Doubtless there have been men able to boast, and with truth, that they
carried to their first assignation with a woman an even pulse. But as
I do not presume to rank myself among these, who have been commonly
men of high station (of whom my late Lord Rochester was, I believe,
the chief in my time), neither--the unhappy occurrence which I am in
the way to relate, notwithstanding---have I, if I may say so without
disrespect, so little heart as to crave the reputation. In truth, I
experienced that evening, as I crept out of the back door of Mr.
D----'s house, and stole into the gloom of the whispering garden, a
full share of the guilty feeling that goes with secrecy; and more than
my share of the agitation of spirit natural in one who knows (and is
new to the thought) that under cover of the darkness a woman stands
trembling and waiting for him. A few paces from the house--which I
could leave without difficulty, though at the risk of detection--I
glanced back to assure myself that all was still: then shivering, as
much with excitement as at the chill greeting the night air gave me, I
hastened to the gap in the fence, through which I had before seen my
mistress.
I felt for the gap with my hand and peered through it, and called her
name softly--"Jennie! Jennie!" and listened; and after an interval
called again, more boldly. Still hearing nothing, I discovered by the
sinking at my heart--which was such that, for all my eighteen years, I
could have sat down and cried--how much I had built on her coming. And
I called again and again; and still got no answer.
Yet I did not despair. Mrs. D---- might have kept her, or one of a
hundred things might have happened to delay her; from one cause or
another she might not have been able to slip out as quickly as she had
thought. She might come yet; and so, though the more prolonged my
absence, the greater risk of detection I ran, I composed myself to
wait with what patience I might. The town was quiet; human noise at an
end for the day; but Mr. D----'s school stood on the outskirts, with
its back to the open country, and between the sighing of the wind
among the poplars, and the murmur of a neighbouring brook, and those
far-off noises that seem inseparable from the night, I had stood a
minute or more before another sound, differing from all these, and
having its origin at a spot much nearer to me, caught my ear, and set
my heart beating. It was the noise of a woman weeping; and to this day
I do not know precisely what I did on hearing it--when I made out what
it was, I mean--or how I found courage to do it; only, that in an
instant, as it seemed to me, I was on the other side of the fence, and
had taken the girl in my arms, with her head on my shoulder, and her
wet eyes looking into mine, while I rained kisses on her face.
[Illustration: IN AN INSTANT I WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE]
Doubtless the darkness and her grief and my passion gave me boldness
to do this; and to do a hundred other mad things in my ecstasy. For,
as I had never spoken to her before, any more than I had ever held a
woman in my arms before, so I had not thought, I had not dreamed of
this! of her hand, perhaps, but no more. Therefore, and though since
Adam's time the stars have looked down on many a lover's raptures,
never, I verily believe, have they gazed on transports so perfect, so
unlooked for, as were mine at that moment! And all the time not a word
passed between us; but after a while she pushed me from her, with a
kind of force that would not be resisted, and holding me at arm's
length, looked at me strangely; and then thrusting me altogether from
her, she bade me, almost roughly, go back.
"What? And leave you?" I cried, astonished and heart-broken.
"No, sir, but go to the other side of the fence," she answered firmly,
drying her eyes and recovering something of her usual calmness. "And
more, if you love me as you say you do----"
I protested. "_If?_" I cried. "If! And what then--if I do?"
"You will learn to obey," she answered, coolly, yet with an archness
that transported me anew. "I am not one of your boys."
For that word, I would have caught her in my arms again, but with a
power that I presently came to know, and whereof that was the first
exercise, she waved me back. "Go!" she said, masterfully. "For this
time, go. Do you hear me?"
My boldness of a minute before, notwithstanding, I stood in awe of
her, and was easily cowed; and I crossed the fence. When I was on my
side, she came to the gap, and rewarded me by giving me her hand to
kiss. "Understand me," she said. "You are to come to this side, sir,
only when I give you leave."
"Oh," I cried. "Can you be so cruel?"
"Or not at all, if you prefer it," she continued, drily. "More, you
must go in, now, or I shall be missed and beaten. You do not want that
to happen, I suppose?"
"If that hag touches you again!" I cried, boiling with rage at the
thought, "I will--I will----"
"What?" she said softly, and her fingers closed on mine, and sent a
thrill to my heart.
"I will strangle her!" I cried.
She laughed, a little cruelly. "Fine words," she said.
"But I mean them!" I answered, passionately. And I swore it--I swore
it; what will not a boy in love promise?
"Well," she answered, whispering and leaning forward until her breath
fanned my cheek, and the intoxicating scent of her hair stole away my
senses, "perhaps some day I shall try you. Are you sure that you will
not fail me then?"
I swore it, panting, and tried to draw her towards me by her arm; but
she held back, laughing softly and as one well pleased; and then, in a
moment, snatching her hand from me, she vanished in the darkness of
the garden, leaving me in a seventh heaven of delight, my blood fired
by her kisses, my fancy dwelling on her beauty; and without one
afterthought.
Doubtless had I been less deep in love (wherein I was far over-head),
or deeper in experience, I might have noted it for a curious thing
that she should be so quickly comforted; and should be able to rise in
a few moments, and at the touch of my lips, from passionate despair to
perfect control, both of herself and of me. And starting thence, I
might have gone on to suspect that she possessed her full share of the
_finesse_, which is always a woman's shield and sometimes her sword.
But as such suspicions are foreign to youth, so are they especially
foreign to youthful love, which takes nothing lower than perfection
for its idol. And this I can say for certain, that they no more
entered my brain than did the consequences which were to flow from my
passion.
