The post-chariot that held in its musty recesses Miss Phyllida Courteen
and Mr. Francis Vernon rattled on its way with all the vigour imparted
by four fresh horses and the exhilarating effect of Plymouth Gin upon
the post-boys.
A smell of saddlecloths and damp cushions, of leather straps and the
dust of oat and hay, clung to the vehicle while over them was wafted the
permeating steam of horses' flanks and the pungent odour of hot lamps.
"Phyllida, my Phyllida, at last."
"Why did you let me travel alone? I was frightened."
"My dear," said Vernon, "indeed, I do not know how to explain my
neglect, but I wanted to ride out of the darkness and find you alone in
the firelight like a maid in an old tale. It must have seemed cowardice
to you."
"I was frightened," murmured Phyllida, growing breathless at the
recollection of Mr. Charlie and Mr. Dicky Maggs lurching round the table
in the Travellers' Room.
"You longed for me?" Vernon moved closer to his love and took her hand.
"Amor," said the girl shuddering, "I think I am frightened now. I think
we will go back. I think I have done wrong."
"You think all these foolish thoughts, dear life. I know that to-day
will be to you a day of days for ever."
He held her now in his arms, and she with a sigh yielded herself into
his keeping. Soft she was and timid, like a bird which has fallen from
the nest, and in the gloom he could still see her wide blue eyes and
above the jangle of the chariot he could hear her whisper,
"I love you, Amor, I love you."
"My Phyllida."
"Amor, dear, dear Amor."
"'Tis not my name, dear one."
"'Tis the name you told me."
"My name is Vernon."
"To me you will always be Amor. Amor means Love. I asked the Archdeacon
and he told me that Amor meant Love."
Vernon was taken outside of himself. As he kissed those lips more soft
than the petals of flowers, the other lips he had known seemed cracked
and dry. In the darkness, he felt her eyelashes upon his cheek as they
drooped to a blush, and a passion of remorse swept over him. He would
wed this child at the end of the journey. He would love her for ever.
That was certain. Oh, yes, there was no doubt he would love her for
ever. He had plucked this flower in a wanton moment, had thought to wear
her for a scented month and fling her away. O execrable intent!
"My Phyllida, my Phyllida! Why do you love me?"
"Why do you love me?" Her hand nestled in his.
"I don't know, because--because--oh, because I do love you, because you
have driven me mad with your blue eyes and your hair and your lips. My
Phyllida, my Phyllida!"
Vernon was no longer conscious of acting. This was no scene set with
chairs at appropriate angles. The raffish Mr. Francis Vernon of London,
the clever Mr. Francis Vernon who vowed every woman had her price, Mr.
Vernon the hero of half a hundred squalid intrigues was dead. Why should
he not forget him, taking for his own that fortunate pseudonym which had
set him as high as the angels? With a gesture of dismay, he drew from
his cuff a greasy King of Hearts and spurned the dishonourable cardboard
with his foot.
"Amor!"
"My dear! My lovely one! My heart!"
"Once I climbed up a high hill at home in Hampshire."
He held her more closely.
"I climbed a hill and stared for a long while right into the sun. I was
giddy. Amor! Amor! I feel now as I did when I stared for a long while
into the sun."
"Phyllida! Phyllida!"
"You'll never not love me, Amor?"
"Never, I swear it."
"I could not bear you not to love me. Once I knew a young woman whose
lover forsook her and she used to work woollen flowers all day long with
a tambour frame, because she was working woollen flowers when he told
her that he loved her, and she never did anything else all the years
that we knew her; and, Amor, she is working them now, and oh, I'm afraid
when I think of her working those woollen flowers."
Vernon in his new frame of mind could scarcely forbear telling his love
of the ills he had intended towards her. He had caught a passion for
frankness and would have poured into her ears the whole of his past. He
could not endure, to such elation had he been carried, that Phyllida
should be ignorant of the worst of him in order that for the future she
should know more truly the very best of him. But he was wise and, though
Cupid had lent him his own wings, he would not play too many aerial
pranks, soar too near the sun, fall and break his neck. It was indeed a
form of abnegation that prevented him from showing Phyllida his own bad
self. It was bitter to hear her murmur, with a white hand on his sleeve.
