"To taste the freshness of the morning air."
Phillis retreated to her own room at her accustomed hour of ten. Her
nerves were excited; her brain was troubled with the events of this
day of emancipation. She was actually in the world, the great world of
which her guardian had told her, the world where history was made,
where wicked kings, as Mr. Dyson perpetually impressed upon her, made
war their play and the people their playthings. She was in the world
where all those things were done of which she had only heard as yet.
She had seen the streets of London, or some of them--those streets
along which had ridden the knights whose pictures she loved to draw,
the princesses and queens whose stories Mr. Dyson had taught her;
where the business of the world was carried on, and where there flowed
up and down the ceaseless stream of those whom necessity spurs to
action. As a matter of narrow fact, she had seen nothing but that part
of London which lies between Highgate Hill and Carnarvon Square; but
to her it seemed the City, the centre of all life, the heart of
civilisation. She regretted only that she had not been able to discern
the Tower of London. That might be, however, close to Mr. Jagenal's
house, and she would look for it in the morning.
What a day! She sat before her fire and tried to picture it all over
again. Horses, carriages, carts, and people rushing to and fro; shops
filled with the most wonderful exhibition of precious things;
eccentric people with pipes, who trundled carts piled with yellow
oranges; gentlemen in blue with helmets, who lounged negligently along
the streets; boys who ran and whistled; boys who ran and shouted; boys
who ran and sold papers; always boys--where were all the girls? Where
were they all going? and what were they all wishing to do?
In the evening the world appeared to narrow itself. It consisted of
dinner with three elderly gentlemen; one of whom was thoughtful about
herself, spoke kindly to her, and asked her about her past life; while
the other two--and here she laughed--talked unintelligently about Art
and themselves, and sometimes praised each other.
Then she opened her sketch-book and began to draw the portraits of her
new friends. And first she produced a faithful _effigies_ of the
twins. This took her nearly an hour to draw, but when finished it made
a pretty picture. The brethren stood with arms intertwined like two
children, with eyes gazing fondly into each other's and heads thrown
back, in the attitude of poetic and artistic meditation which they
mostly affected. A clever sketch, and she was more than satisfied when
she held it up to the light and looked at it, before placing it in her
portfolio.
"Mr. Humphrey said I had the eye of an artist," she murmured. "I
wonder what he will say when he sees this."
Then she drew the portrait of Joseph. This was easy. She drew him
sitting a little forward, playing with his watch-chain, looking at her
with deep grave eyes.
Then she closed her eyes and began to recall the endless moving
panorama of the London streets. But this she could not draw. There
came no image to her mind, only a series of blurred pictures running
into each other.
Then she closed her sketch-book, put up her pencils, and went to bed.
It was twelve o'clock. Joseph was still thinking over the terms of Mr.
Dyson's will and the chapter on the Coping-stone. The twins were
taking their third split soda--it was brotherly to divide a bottle,
and the mixture was less likely to be unfairly diluted.
Phillis went to bed, but she could not sleep. The steps of the
passers-by, the strange room, the excitement of the day kept her
awake. She was like some fair yacht suddenly launched from the dock
where she had grown slowly to her perfect shape, upon the waters of
the harbour, which she takes for the waters of the great ocean.
She looked round her bedroom in Carnarvon Square, and because it was
not Highgate, thought it must be the vast, shelterless and unpitying
world of which she had so often heard, and at thought of which, brave
as she was, she had so often shuddered.
It was nearly three when she fairly slept, and then she had a strange
dream. She thought that she was part of the great procession which
never ended all day long in the streets, only sometimes a little more
crowded and sometimes a little thinner. She pushed and hastened with
the rest. She would have liked to stay and examine the glittering
things exhibited--the gold and jewelry, the dainty cakes and delicate
fruits, the gorgeous dresses in the windows--but she could not. All
pushed on, and she with them; there had been no beginning of the rush,
and there seemed to be no end. Faces turned round and glared at
her--faces which she marked for a moment--they were the same which she
had seen in the morning; faces hard and faces hungry; faces cruel and
faces forbidding; faces that were bent on doing something
desperate--every kind of face except a sweet face. That is a rare
thing for a stranger to find in a London street. The soft sweet faces
belong to the country. She wondered why they all looked at her so
curiously. Perhaps because she was a stranger.
