"Console yourself, Daish," said our hero, as he handed back the Beau's
exquisitely written epistle, "Mr. Clare and I propose to make a long
excursion into the country this very afternoon. Have the goodness to
order our horses to be in the yard at six o'clock."
"Certainly, your honour, but I hope that nothing I may have said or done
or hinted--or--or--or--" poor Mr. Daish stumbled over the awkwardness of
the interview, and was more like a Cremona violin than ever, a violin
whose strings were snapping one by one.
"Console yourself, Daish," said our hero with an incredibly magnanimous
air, "you are not to blame. You must know, Daish, that for a long time
past I have had a curiosity to survey this small green earth, unhampered
by anything more serious than the impulse of the moment. To-night,
Daish, when you retire to rest, when you gather the curtains of your
serene bed, when you hark to the clock in the passage striking the
moderate and orderly hour of ten o'clock, when you reflect with a sigh
of proprietary contentment that you have offended no one in the course
of an innkeeper's promiscuous day, when, in a word, your respectable
head sinks into your respectable pillow, dally for a moment in the
imagination of Charles Lovely and Anthony Clare mocking society,
laughing at convention, seated in the parlour of some remote inn and
dozing gratefully before a pile of logs.
"Think of us, Daish, in the cool dusks and azure silences of April, at
the top of some gentle hill whence we can regard with exhilaration the
prospect of a good dinner, a crimson glass, and genial intercourse with
travellers. Behold us in your mind's eye, walking our horses down
through the twilight, as one by one in cottage lattices the candles
twinkle and, high above, the stars betray the night with silver spears.
For my part, already I can hear the evening gossip of housewives, and
the babble of children in small gardens, and clear against the green
West, I can see the many lovers of a little town moving with slow steps
along their customary path.
"Thus, my excellent Daish, each solemn nightfall will discover for us a
new world, and, when the sun rises on the merry unknown streets of our
pilgrimage, we shall think to ourselves what a vast number of jolly
people exist in this remarkably jolly world. Oddslife--"Mr. Lovely broke
off--"what a surprizing alliance."
As he looked out of the window, we had better look out of the window
too, and I think you will be quite disposed to agree with Charles when I
show you that vivid yellow chaise drawn by two fiery chestnut horses,
and driven by that extraordinarily diminutive coachman, for inside are
seated Beau Ripple and the Widow Courteen, and neither you nor I nor
anybody else ever saw both so nearly disconcerted.
"Now what the deuce can be the meaning of that?" continued Mr. Lovely.
"Of what you were saying?" inquired Mr. Daish in a deprecating voice.
"The horses! the horses!" was all that Mr. Lovely saw fit to reply.
Major Tarry's earlier progress might well have been the meteor which
heralds a cataclysm, for cataclysm this later apparition certainly was.
I vow the noise of conversation it caused far exceeded anything of the
sort that was ever known.
The Beau found the publicity of such an exit unendurable to his polite
soul. That his sacred chaise, which had once bowled along at a high but
decorous speed in order to meet the H--r A---- t of Great Britain,
should achieve such a vulgar notoriety nearly upset the sit of his
waistcoat.
His contemporaries felt the Great little Man's humiliation.
Yet compassion did not prevent them from forming numberless conjectures
as to the cause of this strange affair. Some said 'Debt!'; others boldly
affirmed an intrigue; but as usual nobody guessed the true reason, which
was that beneath a gorgeous exterior lurked the gentlest, kindliest
heart.
When the Widow, with a very noisy tale of seduction, poured forth her
tears upon his cushions, Mr. Ripple instantly reproached himself and
nobody else with the disaster, immediately decided he must atone for his
negligence by immediately ringing his flowered bell-pull and commanding
Magog, who immediately appeared, to run immediately to the stables and
command the immediate harnessing of the royal horses to the royal chaise
and the immediate buttoning of his diminutive coachman's slender
gaiters.
It was with a shudder, if a much polished shudder, that he handed Mrs.
Courteen to a place amid the fawn and ivory of the interior of his
chaise. With a barely repressed shudder, too, he observed the dabbled
rouge of her cheeks, and the open mouths of the cits, and the bobbing of
heads at windows, and a horrid bank of black clouds in the extreme
South-west that seemed to betoken a night full of rain, and last but
perhaps worst of all, the lean sign-post 'To London,' a prologue to
G---- knows what unendurable discomfort.