"I knew you were true, my true love, all the time, all the time."
Nothing tugs at the heart-strings of a man like a young maid's plighting
of her troth. Nothing makes his brain reel like her first kiss freely
given.
"Oh, Phyllida, Phyllida! I'm not fit for you."
"Foolish Amor."
"Are you happy, my dearest?"
"Oh, so happy."
"We shall never be parted again."
"Never!"
"I did not know that life was so wonderful."
"I thought it was," she murmured, as she nestled to his heart, "because
Spring was always so sweet, and now I need never mind the Winter."
"All the years I did not know you, my Phyllida, were wasted years."
"Amor!"
"Phyllida!"
"How I shall always love you."
"Always?"
"To the end."
"Once," she said with a sigh, "I longed to grow old, and now I would
like to be always young."
"Ah! Phyllida, my Phyllida, don't speak of age. I've wasted so much of
my life."
He thought with anguish of the dead Summers he had known and wondered
with a great dread whether they would come again. If, while he could
still feel this splendid passion, they should be grey and dismal, he
would never forgive himself for having revelled in the warmth and gaiety
of those irrevocable seasons.
"You are not sad?" she asked, jealous of his silence.
"I wish that life were not so short."
Our villain was beginning to examine the foundations of his existence
upon this earth, where hitherto he had jogged along, accepting the most
outrageous calamity and good luck with placid superficial mind.
Meditation upon the brevity of a life, which at any moment a tavern
brawl might extinguish, would have seemed to him before this passionate
conversation a lunatick method of spending time. Poor villain! he had
not enjoyed much leisure for meditation. He was born in a hurry, his
mother being under contract to appear as Millamant a long while before
she should. He was brought up in a hurry at Alleyn's School to be
murdered in a hurry by some Richard III. Moreover, in youth he had
assisted at so many tinsel deaths that it was not surprizing he should
regard them lightly. Even his mother's death within sound of the orange
girls outside Drury Lane struck him as nothing more final than a last
appearance.
Now for the first time, there broke upon him the stunning fact of
inevitable decay and, being a self-indulgent man, he had for the moment
nothing more dignified than petulant despair with which to meet this
sudden apprehension of mortality.
"'Tis monstrous," he declared, "a fearful thought that you and I should
ever grow old and die. I cannot bear to think of your brown hair growing
white. Phyllida, you cannot grow old."
Love had made a woman of Phyllida and already, with gentle touch, she
soothed his anguish.
"Dear Amor, I know that if we love each other truly, we shall never grow
old to each other."
"Phyllida, I love you," and clasping her lissome body breathless to his,
he defied the lightning of the Gods.
And now a new fear assailed him. 'We shan't be followed,' he had
contemptuously informed old Mother Mawhood at Blackhart Farm. In sudden
dread he leaned out of the window of the chariot, and strained his eyes
to pierce the darkness. He could see nothing save the shadows of the
postillions against the hedge, hear nothing save the clatter of the
horses. The loneliness and gloom affected his spirits and with a shudder
he sought again the musty interior of the vehicle. He caught his love to
his heart.
"What did you see?" she asked.
"Nothing, but I was afraid, I could not bear to lose you now."
"You saw nothing?"
"Nothing."
"And heard nothing?"
"Nothing. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, Amor, I thought I saw the shadow of a man on horseback."
"Fancy, my sweet, fancy." Then, with a sinking fear, he remembered he
had told Mother Mawhood of the pearls. He called to mind the postboys'
insolence, the look that passed between Charlie and Dickie when he told
them he would ride in the chariot. He sprang in alarm to open the
window, but the carriage pulled up with a jerk which flung him back
against Phyllida. The glass crashed to the heavy butt of a pistol and,
as he stretched out for his own fire-arms, he saw the postboys resting
long barrels on the sill and, by the lamp which one of them held, a
masked face that with thick brutal voice demanded their money.
"Hand 'em over."
"Hand what over?" said Vernon, in a futile attempt to delay his
humiliation.