Presently there was a sort of hue and cry and everybody began running,
she with them. Oddly enough, they all ran after her. Why? Was that
also because she was a stranger? Only the younger men ran, but the
rest looked on. The twins, however were both running among the
pursuers. The women pointed and flouted at her; the older men nodded,
wagged their heads, and laughed. Faster they ran and faster she fled;
they distanced, she and her pursuers the crowd behind; they passed
beyond the streets and into country fields, where hedges took the
place of the brilliant windows; they were somehow back in the old
Highgate paddock which had been so long her only outer world. The
pursuers were reduced to three or four, among them, by some odd
chance, the twin brethren and as one, but who she could not tell,
caught up with her and laid his hand upon hers, and she could run no
longer and could resist no more, but fell, not with terror at all, but
rather a sense of relief and gladness, into a clutch which was like an
embrace of a lover for softness and strength, she saw in front of her
dead old Abraham Dyson, who clapped his hands and cried, "Well run,
well won! The Coping-stone, my Phillis, of your education!"
She woke with a start, and sat up looking round the room. Her dream
was so vivid that she saw the group before her very eyes in the
twilight--herself, with a figure, dim and undistinguishable in the
twilight, leaning over her; and a little distance off old Abraham
Dyson himself, standing, as she best remembered him, upright, and with
his hands upon his stick. He laughed and wagged his head and nodded it
as he said: "Well run, well won, my Phillis; it is the Coping-stone!"
This was a very remarkable dream for a young lady of nineteen. Had she
told it to Joseph Jagenal it might have led his thoughts into a new
channel.
She rubbed her eyes, and the vision disappeared. Then she laid her
head again upon the pillow, just a little frightened at her ghosts,
and presently dropped off to sleep.
This time she had no more dreams; but she awoke soon after it was
daybreak, being still unquiet in her new surroundings.
And now she remembered everything with a rush. She had left Highgate;
she was in Carnarvon Square; she was in Mr. Joseph Jagenal's house;
she had been introduced to two gentlemen, one of whom was said to have
a child-like nature all aglow with the flame of genius, while the
other was described as a great, a noble fellow, to know whom was a
Privilege and to converse with whom was an Education.
She laughed when she thought of the pair. Like Nebuchadnezzar, she had
forgotten her dream. Unlike that king, she did not care to recall it.
The past was gone. A new life was about to begin. And the April sun
was shining full upon her window-blinds.
Phillis sprang from her bed and tore open the curtains with eager
hand. Perhaps facing her might be the Tower of London. Perhaps the
Thames, the silver Thames, with London Bridge. Perhaps St. Paul's
Cathedral, "which Christopher Wren built in place of the old one
destroyed by the Great Fire." Phillis's facts in history were short
and decisive like the above.
No Tower of London at all. No St. Paul's Cathedral. No silver Thames.
Only a great square with houses all round. Carnarvon Square at dawn.
Not, perhaps, a fairy piece, but wonderful in its novelty to this
newly emancipated cloistered nun, with whom a vivid sense of the
beautiful had grown up by degrees in her mind, fed only in the
pictures supplied by the imagination. She knew the trees that grew in
Lord Manfield's park, beyond the paddock; she could catch in fine days
a glimpse of the vast city that stretches itself out from the feet of
breezy Highgate; she knew the flowers of her own garden; and for the
rest--she imagined it. River, lake, mountain, forest, and field, she
knew them only by talk with her guardian. And the mighty ocean she
knew because her French maid had crossed it when she quitted fair
Normandy, and told her again and again of the horrors encountered by
those who go down to the sea in ships.
So that a second garden was a new revelation. Besides it was bright
and pretty. There were the first flowers of spring, gay tulips and
pretty things, whose name she did not know or could not make out from
the window. The shrubs and trees were green with the first sweet
chlorine foliage of April, clear and fresh from the broken buds which
lay thick upon the ground, the tender leaflets as yet all unsullied by
the London smoke.
The pavement was deserted, because it was as yet too early for any
one, even a milk-boy, to be out. The only living person to be seen was
a gardener, already at work among the plants.
