!' he said, and then he stopped and looked at
the girl. He would have liked to take her in his arms, but there were
several Newnham girls all hurrying down the road, and they looked at
him, and they looked at Lucy. Some of them blushed, and some turned
pale, and all were shocked. It was a dreadful precedent.
The atmosphere of Newnham revived Lucy, and she paused at the gate and
looked up into his face with a little white smile.
'I am very stupid,' she said, 'but the Master frightened me so much,
and I am not quite myself.'
He held her hand longer than he need have done, and he looked down into
the small white face with a smile of ownership and protection that was
quite new to Lucy. Nobody had ever looked in her eyes like that before,
and, instead of drawing her hand away, Lucy hung her head and blushed
like a poppy.
'Shall I bring you word how the Master is the first thing in the
morning?' he said, still holding her hand; 'how early will you be out
in the lane if I come?'
'Oh, as early as you like; seven o'clock!'
And so Lucy made her first appointment to meet Wyatt Edgell.
CHAPTER XIII.
SLIPPING AWAY.
When Lucy went out into the road outside the gates of the college,
before seven o'clock the next morning, Wyatt Edgell was already there
waiting for her. It is a short, narrow road, or lane, and it leads to
nowhere, unless Selwyn College be considered anywhere. It has been the
privilege of the students of Selwyn to use this road as a shortcut to
their college, but it will not be their privilege much longer.
The road is now the private property of the authorities of Newnham,
and a new wing connecting the old and the new halls will be built
across the road, and the jealous walls that shut out the grounds from
masculine eyes will be thrown down, and the old dusty lane will be
covered with smooth, green turf, and it will be a thoroughfare no
longer for the foot of man to pass over.
Perhaps they will restore again the old fortifications. There was
a Roman camp here once, and a battle ditch running all the way to
Grantchester. Every inch of ground here is classic, and strewn with
remains of those old Romans who brought us all the gentler arts.
Perhaps they brought the Muses with them and planted them at Newnham?
There was an old Roman dug up the other day, four feet beneath the
surface, a noble skeleton, six feet six in length. The whole earth
teems with ancient coins and pottery and Roman relics. They will have
to build a museum in the new wing to preserve the 'finds' that are
unearthed in digging its foundations.
Lucy was quite indifferent to the Romans. She would rather, if she had
had the choice, have met one of their old ghosts in the lane than one
of the Dons of Newnham taking her morning walk. She looked fearfully up
and down the road when she got outside the gate, but there were only
some Selwyn men going down to the bathing sheds; there was not a girl
in sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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