"The pops first," said one of the Maggs, winking humorously in the
direction of Vernon's pistols that in leathern holsters lay harmless on
the dusty floor of the chariot.
Now occurred one of those astonishing coincidences that have tempted the
speculation of many sages since the beginning. A field-mouse chose that
very moment to cross the road. A large white owl spied the diminutive
pilgrim and, having tasted no food that stormy night, swooped daringly
upon his prey under the heads of the standing horses. Terrified by the
soft white apparition, the leaders plunged forward. In a moment the
chariot was bumping and jolting at a wild pace down the road, having
broken Charlie Maggs' big toe in transit. The blackguard deserved a scar
for his carelessness, if for nothing else, and the limp he earned that
night was some time afterwards the means of proving his complicity in
the affair of the blind mouse-tamer, thereby ridding the world of a very
dirty rascal. Mice were fatal to Charlie Maggs. It is satisfactory to
know that the adventurous animal avoided the owl, and it is also
consoling to learn that the latter never adorned a gamekeeper's pole,
but died a natural death in the hollow trunk where it had spent actually
all the days of its life.
It was a moment or two before Vernon understood that the danger was
averted; then he bent low to reassure Phyllida, who was crouching in the
darkest corner of the chariot.
"My dear," he cried, and for all the swaying motion caught her to him
with a certain grace. "My dear, there is nothing to be afraid of now."
"Oh! Amor!" she sobbed, abandoning herself to the horror of remembrance,
"that face--that black face."
"My sweet, you shall never see it again."
"It will follow us."
"If he should I have something here that will frighten him away fast
enough."
Vernon waved a pistol which he had picked up even as he caught hold of
Phyllida. But the masked face did not pursue them and, after a mile or
so of noisy swaying progress, Vernon began to consider the possibility
of stopping the carriage. He leaned out of the window and nearly had his
eyes put out by a bramble sucker. A survey from the other side, where
the remaining lamp lent a wavering illumination, showed they were
travelling at an alarming pace down a deep rocky lane. Vernon noticed
that the boulders in places trespassed considerably upon the road with
projecting points, and there seemed every likelihood of the chariot
being presently wrecked like a rudderless boat. However, runaway horses
and drunken men share a large amount of the world's luck between them,
and notwithstanding the headlong speed, every boulder in turn was
successfully avoided. Farther along, the surface of the road grew worse
and, every other second, one of the wheels would grate against the side
of a deep rut with a horrid jar. They were going downhill now and Vernon
strained his eyes to discover the lie of the country. The pace was
harder than ever, and it seemed impossible for four horses to survive
the roughness of the road and the steepness of the descent.
Suddenly above the clatter they heard the roar of water: at the same
moment the front wheel struck some permanent obstacle: the chariot
dipped forward: Phyllida and Vernon were flung in a tangled heap on the
floor, while the sudden cessation of movement made the noise of the
water sound very portentous in the gloom. Vernon extricated himself from
the vehicle on the lighted side and, jumping out, splashed his way
through mire and puddles to the horses' heads. The two leaders with that
unexpected philosophy which in horses often succeeds the most fervid
excitement were cropping the young herbage peacefully, while the
wheelers were only slightly more restive through their inability to
reach the same sweet pasture. Vernon snatched the solitary lamp from the
socket and went to help Phyllida alight. As she stood upon the step and
gave him her little hand, he divined with a sense of awe, begotten by
the solitude of the surroundings, that she was truly his. He was Adam
greeting Eve with the mystery of woman all about her in that primaeval
Spring.
The scene of the catastrophe was peculiarly solemn. The chariot had
struck a column of stone that rose suddenly out of the ground as if the
finger of a Titan had been frozen into perpetuity to mark some early and
gigantick travail of his mother Earth. The lamp with feeble yellow light
made monstrous shadows of the huge features it sought vainly to
illuminate. So far as he could judge they were nearly at the bottom of a
deep ravine along which swept a torrent whose magnitude was impossible
to estimate, since the roar of the waterfall gave it in the darkness a
dreadful importance.
"It must be close on two o'clock," said Vernon, "let's leave this
disastrous vehicle. We may find shelter somewhere over this valley."