A great yearning came over her to be out in the open air and among the
flowers. At Highgate she rose at all hours; worked in the garden;
saddled and rode her pony in the field; and amused herself in a
thousand ways before the household rose, subject to no restraint or
law but one--that she was not to open the front-door, or venture
herself in the outer world.
"Mr. Jagenal said I was to do as I liked," she said, hesitating. "It
cannot be wrong to go out of the front-door now. Besides," reasoning
here like a casuist, "perhaps it is the back-door which leads to that
garden."
In a quarter of an hour she was ready. She was not one of those young
ladies who, because no one is looking at them, neglect their personal
appearance. On the contrary, she always dressed for herself;
therefore, she always dressed well.
This morning she wore a morning costume, all one colour, and I think
it was gray, but am not quite certain. It was in the graceful fashion
of last year, lying in long curved lines, and fitting closely to her
slender and tall figure. A black ribbon was tied round her neck, and
in her hat--the hats of last year did not suit every kind of face, but
they suited the face of Phillis Fleming--she wore one of those bright
little birds whose destruction for the purposes of fashion we all
deplore. In her hand she carried, as if she were still at Highgate and
going to saddle her pony, a small riding-whip. And thus she opened the
door, and slid down the stairs of the great silent house as stealthily
and almost as fearfully as the Lady Godiva on a certain memorable day.
It was a ghostly feeling which came over her when she ran across the
broad hall, and listened to the pattering of her own feet upon the
oilcloth. The broad daylight streamed through the _réverbère_; but yet
the place seemed only half lit up. The closed doors on either hand
looked as if dreadful things lurked behind them. With something like a
shudder she let down the door-chain, unbarred the bolts, and opened
the door. As she passed through she was aware of a great rush across
the hall behind her. It was Cæsar, the mastiff. Awakened by a noise as
of one burgling, he crept swiftly and silently up the kitchen-stairs,
with intent to do a desperate deed of valour, and found to his
rapturous joy that it was only the young lady, she who came the night
before, and that she was going out for an early morning walk--a thing
he, for his part, had not been permitted to do for many, many moons,
not since he had been brought--a puppy yet, and innocent--to the heart
of London.
No one out at all except themselves. What joy! Phillis shut the door
very carefully behind her, looked up and down the street, and then
running down the steps, seized the happy Cæsar by the paws and danced
round and round with him upon the pavement. Then they both ran a race.
She ran like Atalanta, but Cæsar led till the finish, when out of a
courtesy more than Castilian, he allowed himself to be beaten, and
Phillis won by a neck. This result pleased them both, and Phillis
discovered that her race had brought her quite to the end of one side
of the square. And then, looking about her, she perceived that a gate
of the garden was open, and went in, followed by Cæsar, now in the
seventh heaven. This was better, better, than leading a pair of twins
who sometimes tied knots with their legs. The gate was left open by
the under-gardener, who had arisen thus early in the morning with a
view to carrying off some of the finer tulips for himself. They raced
and chased each other up and down the gravel walks between the lilacs
and laburnums bursting into blossom. Presently they came to the
under-gardener himself, who was busy potting a selection of the
tulips. He stared as if at a ghost. Half-past five in the morning, and
a young lady, with a dog, looking at him!
He stiffened his upper lip, and put the spade before the flower-pots.
"Beg pardon, miss. No dogs allowed. On the rules, miss."
"William," she replied--for she was experienced in undergardeners,
knew that they always answer to the name of William, also that they
are exposed to peculiar temptations in the way of bulb--"William, for
whom you are potting those tulips?"
Then, because the poor youth's face was suffused and his countenance
was "unto himself for a betrayal," she whistled--actually whistled--to
Cæsar, and ran on laughing.
"Here's a rum start," said William. "A young lady as knows my name,
what I'm up to and all, coming here at five o clock in the blessed
morning when all young ladies as I ever heard of has got their noses
in their pillowses--else 'tain't no good being a young lady. Ketches
me a disposin' of the toolups. With a dawg, and whistles like a young
nobleman."
He began putting back the flowers.
"No knowin' who she mayn't tell, nor what she mayn't say. It's
dangerous, William."
By different roads, Montaigne wrote, we arrive at the same end.
William's choice of the path of virtue was in this case due to
Phillis's early visit.