It was six o’clock of a cold September morning when Sir Robert--or
Mr. Tuke, as we must now know him--woke in his room off the
stable-yard of the old “George” inn at Winchester. Lying lazily
snoozed amongst the pillows, he reviewed, with some amused
satisfaction, the first courses of that scheme of reformation he had
mapped out for himself, whereof two rather sleepless nights at Farnham
and his present quarters--the result of an abstention in the matter of
numerous “nightcaps,” which habit had made necessary to slumber--were
the prologue. Now, the little battle fought and won, he preened his
moral feathers smugly, and felt clear-eyed and very good indeed. As to
the mysterious estate--the last stage on the journey to which he
should cover that day--he had soon learned to accept its acquisition
with that sweetness of irresponsibility that was his most engaging and
aggravating characteristic. But, after all, he had an excellent
digestion--in common with a great many men of the eighteenth
century--and was little inclined to dyspeptic brooding over problems.
Now, as he lay, his half-dreaming glance was arrested by a coloured
print after George Morland hanging on the wall over against him. The
like he remembered dimly to have known in a nursery of long ago--a
picture that had often set his young soul wandering by lanes of
enchantment. Nothing could have served better to confirm and make
abiding his present mood. He was a boy again, an apple-skinned
Ulysses, with the limitless possibilities of the unknown before him.
Without stain or guile he passed beyond the narrow margins of the
print into a land that no mortal foot but his own had yet trodden.
Indeed, for the moment he was a child again, and there is nothing in
after-life like the pure imaginings of such. To the child every
incident is a picture framed and hung upon a wall. The memory of these
pictures abides long, then fades a little and a little more. We are
hardly conscious of them in old age, or at least feel hardly the
ecstasy of their atmosphere. In acquiring our identities (Keats’s
phrase), what don’t we lose? We find a fact for a dream--a wretched
exchange. But the first possession doesn’t altogether go. It recurs to
us at odd moments in little sweet mental vertigoes--never so much,
perhaps, as during that half-waking hour of dawn when we are least
conscious of our material selves.
Then to think of a dewy morning down; of a pleached alley of
fruit-trees in blossom; of a windy common; of the mystery of snow and
brooding distances; of a Christmas-tree, even, and the mingled
ravishing smell of lighted tapers and banked fir-branches, is
momentarily to recall the amazing romance and illimitableness of life;
is to be quit of the dreariness of conviction, and to stand once more
at the foot of the green slope, and look up and wonder whither the
clouds are sailing over the far summit. A few artists, a few writers,
a few musicians, have the power, or the instinct, to inspire us with
these ancient imaginings; and such as can, we must dearly love, though
they may never stand in the front ranks of their fellows. The child is
the only real genius; and perhaps these have remained morally
children. In mid-life they can arrest and record the fugitive
retrospections that to the most of us are only bubbles broken away
from the far-distant spring of life, to be caught at and to vanish on
the prick of possession. God bless them! they are our best earnest of
the spiritual.
Out of his luminous stupor on that grassy borderland of dawn, the
dreamer came with a full heart, and, it must be confessed, a biting
consciousness of emptiness in his stomach.
He sprang out of bed, and bathed and dressed to the hissing
accompaniment of ostlers in the yard below and to the clank of
horse-hoofs on the cobble-stones.
He breakfasted, as men did in those days, as if he were victualling
for a siege, and had great thoughts of kissing the chambermaid when he
fee’d her--but refrained.
By half-past nine he was on the road, with a heart full of gaiety, and
a recurring wonder for his destination, and clattered under the old
west gateway of the town with a song on his lips--
She was throated like the stare--
Well-a-day!
She was white as buds of May--
Well-a-day!
And all with their sweet scent
Her bodie was besprent,
That to kiss her was a joy beyond compare,
If her mouth the scarlet hips--
Well-a-day!
Would for redness all dismay--
Well-a-day!
Ah! it took its comely stain
From the truths that she had slain;
For falser than the serpent were her lips.
Once with passion I did rave--
Well-a-day!
Now I will not, though she say
Well-a-day!
For the cry of damnéd Love
All her beauty doth disprove,
And her heart it is a stone above his grave.
Mr. Tuke had not a good voice. The chords of vibration were beyond his
control. But his breast was lined with romance, and this led him to
give some melodious effect to the sentiment of words that did not
seem, it must be admitted, appropriate to his rather riotous
character.
He left the old city and took the Stockbridge road; and presently,
entering between country hedgerows, looped his reins slackly and let
his horse amble fairly as he listed.
The sunshine in his soul was constitutional, inextinguishable, and not
reflected from his surroundings; for the day was bitter for the time
of year, and the wind stuck as rigidly in the northeast as if the
stiff-pointing weathercocks had nailed it there. The greyness,
however, emphasized the sparkle of hip and holly and all red berries;
for every dull mood of Nature has its compensations to shame us out of
peevishness. A squirrel ran from branch to root of a beech-tree like a
stain of rust; a cloud of fieldfares went down the sky and wheeled,
disintegrated, as if they were so much blown powder; the ruddocks
twinkled in the hedges like dead leaves flicked by the wind.
