Mr. Lovely left the Great House enraged with the owner, with Society
and, to say truth, with his own heroick self.
I do not think he was very wildly in love with Miss Courteen, but I do
believe he was sincerely vexed with himself for letting her fall into
Vernon's power. For a moment he seriously pondered the wisdom of warning
her mother of the lengths to which the affair had gone, but upon
reflection shrank from a step which would savour, in the eyes of the
world, of ill-bred intrusion. After all, the girl was nothing to him,
and her reputation--plague on her reputation! I trust you observe the
unheroick aftermath of heroick Burgundy. Such bathos of indifference
would have sounded strange in the days preceding this forenoon.
Just then my lady Bunbutter went by in her capacious chair and Charles
prepared to make an elaborate bow, but her ladyship merely stared at him
in cold disdain, and he was forced to buckle his shoe to save his
countenance.
"So everybody knows," said Charles to himself, "Well! I shall always
regard Curtain Wells with affection and remember it with regret."
He walked down the Colonnade where Miss Morton lived and, as he passed
the house, thought with half a smile of Valentine Day. It seemed a
century ago--that merry morning. Soon he was in the fields, where the
hedges were splashed with the silver of blackthorn in profuse bloom.
He crossed a winding path, begun and ended with a notched and scrabbled
kissing-gate, and, passing through a small plantation where the
daffodils grew tall, went up a rounded hillside along whose clear-cut
horizon great fleecy clouds moved solemnly. He stopped for a moment to
glance back at Curtain Wells with the March sun spangling the rain-wet
roofs before he dipped with a sigh into one of those serene valleys that
are only found in England--valleys whose slopes are often darkened by
the long shadows of sheep and cattle, whose hollows are bright with
moist grass and in summer fragrant with spearmint and creamy
meadowsweet.
He took the devious course of a narrow stream and knew the grave
delights of rural meditation; yet somehow the image of Phyllida danced
before him all the time and whenever he paused, the wind far away over
the hillside had a melancholy and foreboding sound.
He met an elderly gentleman--a parson by the colour of his cloth--who
was poking some decayed herbage with a long cane. The elderly gentleman
looked up as Charles went by, gave him a 'very good morning,' and said
he believed he had seen an adder enter the herbage.
"Indeed," said Charles, who thought the information given demanded an
attitude of respectful surprize.
"But nothing amazes me after that wonderful February. When I tell you
that half an hour ago I saw an Orange Tip butterfly, you will understand
that nothing amazes me."
Charles left the Elderly Gentleman still investigating the decayed
herbage reputed to contain an adder, and found himself envying a mind
that could invest a day with such easy fame. He had seen an Orange Tip
butterfly. Had he met grey-eyed Athene, or beheld the roses and doves of
Cytherea, the day would scarcely have held a more splendid memory.
He envied the Elderly Gentleman. To be sure, with a Stoick complacency,
he had announced that nothing strange in the natural order could startle
him after that wonderful February, but his tone of triumphant excitement
foretold an entry in his diary that very night, perhaps was the prelude
to a paragraph in the _Gentleman's Magazine_.
He began to imagine the Elderly Gentleman sipping his Port before the
Rectory fire, on his knees an open Concordance whose pages were
illuminated by dancing butterflies, precocious heralds of the scented
spring. He heard the dignified butler told of his reverend master's
lucky discovery, heard him asked to hand down the calf-bound diary of
such and such a faded year, heard the Elderly Gentleman's chuckle when
he found, as he suspected, that the date in his own experience was
unprecedented and finally heard him order a bottle of the Port in bin
twelve, the first-fruits of the Assiento Agreement.
Charles fell to comparing himself to the Elderly Gentleman, greatly to
his own disadvantage.
Certainly the image of Phyllida danced before him in the water meadows,
eluded him at every turn and twist of the little stream, and beckoned
him along this secluded valley; but his own heart did not beat with the
proper amount of answering fervour.
Six weeks ago when he saw her first, all swansdown and blushes, he had
been duly elated. She had occupied much of his meditations ever since,
but he had no sensation of triumph, no delight in the great fact of her
existence. Perhaps that was because she belonged to the world. The
butterfly had belonged, as a phenomenon, to the Elderly Gentleman alone.