Phyllida drew the riding hood round her and, taking her lover's arm,
silently acquiesced in this proposal.
As they drew near the waterfall, the thunder of it made her shiver. They
crossed the torrent by a stone bridge that seemed to have become a
natural feature in the landskip.
On the far side by a common impulse they stopped and Vernon leaned down
to kiss her face.
"My Phyllida," he murmured; and held the lamp so that he could see the
shimmer and gleam of love in her eyes. They stood silent, enraptured,
and the hot yellow lamp away down in the depths of this world-forsaken
valley became the very torch of Hymen.
With slow steps they climbed the opposite hill, deserting the waters and
the rocks, the ferns, the little bridge, for the grey starshine above
the gloom. Yet the awe of that solemn ravine, which they had reached
after such peril, enthralled them still and I think both felt as if
somehow their love had been consecrated by a divine being. It was quite
a relief from the strain of reverence when Vernon informed Phyllida that
there was no sign of any human habitation.
"What shall we do with the carriage?" asked the latter.
"Don't fret about that."
"And the horses?"
"They must take their chance. I wish I knew the hour."
"You said it must be two o'clock."
"The sun does not rise till half-past five. Three hours and a half. I
wonder why we left the chariot. It would be wiser to go back. You will
be cold in this open country."
The wind was blowing shrewdly up there in the starlight, and Phyllida
would not deny she was cold and tired.
"We had better go back to the chaise. 'Twas warmer in the valley."
Yet both of them felt a strange disinclination to risk the disillusion
of return till, suddenly, up there in the wind and starlight, terror
caught them, and the noise of water tumbling over rocks gave them a
sense of security from this wide place of silence.
"'Tis a monstrous uneasy country," said Vernon, voicing in common speech
the sense of woe that oppressed him.
"I feel frightened," Phyllida agreed, "let us go back to the water."
They stopped to listen as people will whose minds have been much wrought
upon. There was nothing but the lisp of the wind in the bents of last
year's grass and a melo-dious sighing in the boughs of larches. Yet
never throughout that adventurous night had Phyllida's heart pattered at
such a pace, never had she been so near to shrieking aloud. Without
longer delay they turned back in the direction of the coombe, walking
with quick steps as if to avoid an invisible pursuit. Half-way down the
hill, Vernon stooped to gather a primrose.
"Here's a daisy," he said.
"A daisy," Phyllida cried. "Why, foolish Amor, 'tis a primrose," and
whatever fiend or goblin followed in their wake fled in affright at the
sound of her rippling laughter.
I think nothing shows more conclusively that Mr. Vernon was in love with
Miss Courteen than his indifference to her ridicule.
"Sweetest," he said, "I'm ignorant of the best things like flowers," and
forthwith began to tell Phyllida of his life in London, so that when
presently they stood again upon the bridge, he was raising his voice in
order to describe his first impressions of rustick Marybone, to which he
added a very nice account of the view of the Hampstead Hills.
Under the influence of this narrative, the scene lost some of its
grandeur. An air of grottoes, of stone embellishments, arbours, and
cunning recesses shed itself over the landskip. One heard comparisons
with this or that famous haunt of sight-seeing mobs. In fact both Vernon
and Phyllida, being English, felt their late raptures were unbecoming,
and having excused a lapse into sensibility by the fright they had
suffered, proceeded to declare that the chasm, far from being Titanick,
would make a mighty fine site for an excursion of pleasure. At least
Vernon clothed the opinion in words, Phyllida was too much fatigued to
do more than murmur a weary assent.
They found the chariot just as they had left it and the four horses
browsing upon the grass. He handed her into the vehicle, made her
comfortable with what rugs and cloaks he could collect and left her to
rest with the assurance he would remain close at hand. She gave his hand
a tired clasp and almost immediately fell fast asleep. Vernon tethered
the horses to various stumps in the vicinity, and proceeded to doze and
dream away the cold hours before dawn in the shelter of a particularly
large and overhanging ledge of rock. The sound of the falling water that
deafened him with its roar when first he heard it, now soothed him like
a gentle lullaby.
