Christians Mistake | Page 6

the retreating carriage
with a composed smile, which asked no condolence, and offered no
confidences, the good lady was, to say the least, surprised. "But," as she
afterward confessed to at least two dozen of her most intimate friends,
"there always was something so odd, so different from most young
ladies about Miss. Oakley." However, to the young lady herself she
said nothing, except suggesting, rather meekly, that it was time to
change her dress.
"And just once more let me beg you to take my shawl--my very best--
instead of your own, which you have had a year and a half. Ah!"
sighing, "if you had only spent more money on your wedding clothes!"
"How could I?" said Christian, and stopped, seeing Dr. Grey enter. This
was the one point on which she had resisted him. She could not accept
her trousseau from her husband's generosity. It had been the last
struggle of that fierce, poverty-nurtured independence, which nothing
short of perfect love could have extinguished into happy humility, and
she had held to her point resolute and hard; so much so, that when, with
a quiet dignity peculiarly his own, Dr. Grey had yielded, she had
afterward almost felt ashamed. And even now a slight blush came in
her cheek when she heard him say cheerfully,
"Do not trouble her, Mrs. Ferguson, about her shawl. You know I have
taken her--that is, we have taken one another 'for better, for worse,' and
it is little matter what sort of clothes she wears."
Christian, as she passed him, gave her husband a grateful look. Grateful,
alas! Love does not understand, or even recognize, gratitude.
But when the door closed after her, Dr. Grey's eyes rested on it like
those of one who misses a light.

He sat down covering his mouth--his firmly-set but excessively
sensitive month with his hand, an attitude which was one of his
peculiarities; for he had many, which the world excused because of his
learning, and his friends--well, because of himself.
If ever there was a man who without the slightest obtrusiveness, or self-
assertion of any kind, had unlimited influence over those about him, it
was Arnold Grey. Throughout a life spent entirely within the college
walls, he had, from freshman to fellow, from thence to tutor, and so on
to the early dignity of mastership, the most extraordinary faculty of
making people do whatsoever he liked---ay, and enjoy the doing of it.
Friends, acquaintances, undergraduates, even down to children and
servants, all did, more or less, sooner or later, the good pleasure of Dr.
Grey. Perhaps the secret of this was that his "pleasure" was never
merely his own. None wield such absolute power over others as those
who think little about themselves.
Had circumstance, or his own inclination, led him out farther into the
world, he might have been noticeable there, for he had very great and
varied acquirements---more acquirements perhaps, than originalities.
He had never written a book, but he had read almost every book that
ever was written--or, at least, such was the belief current in
Avonsbridge. In his study he was literally entombed in books---
volumes in all languages--and Avonsbridge supposed him able to read
them all. How far this was a popular superstition, and to what length
his learning went, it is impossible to say. But nobody ever came quite
to the end of it. He was a silent, modest man, who never spoke much of
what he knew, or of himself in any wise. His strongest outward
characteristic was quietness, both of manner, speech, motions,
springing, it appeared, out of a corresponding quietness of soul.
Whether it had been born with him, or through what storms of human
passion and suffering he had attained to this permanent central calm,
who could say? Certainly nobody knew or was likely to know; for the
Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could
not be fathomed easily with any line. Possibly because, old as he was, it
happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by
the right hand, had never been dropped yet.

As he sat, his grave eyes fixed on the ground, and his mouth covered by
the long thin brown hand--the sort of hand you see in mediaeval
portraits of student-gentlemen--nothing of him was discernible except
the gentleman and the student. Not though he sat waiting for his "two-
hours' wife," whom undoubtedly he had married for love--pure love--
the only reason for which anyone, man or woman, old or young, ought
to dare to marry. That he could feel as very few have the power to feel,
no one who was any judge of physiognomy could doubt for a moment;
yet he sat perfectly quiet--the quietness of a man accustomed