I
Do not imagine that this is to be a love-story. Very few experiences
furnish material for such. Rarer still is the ability to use the
material, when it falls in one's way. At any rate, I make no pretension
thereto.
But it sometimes happens during the earlier and more tumultuous period
of a man's life, that casual occurrences take place, which do not indeed
at the time immediately influence his actions or his fortunes, but which
in later days may be recalled with interest. Of this sort--if I mistake
not, or if I do not mar them in the telling--were my three meetings with
Mary Verner. I only met her thrice.
The first time--many a year has sped away since; but it seems, if I shut
my mental eye to events and feelings with which the interval has been
crowded, and my bodily eye to the library table before me, as if the
little scene were being enacted here, now, to-day.
Whence this power of summoning up the ghosts of long ago? Why should the
comparatively recent refuse to be stamped upon the memory, and the old
impressions refuse to fade? Let philosophers answer; I have no more
inclination to write an essay than to tell a love-tale. My purpose I
have already stated; though I omitted to mention that I write my own
veritable experience--with a change of names, a studied obscurity of
dates, and a very slight change otherwise.
The precise year I do not remember, nor, consequently, my own exact age;
but I must have been about fourteen. George Verner, Mary's brother--poor
fellow! I saw his death registered, the other day, in that odious corner
of the _Times_--was my class-mate and play-mate at a school some few
miles from London. He was a good-looking and good-tempered fellow, if
not remarkable for his abilities. It chanced that I was--in the choice
language of the time and place--"a dab at Latin verses." I helped George
once in a while with his exercises; and once in a while with the
mince-pies, that his mother's a cook used to send him on the sly. The
first time that I saw her--Mary Verner I mean, not the cook--was on a
whole holiday; George, who lived in the neighbourhood, had invited me to
pass it with him. The old family coach came for us at ten o'clock, with
the fat old horses and the fat old family coachman, just for all the
world as you may often meet them in the story-books that are called
"exceedingly natural," and as you now-a-days rarely find them in real
life. Pony-phaetons, britzkas, coupes, "Croydon-baskets," and
nondescript vehicles that, being neither close carriages nor open, are
palmed off as both--these have superseded the full-bodied of my early
recollections.
I fancy that I see her now.... You perceive that though I note the
modern change in the carriage department, I recognize none such in the
phraseology of our tongue. I fancy I see her now. You may, if you
please, alter the wording; but that's the plain English of it.
As we drove up the sweep that led from the lodge to the front entrance
of a very beautiful suburban villa, I leaned out of the window, with the
curiosity natural to a boy of fourteen, on strange ground.
Mary Verner--I knew, by the family likeness, that she was George's elder
sister, the moment my eye lighted on her--was trimming or watering her
geraniums, in one of the recesses on either side of the porch.
"Here, Mary, here's Cuthbert _tertius_," said George, running up the
steps, and pushing me before him.
"I know him; how d'ye do? I'm glad to see you," was the frank reception,
spoken in a clear, round-toned, springy voice, that seemed to drop
without effort out of a rose-lipped mouth well-filled with well-knit
teeth. And as she spoke smilingly, she opened a pair of large brown eyes
that I have since thought--for boys don't know much about the law of
colours--were designed to harmonize with what we call a clear brunette
complexion. Certainly, if the ballad of "The Nut Brown Mayde" be a model
imitation of the antique, Mary Verner might have sat for the portrait.
But it was not so much her eyes that took hold of me, open though they
did by degrees, wider and wider, until I wondered when they would cease
opening; nor her coal-black hair, dressed as you may see it in the
likenesses by Sir Thomas Lawrence; nor her rosy mouth; nor her even
teeth; nor her figure full of grace, _svelte_ as the French call it, for
which we have no answering word. It was not these, or any of them. It
was the carolling of her few words, so free and unconcerned in tone. If
I had not met her subsequently, I might have forgotten her looks; I
doubt whether her voice could have passed from me.
I need not tax my memory or my invention about the trifling though happy
events of that day. It was pretty evident who was mistress of the house,
though the fond and proud mother of Mary Verner had the air of a
dignified and well-bred woman. Silent or talking, it was Mary who
dispensed the honours, at least so far as the stranger was concerned.
Probably it was the same with all comers; but this is only a surmise.
Well; the whole holiday came to an end, and we were driven back to the
old school by the old coachman, our pockets full of chestnuts, and our
boyish hearts full of a sense of supreme enjoyment, such we believe as,
in later life, women feel after the best ball of the season, and men
after a splendid whitebait dinner at Blackwall. I recollect telling the
fellows in the dormitory what a jolly time we had been having, and how
capitally George's pony leaped the fence on the common, round the
corner, out of sight of the house. By the way, it was partly owing to
that pony having engrossed so much of our time, that I had not regularly
fallen in love with Mary Verner. Partly, I say, because I was further
saved from this predicament by a standing devotion to my pretty cousin
Rose, which the temptation had been strong enough, but not long enough
to disturb. I never went to George's house again; and ere long the image
of his sister was stowed away on one of the upper shelves of my memory.
There it might have been smothered in dust, or even converted into it,
if chance had not taken it down and given it an airing.