I cannot do justice to the scene: Rembrandt with his powerful and gloomy
imagination could have etched it. He would have made the two lovers
present themselves to the onlooker in their right proportions to the
scenery. You and I are too near to the candlelight of Curtain Wells to
believe in the romantick desolation wherein they seemed of no more
importance than the ferns that hung down their green tongues to the
limpid pools hollowed from jagged rocks. Vernon, huddled in the shelter
of the crag, with his hat pressed over his eyes, his knees arched as
high as his chin, might well have been a belated herdsman who, having
flung himself into this valley to avoid the upland wind, had been
bewitched by the magick of running water to dream away the night. The
horses in the black shadows and the ruined chariot had an air of Gothick
melancholy; the yellow lamp that glimmered fitfully in the heart of the
abyss served only to throw into more huge relief the neighbouring rocks,
while it lighted the thresholds of gaping caverns that stretched beyond
to unimaginable depths of solitude and gloom. The night wore on and over
the hill the lovers had found so depressing to their spirits, like a
sword in the twilight, lay the first grey streak of dawn. Phyllida and
her lover slept while the features of the landskip began to win again
their own outlines, while the rocks that were wrapped in the warm velvet
of night appeared with a cold sheen. The grey streak widened to a broad
lake whose margin was flecked with the faint hues of lavender and mauve.
Birds began to twitter and chirp in the trees and bushes that overhung
the rocks below, while the winds of dawn fluted in the small withy bed
beside the bridge.
Very wan in the morning twilight, Mr. Charles Lovely and Mr. Anthony
Clare clattered down the deep lane that led to the valley. Their horses'
flanks glistened with the sweat of hard travel and the riders rose
hardly to the jerking downhill motion.
Just as the rose-tipped fingers of Aurora plucked the lavender from the
skies, Charles and Tony caught sight of the chariot and just as they
pulled their horses to a standstill, Mr. Vernon woke up. It is
characteristick of the latter's new-found consideration that his first
action was to warn them with a gesture of Phyllida's presence fast
asleep inside. Charles tapped his holsters in reply and pointed up the
opposite slope. Vernon rose to follow his pursuers with a backward
glance in the direction of the chariot.
When they were over the bridge and out of Phyllida's hearing Charles
reined in his walking horse and inquired if Vernon was willing to give
him satisfaction.
"For what?" said the latter with a sneer.
"For insulting my Muse," said Charles, determined if possible not to
make Phyllida the subject of the quarrel.
"Your muse?" echoed Vernon, with the faintest intonation of surprise,
"but I promised you satisfaction for that a month hence."
Vernon was equally determined that Phyllida should be the direct
occasion of the duel, if duel there must be.
The rosy heavens became a sheet of vivid scarlet intersected with the
golden bars of the fast rising sun. Up he came in a blaze and dazzle of
glory, lustrous and invigorating; still the colour was not quite
effaced, and on the three men that scarlet dawn made an invincible
impression of disaster and woe. A red sky is a warning to shepherds and
sailors, no doubt it was ominous to lovers.
The summit of the hill was reached and involuntarily the three paused in
their wrangling to marvel at the extensive landslip suffused with the
amber haze of earliest morn. The homesteads in sight seemed untenanted:
there was not a single column of curling smoke to mark the presence of
humanity.
Where they were standing, the road was bordered on either side by a wide
stretch of level sward. On the left was a spinney of larches showing as
yet no crimson plumes of Spring, round which numbers of rabbits
gambolled in air that sparkled like golden wine. It seemed indeed more
like July than April, and only the bare trees told the true tale of the
season's youthfulness. Up here on the top of the world the three men
drank in the beauty of the universe and, having as it were performed
their orisons, turned to arrange the details of a bloody encounter.
"I promised I would meet you where you would in a month's time,"
repeated Vernon obstinately.
"But I prefer to meet you now," replied Charles.
"I have no one to act for me."
"Mr. Clare will act for both of us."
"That is an irregular proceeding."
"I don't care."
"And Miss Courteen?" Vernon was resolved to drag Charles to the real
point at issue. "What is to become of Miss Courteen?"
"In either event, Mr. Clare will be able to escort her back to Curtain
Wells."
