Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story

As the Fellows passed out on their way to Common Room, there to tackle with a fresh appetite Pedby’s grace, they paused, as was their wont, on the steps of the Hall, looking up at the sky, envisaging the weather. The wind had dropped. There was even a glimpse of the moon riding behind the clouds. And now, a solemn and plangent token of Oxford’s perpetuity, the first stroke of Great Tom sounded. XXII Stroke by stroke, the great familiar monody of that incomparable curfew rose and fell in the stillness. Nothing of Oxford lingers more surely than it in the memory of Oxford men; and to one revisiting these groves nothing is more eloquent of that scrupulous historic economy whereby his own particular past is utilised as the general present and future. “All’s as it was, all’s as it will be,” says Great Tom; and that is what he stubbornly said on the evening I here record. Stroke by measured and leisured stroke, the old euphonious clangour pervaded Oxford, spreading out over the meadows, along the river, audible in Iffley. But to the dim groups gathering and dispersing on either bank, and to the silent workers in the boats, the bell’s message came softened, equivocal; came as a requiem for these dead. Over the closed gates of Iffley lock, the water gushed down, eager for the sacrament of the sea. Among the supine in the field hard by, there was one whose breast bore a faint-gleaming star. And bending over him, looking down at him with much love and pity in her eyes, was the shade of Nellie O’Mora, that “fairest witch,” to whose memory he had to-day atoned.