The horseman had an eye and a heart for all. He was of good, lovable
material, whatever the hitherto courses of his bad days and worser
nights.
By and by he came out upon country very wild and barren. The road
heaved and dropped by way of grim and treeless downs, through whose
cropped surface-grass the white chalk smote upwards like death in a
sick man’s face. For leagues the sterile slopes seemed stretching
onwards; and no sign of life was on them all, but here and there a
flapping crow--no music of it, but, in some more sheltered hollow, the
sweet lark’s broken ground-song.
And the further he rode, the more confirmed in desolation grew the
scenery. There was a wild forlorn beauty about it all, nevertheless--a
clean-blown freshness that seemed to set the hillsides pulsing with
opal tints, like near-extinguished ashes breathed upon.
Something, familiar to those days, was wanting, however; and the
solitary rider peered for the something, unwilling to believe that a
tract so lonely could be innocent of a certain unchancy landmark. He
had already loosened his pistols in the holsters, and was riding with
a greater regard for surprises.
He topped a hillock, and “Ah!” quoth he; “I could not be mistaken.”
On a high swell of ground, right in his path, as it seemed, a
structure like a massive clothes’-horse, open at an angle, stood up
against the sky. From its crowning beams a short slack or two of chain
depended; but these were quit for the time of any ugly burden--a void
that by no means pleased the traveller.
“When the boggart tumbles, the crows re-gather,” he murmured
sententiously; but he set to singing again, though with an eye alert
for mishaps.
Nothing occurred, however; nor had he sighted a solitary soul moving
in the breadth of the wide landscape, when--without a change being
obvious in the character of the latter--he found himself descending a
steep slope to a little long township of queer and ancient houses.
Here at a pleasant small tavern--on whose sign-board, as he
approached, he read the legend “The First Inn” (the reverse slyly
exhibited, to the eternal merriment of chuckleheads, the obvious
antiperistasis of “The Last Out”)--he drew rein, and found he had
reached the village of Stockbridge, which was in truth that
halting-place on his last stage, from which he was, as he had learned,
to take a by-road, some five or six miles, to his destination.
Into the tap he strode; and there were a few gaping rustics swilling
their muddy quarts, and the landlord, a wizened, bent-stick of a man,
behind the bar.
“Oblige me by sending some one to look after my horse,” said Mr. Tuke
to this person.
The person shifted a glass or two, covertly eyeing the stranger
through rheumy slits of lids; but answer made he none.
Mr. Tuke repeated his request--still without result. He turned sharply
on one of the grinning hinds.
“What ails the old faggot?” he said.
“He be stone deaf, master.”
Then the fellow bawled: “Jarge! Jar-rge! the gen’leman warnts ’s oss
tended.”
The old man put a wrinkled claw to his ear, and shook his head.
“Eh!” said Mr. Tuke. “You refuse?”
He flushed in surprised anger, when at the moment a girl came into the
bar, and addressed him in a bright civil voice.
“Grandfather’s deaf, sir,” she said; “and I was out of the way. I’ll
send your horse to the stable. And what shall I draw for your honour?”
She was fresh and desirable as a spring of sweet water to a thirsty
traveller. An old yellow handkerchief, of cherished silk, was knotted
about her head, yet none so jealously but that a curl or two might
escape--like tendrils of Tantalus his vine--for the teasing of fervid
souls; and her gown, girdled under her bosom and fastened there with a
favour of Michaelmas daisy, smelt of lavender and was the colour of
it. She was tall, too, for a Hebe of the downs, and her arms, bare to
the elbow, were tanned of a soft ivory--as were her hands, that were
fine and capable-looking.
She gazed honestly at our gentleman from eyes as full of brown
harmonies as a starling’s back; and he had no thought but to return
her gaze with complete admiration.
“Can you give me to eat?” he said. “Anything will do.” And “Surely,
sir,” she answered, “if simple fare will serve your honour.”
She showed him into a queer little parlour, with a long latticed
window that looked into a vegetable garden ruddy with apple-trees, and
fetched cloth and salt from a corner cupboard, while he sat down by an
old grumbling grandfather clock and watched her movements.
“Who is the landlord of this good tavern?” said he.
“George Pollack, sir; and I am his granddaughter, at your service.”
“Would you were. And what is your name, my pretty maid?”
“Elizabeth, I was christened,” said she; “and Betty am I called.”
His last words suggesting an old nursery rhyme--“And what is your
fortune, my pretty maid?” he could not help murmuring.
“Self-possession,” said she with a smile, and whisked out of the room.