"We have an adventure to hand," said Charles to Clare, as they strolled
across the yard of the _Blue Boar_. "We'll follow Ripple!"
"Ripple?"
"Ay! Which way did Mr. Ripple's chaise go?" demanded Charles of a knot
of idlers.
"Lunnon Road," they replied unanimously.
"We must get ready at once," declared Charles.
* * * * *
"How pleasant 'twould be," thought Phyllida, "if I were not alone."
Even alone, it was very pleasant to bowl along a level road at an
equable rate of speed. It was very pleasant to try on the peacock-blue
riding hood that so became her. It was very pleasant to see the cheerful
faces of the many wayfarers encountered by the chariot. The backs of the
postillions glowed with scarlet, and a gay contrast they made to the
flaming gorse of a wild open stretch of country. Every cottage that
nestled back from the road with clipped yews to guard the gate seemed to
Phyllida a desirable place to live and love in for ever. It was
pleasant to watch the lambs in the meadows, and exciting indeed to count
the still sparse primroses starring the hedgerows. It was pleasant to
watch the children stand on the topmost rung of a five-barred gate and
cheer as they rattled past. Very pleasant it was, though the sight
brought a slight lump in her throat, as she thought how often she had
done the same thing with Dick Combleton the Squire's youngest son.
Up-hill with many a groan and grunt, and down-hill with a clatter and a
dash, and along the level with a ring and a jingle went the post-chariot
in the afternoon sunlight. Past farm-house and farm-yard, past villages
and churches, and inns with waving signs, past ponds and geese, past
many a tired woman trudging home from market and many a jovial carter;
past sign-posts and cross-roads and milestones; past smithies with
roaring fires and monstrous bellows, past lowing cows and crowing cocks,
past journeymen tinkers and journeymen barbers, past a great dancing
bear which, had Phyllida but known it, danced not a whit more foolishly
for bumpkins than rose-pink Phyllida herself for the malicious eyes of
the world of fashion.
After a long climb up a heavy hill, whence a very fair champagne spread
before her, the great black and purple cloud caught the westering sun,
and suffused the whole landskip with a queer metallick sheen. It made
the rooks that swayed in the bare branches of a windy clump of elms take
on a strange green lustre over their plumage, and cast a stillness over
the world. That view remained with Phyllida all her life, as a pause
wherein she had contemplated existence for the briefest moment. Years
afterwards, an old woman, sitting in a dim ingle-nook, would see that
fair champagne in the clouds of smoke that curled ceaselessly up the
wide chimney, and, above the scent of burning logs, would be wafted the
perfume of the white March violets that blossomed at the foot of those
swaying elms where the rooks cawed and the dead leaves raced round and
round.
"Stop, you blackguards," cried a rasping voice above the noise of fast
approaching hoofs.
"Crack! crack!" went Dickie Maggs' big pistol.
"'Ighwayman, Miss," he added cheerfully, as the sound of something soft
falling was heard, followed by horse-hoofs in mad retreat down the long
heavy hill.
In a moment, the chariot was rocking in a wild gallop down the opposite
decline.
Raindrops began to fall, deliberately at first, but soon fast enough,
while the earth was slowly blotted out by storm and rain and twilight.
On the summit of the hill, Major Constantine Tarry lay face downwards,
having paid the extreme penalty of interference with other people's
business. Poor Tarry, he was a bore and a braggart, and had not the
slightest intention of being killed, yet I for one regret the manner of
his death, up there on the top of that wind-swept hill. And for all he
told you such very long stories when he asked you to dine with him at
Oudenarde Grange and Malplaquet Lodge and Ramilies House, he gave you
some capital Port, and Sherry nearly as dry as his own anecdotes.
Moreover, he really fought in that bloody fight of Fontenoy, and that
was a very great honour and should make us forgive a very great deal.
A flash of lightning illuminated the dead body of the veteran lying face
downwards in the mud of an English high-road, and a distant volley of
thunder accorded military honours to his somewhat grotesque death.
_Chapter the Twenty-ninth_