"D---- n you," said Vernon, roused by his enemy's assumption of
guardianship. "And what if she wishes to stay with me?"
"Mr. Lovely has her mother's authority to conduct her home," interposed
Clare.
"What you two prim busybodies don't appear to understand is that Miss
Courteen prefers to remain with me."
"Miss Courteen is not her own mistress. She is not of age," said Clare.
"And pray how do you propose to make her accompany you?"
"Why, in this way," interrupted Charles, shaking off his friend's arm,
"in this way, Mr. Vernon. If you decline to meet me with pistols, by
G---- I'll thrash you senseless with my crop."
Vernon's hands twitched for a moment, but he had learned a new
restraint, gained a new dignity from the wondrous ride and with scarcely
a perceptible quiver in his voice begged to point out to his friend Mr.
Lovely that if he shot him, he should not scruple to shoot Mr. Clare
were the latter to stand in his way.
"But what if you're shot, Sir?" cried Charles, betraying in his
eagerness the true reason for his desire to force an instant encounter,
"as by G---- you deserve to be for murdering the poor little Major."
Vernon was perplexed.
"The Major? Is he dead? I had nothing to do with his death." The
simplicity of the denial almost convinced his listeners that he was
speaking the truth.
"Come, Sirrah, will you meet me? said Charles, lifting his crop.
"Listen, you pair of puppies," said Vernon between his teeth. "I could
have put a bullet into either of you at any time during the last five
minutes, and by heavens, I don't know why I kept my finger from the
trigger. Yes, I do," he shouted. "I've got a chance of happiness and I'm
not going to throw it away by having your blood on my head. You're an
interfering pair of fools, but I cheated one of you at cards and I
played a low game over the book, and by G----, I believe my father was a
gentleman. I'll meet you, Mr. Lovely, now."
With these words he flung down on the grass at Charles' feet the two
pistols which the skirts of his riding-coat had concealed.
"I'll step fifteen paces," said Mr. Clare, hiding his emotion with a
piece of practical utility. And, as he began to measure the ground, away
down in the broken chariot, Phyllida woke with a start. She was
surprized by the daylight and called to her lover. Only birdsong
answered her voice. In sudden dismay, presentiment hanging over her like
the aftermath of an evil dream, she jumped from the chariot. Intuition,
perhaps the remembrance of last night's fear, made her look towards the
summit of the slope. In silhouette against the golden sky, she saw three
figures. Breathless with horror she ran in their direction. Up the hill
she laboured. It was still cold from the night air and foreboding was
heavy upon her heart. Up the hill she struggled, leaving in her path
many fluttering pieces of muslin where eager feet had torn the frail
flounces. Down the road, she saw them level their weapons. "One, two,
three," came in measured tones along the still air of the morning. There
were two shots, the scud of frightened rabbits to their burrows, a
reeling figure, a cloud across the sun, a mist over life, and she was
kneeling in the dewy grass beside Amor.
"Oh, God!" she screamed, "He's dead. Oh! Oh! Oh!"
That anguished cry wounded Lovely deeper than any leaden bullet, for it
killed his hopes.
At the touch of his dear one, Vernon opened his dark eyes.
"Here's a bunch of primroses," he murmured, "not daisies. I picked them,
Phyllida ... for you ... not daisies ... primroses...."
And so with thoughts of flowers, Mr. Francis Vernon died. Pray let that
sentence be his epitaph.
Charles, watching the maid stare into the sun with eyes whose light
seemed fled with the swift-flying soul of the dead man, wished
passionately--wildly--that he were the quiet body there in the dewy
grass.
"What shall we do?" he murmured brokenly to Clare.
"Leave her alone for a while."
"What a mistake it has been."
They walked away with cautious steps and spoke in whispers as if they
were afraid.
"What right had I to interfere between lovers?"
"You did it for the best."
"I know, I know, but what a d----d number of silly actions are done for
the best."
"To-day is the first of April," said Clare, seeking with a commonplace
to relieve the tension of Charles's distracted mind.
"Is it? What an April fool fortune has made of me."
_Chapter the Thirty-seventh_