To the rest of mankind it was a legend. The discovery would be recorded
in print, but the discovery itself would flutter in secret pale wings
powdered with vivid gold, and this March morning would remain a
permanent fact in that Elderly Gentleman's heart. He would suffer no
disillusion. If others saw that butterfly, why, then, he would enjoy the
discussion of it, whether in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ beneath a
learned pseudonym or over two or three glasses of Port, with details
long drawn out to protract the delicious memory.
The ink is faded on the pages of those calf-bound diaries, the Latin
epitaph on the Elderly Gentleman's tombstone is now nearly illegible,
but since he went down to Elysium alert and heedful of the changing
seasons, I believe that his spirit still listens on summer eves to the
blackbirds in his beloved orchard and observes with interest and
curiosity each separate harebell that blossoms above his mortal remains.
Charles went on his way with much the same thoughts about the Elderly
Gentleman as I have set down for my own, and continued to envy his gift
of youth.
Presently he met Margery of Baverstock Farm.
Let me remind you, she was the wench to whom Mr. Anthony Clare had paid
light court back in the winter. Charles reproved him for his behaviour
and apparently his friend had given up his addresses, for the milkmaid
looked happy and blooming and seemed not at all displeased to giggle
over a hazel wand at Mr. Charles Lovely.
"Good morning, Margery."
"Oh, good morning, zur," said Margery.
"No longer with Farmer Hogbin?"
"I be with Farmer Hogbin's brother Jahn to High Corner Farm."
"And happy?"
"Oh, 'ess, proud and happy."
"Seen Mr. Clare lately?"
Margery blushed expansively.
"Oh! naw! I an't seen him since Baverstock Barn. I be courting."
"Eh, indeed," said Charles, "and who is the shepherd?"
"Wully Pearce."
"And you'll be married soon?"
"Come barley harvest--'ess."
"I will dance at your wedding, Margery."
"We shaant have daancing, because Wully says it leads to what oughtn't
to happen."
Charles made a wry face.
"Going to wed a Puritan, eh?"
"Nay," said the buxom maid. "He's carter to Farmer Jahn Hogbin."
"Then, surely, he will let you have a merry junketing at the bride-ale."
"Naw, indeed an' he wawnt, because his sister Molly when they were
thrawing the stocking last year fell on her back, and Wully's fam'ly is
a proud and proper fam'ly and Wully says we mun be married wi' no such
nonsense."
This long proclamation of propriety made Margery quite breathless, so
Charles, with a bow and the present of a crown, passed on his way.
Margery's case gave him more food for meditation. There was a buxom hale
wench with the bloom of a peach, throwing away her ample charms upon a
puritanical clod whose only ambition seemed to be the preservation of a
mealy-mouthed decorum. Pshaw! such prime beauty deserved a better fate.
Such a wedding as hers should have made old wives' fireside gossip for a
score of years and the tale of it quickened the hearts of every lover
and his lass that listened beneath the golden summer moon. Had he the
control of the ceremony, by Heaven! they should have danced the dawn in,
and every man and every maid should have gone to sleep with a face as
pale as the morning sky. It was ridiculous that young Cupid should be
breeched for the bidding of a lubberly half-baked ploughboy.
And yet, to be honest with himself, was not he behaving in much the same
way as the despised Wully Pearce? Was not his chief objection to Vernon
based on the latter's reputation as a man of intrigue? It was Phyllida's
attraction to Vernon that made him indignant. Had she chosen to bestow
herself on a middle-aged squire with acres and a gaunt square hall and a
pack of hounds, would he have been at all seriously disconcerted by the
prospect? And Vernon could have no honest love for her, because if a man
means to wed a young woman, he does not stigmatize her behaviour in
scurrilous verses, even to secure an advantage over a supposed rival. Or
does he--when he is not quite a gentleman?
Then occurred to him the story he had heard many years ago of a thin
unhappy-looking woman who had spoken kindly to him at some crowded Al
Fresco entertainment where he and his father and mother had gone one
fine July afternoon. He had asked about her as they drove home to the
lodgings, and he remembered his mother's warning finger, while his
father laughed over Lord B---- and Mrs. D----.
At the end of the tale his mother, a gentle Christian soul, had said it
served the baggage right, and bade him never talk to people to whom he
had not been presented by his parents. No doubt the circumstances of the
two cases were totally different, but he connected them vaguely in his
mind.