For the time, indeed, I was in an ecstasy, a rapture. Walking
a-tip-toe, and troubled by none of the things that trouble common
folk; so that to this day--though long married--I look back to that
period of innocent folly with a yearning and a regret, the sorer for
this, that when I try to analyse the happiness I enjoyed, I fail, and
make nothing of it. That all things should be changed for me, and I be
changed in my own eyes--so that I walked a head taller and esteemed
myself ridiculously--by the fact that a kitchen wench in a drugget
petticoat and clogs had let me kiss her, and left me to believe
that she loved me, seems incredible now; as incredible as that
a daily glimpse of her figure flitting among the water-butts and
powdering-tubs had power to transform that miserable back garden into
a paradise, and Mr. D----'s school, with its dumplings, and bread and
dripping, and inky fingers, into a mansion of tremulous joy!
Yet it was so. Nor did it matter anything to me, so great is the power
of love when one is young, that my mistress went in rags, and had
coarse hands, and spoke rustically. Touching this last, indeed, I must
do her the justice to say that from the first she was as quick to note
differences of speech and manner as she was apt to imitate good
exemplars; and, moreover, possessed under her rags a species of
refinement that matched the witchery of her face, and proved her to
be, as she presently showed herself, no common girl.
Of course I, in the state of happy delirium on which I had now
entered, and wherein even Mr. D---- and the boys wore an amiable air,
and only Mrs. D----, because she persecuted my love, had the semblance
of a female Satan, needed no proof of this; or I had had it when my
Dorinda--so I christened her, feeling Jennie too low a name for so
much beauty and kindness--proposed at our second rendezvous that I
should teach her to read. At the first flush of the proposal I found
reading a poor thing because she did not possess it; at the second I
adored her for the humility that condescended to learn; but at the
third I saw the convenience, as well as sense, of a proposal which was
as much above the mind of an ordinary maid in love as Dorinda appeared
superior to such a creature in all the qualities that render sense
amiable.
Yet this much granted, how to teach her, seeing that we seldom met or
conversed, and never, save under the kindly shelter of darkness? The
obstacle for a time taxed all my ingenuity, but in the end I
surmounted it by boldly asking Mr. D----'s leave to hold the afternoon
classes in the playground. This, the approach of warm weather giving
colour to the petition, was allowed; after which, as Dorinda was
engaged in the back premises at that hour, and could listen while she
drudged, the rest was easy. Calling up the lowest class, I would find
fault with their reading, and after flying out at them in a simulated
passion, would remit them again and again to the elements; so that for
a fortnight or more, and, indeed, until the noise of the lads
repeating the lesson annoyed Mrs. D----'s ears, the playground rang
with a-b, ab; e-b, eb; c-a-t, cat; d-o-g, dog, and the like, with the
alphabet and the rest of the horn-book. And all this so frequently
repeated, that with this assistance, and the help of a spelling-book
which I gave her, and which she studied before others awoke, my
mistress at the end of two months could read tolerably, and was
beginning to essay easy round-hand.
And Heaven knows how delicious were those lessons under the shabby
ragged tree that shaded one half of the yard! I spoke to the yawning
grubby-fingered boys, who slouched and straddled round me; but I knew
to whose ears I applied myself; nor had pupil ever a more diligent
master, or master an apter pupil. Once a week I had my fee of kisses,
but rarely, very rarely, was permitted to cross the fence; a reserve
on my Dorinda's part, that, while it augmented the esteem in which I
held her, maintained my passion at a white heat. When, nevertheless, I
remonstrated with her, and loverlike, complained of the rigour which
in my heart I commended, she chid me for setting a low value on her;
and when I persisted, "Go on," she said, drawing away from me with a
wonderful air of offence. "Tell me at once, and in so many words, that
you think me a low thing! That you really take me for the kitchen
drudge I appear!"
Her tone was full of meaning, with a hint of mystery, but as I had
never thought her aught else--and yet an angel--I was dumb.
"You did think me that?" she cried, fixing me with her eyes, and
speaking in a tone that demanded an answer.
I muttered that I had never heard, had never known, that--that--and so
stammered into silence, not at all understanding her.
"Then I think that hitherto we have been under a mistake," she
answered, speaking very distantly, and in a voice that sent my heart
into my boots. "You were fond--or said you were--of the cook-maid. She
does not exist. No, sir, a little farther away, if you please," my
mistress continued, haughtily, her head in the air, "and know that I
come of better stock than that. If you would have my story I will tell
it you. I can remember--it is almost the first thing I can remember--a
day when I played, as a little child, with a necklace of gold beads,
in the court-yard of a house in a great city; and wandered out, the
side gate being open, and the porter not in his seat, into the
streets; where," she continued dreamily, and gazing away from me,
"there were great crowds, and men firing guns, and people running
every way----"
I uttered an exclamation of astonishment. She noticed it only by
making a short pause, and then went on in the same thoughtful tone,
"As far as I can remember, it was a place where there were booths and
stalls crowded together, and among them, it seems to me, a man was
being hunted, who ran first one way and then another, while soldiers
shot at him. At last he came where I had dropped on the ground in
terror, after running child-like where the danger was greatest. He
glared at me an instant--he was running, stooping down below the level
of the booths, and they had lost him for the time; then he snatched me
up in his arms, and darted from his shelter, crying loudly as he held
me up, 'Save the child! Save the child!' The crowd raised the same
cry, and made a way for him to pass. And then--I do not remember
anything, until I found myself shabbily dressed in a little inn,
where, I suppose, the man, having made his escape, left me."