Moreover, without any doubt, Phyllida had caught his fancy. She
disturbed his view. Yet there was nothing that singled her out from a
dozen handsome young women with whom he had danced, whose existence save
as a bevy he no longer recognized. Still, whatever he thought about the
affair, his opinion would never again be invited and, disinherited by
Beau Ripple, he must consider his own position with an eye to the
future.
He was bracing himself preparatory to this great mental effort, when he
perceived round the next bend of the stream Mr. Anthony Clare, pensively
leaning against the rugged stem of a pollard willow-tree.
"Tony," said Charles, "Ripple has dismissed me."
"I know," said his friend, "your writ of banishment, signed, sealed and
delivered, is pasted on the window of every coffee-house and occupies a
large and distinguished space in the vestibule of the Assembly Rooms.
What do you propose to do?"
"I might hire myself out to the amiable Hogbin as carter."
"Pshaw," said Tony, "be serious."
"Or I might take to the road."
"Nonsense, man."
"Nay! I vow such a career has many advantages for a poor man, since he
may live and, what is more, die at the public charge."
"You are not in earnest, Charles?" said Mr. Clare, laying an anxious
hand upon his friend's wrist.
"And why not, i' faith?"
"What would you gain by such an impulse of folly?"
"My livelihood and, as I said, very possibly my funeral expenses."
"Such flippancy is ill-timed," said Mr. Clare, who was a serious young
man and spent much of his leisure with the theory of estate-management.
"Nay! I am not treating the matter as a jest, but truly considering the
benefit of adopting such a novel method of existence in these hard
times."
"Novel!" said Clare, with a scoffing laugh. "Novel! why, every
ne'er-do-weel blackguard for the past hundred years has tried this novel
method of existence and every one of them has come at last to the same
windy death."
"Oh, as to the last scene," interrupted Charles, "indeed I vow 'tis the
best in the play, for it never fails to please the populace, and sure in
this dull world a man should try to give a little amusement; I hold that
the author of a diverting comedy and the thief who makes a brave exit
are the truest benefactors of humanity."
"All this is very pretty fooling, but leads nowhere," said Clare, who
had a proposal to make and was vexed by Charles' levity.
"But ponder, Tony, the Gothick atmosphere of such an escapade. Imagine
the moated grange, the haunted lane, the shadowy coppice, the
phantastick oaths and gestures, the pursuit by moonlight, the clatter of
hoofs, the jingle of spurs--all this appeals to an aspect of my
character too long subdued by the bonds of convention and the trammels
of polite society."
"But, you fool, you would be taken at once. You have no cant of the road
and, as a Dilettante, would certainly be regarded with odious suspicion
by every regular highway-man between Berwick and Dover. Oddslife, I'll
not argue with you further, for I do not believe you mean a word of what
you say, and, harkee, I have a plan that will suit either of us better
than your cut-throat Braggadocio."
As a matter of fact, Charles had once or twice thought quite seriously
of taking to the road. After all, it was in accordance with every
precedent of outlawry. As soon as a man was banished from Society, he
should compensate himself for the discomfort he incurred. Tony, however,
now came forward with a project which, while it preserved much of the
charm of highway robbery, held none of its dangers or difficulties. He
suggested that since neither he nor Charles had very many ties to attach
them fast to Curtain Wells, they should spend a year in making the Grand
Tour of the British Islands.
Charles objected on the score of money.
"I have three hundred guineas," said Clare. "That will equip us with all
that we require as travellers, and I am sure the world will entertain us
for our pleasant appearance and company."
"In fact we are to become beggars--in velvet gowns," Charles commented.
"Adventurers, knights at arms, what you will," added Clare.
Charles was enraptured with the idea, so deeply enraptured that he saw
no absurdity in grave Mr. Anthony Clare setting out upon such a career
of folly. In fact, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for his
friend to spend three hundred guineas on a whim. He himself would have
spent treble that sum (had he possessed it) in order to the exploitation
of such a witty, ingenious and romantick method of wasting time.
"We must equip ourselves for the parts we are about to play. There must
be no shilly-shally, and above all no one must think us anything but
eccentrick men of fashion, itinerant beaux, fops on pilgrimage,
wandering wits."
"The last phrase is unfortunate," said Clare. Charles laughed hugely.
By this time Phyllida had faded like a summer joy, Vernon was forgotten,
nothing mattered except this new and exceedingly entertaining project.
"What is the first thing to be done?" inquired Clare.
"Egad, what should always precede any undertaking of importance--a visit
to the tailor."
The two young men beneath a sky growing rapidly overcast, walked
quickly through the lush meadows towards Curtain Wells, discussing as
they went the merits of rival tailors with infinite vivacity.
Meanwhile in the Crescent, our heroine was engaged upon much the same
problem. Possibly the reason that so many timid young women have been
brave enough to plunge into an elopement, is the obfuscation of the real
issue, the vital stakes, by the need of deciding what they shall leave
behind to console their abandoned virtue.
So it was, at any rate, with Phyllida. She was deterred from soft
regrets by the desperate necessity of making up her mind between the
charms of a muslin frock overlaid with pink rosebuds and a muslin frock
sprigged with the palest blue forget-me-nots.
There were a thousand sentiments that might well have restrained her
from the wild step she was taking, but everything was forgotten for a
trifle; and when finally she slipped out of the door, the only living
creature for whom she indulged herself in the luxury of a protracted
farewell, was Thomasina the tabby cat, and that was considerably
interrupted by the attenuated miaouws of a large family lately arrived.
Even Ponto the spaniel had sidled off to a favourite heap of rubbish.
Pray do not suppose I am sneering at Phyllida. Heaven forbid that you or
I should sneer at a young woman, however impetuous, however foolish.
Still, I cannot help observing that the heroism of most heroick actions
is to be sought for in the obscure preliminaries to a grand event.
Phyllida had known the agony of making up her mind through many a
firelit, sleepless night. When the moment arrived for carrying out her
resolve, she spent most of the forenoon reading the advertizement of a
fashionable mantua-maker. As to her devices for getting rid of her
mother and Betty and the landlady and Thomas and Miss Sukey Morton, who
called to inquire whether Mrs. Featherbrain's new novel was called _The
Affectionate Aunt_ or _The Disconsolate Uncle_,--why, they were as old
as the first writer of tales and I will not weary you with their
repetition. And why should I delay you with the narrative of the
attempt to open her mother's jewel-case with a bodkin and a silver
paper-knife? Like most toilet receptacles, it was very easily broken.
She hurried down the Crescent with a small parcel of cloaths wrapped up
in brown paper and tied with a green ribbon. If you are anxious to know
what was inside, I will refer you to Miss Howe, Mr. Richardson's Miss
Howe, to whom Miss Clarissa Harlowe confided a parcel of much the same
dimensions and contents.
She did not forget her swansdown muff nor her swansdown tippet, and
altogether she looked just the same as she looked a good many pages ago
and was flushed to just the same frail hue of carmine.
Ding-dong went St. Simon's husky clock, ding-dong, ding-dong.
Pitter-pat went Phyllida's heart and pitter-pitter-pitter-pitter-pat
went Phyllida's heart when, exactly opposite the toy-shop, she saw a
post chariot and four bay horses and two postillions staring very
intently at the sky.
It struck Phyllida how clever it was of her dear Amor to chuse such a
time and such a place; for all the world was engaged in directing the
start of the Invincible Stage Coach that ploughed once a week between
Curtain Wells and London.
Tootle-a-tootle-a-tootle went the long brass horn of the guard and
plump-plump went two large parcels into his basket and crack-crack went
the coachman's long whip, and 'Now then Miss, jump in,' said one of the
post-boys, still staring intently at the March sky, and before Phyllida
knew where she was, she found herself sitting on a rather damp cushion
with a peacock-blue riding hood lined with swansdown on the seat beside
her, but no sign of Mr. Francis Amor.
In dismay she put her head out of the window and cried to the nearest
postillion.
"Mr. Harmor's followin' on 'orseback," he said, with a thumping thwack
on the ribs of his mount and a vicious prod with his rusty spurs.
Phyllida drew back with tears of disappointment starting to her wide
blue eyes; but before she could make up her mind to stop the chariot and
never elope again, she caught the glance of Thomas in open-mouthed
amazement. Instinctively, she pulled the musty curtains close, and,
lifting the leather flap at her back, could not help laughing aloud to
see dignified Thomas mopping his brow with his right hand and waving his
tall cane with the left; and just as the chariot tore round the corner
of the street, she saw that Thomas had knocked off Lord Cinderton's grey
beaver hat. The Love Chase had begun.
_Chapter the Twenty-eighth_