“THE FRENCH HORN”—MABEL HARKER, MY UNFORTUNATE ENGAGEMENT TO HER
—MR. CRAGE AND WHARTON PARK
THOUGH the idea to sack Monte Carlo did not occur to me till late in the
year (in the September of which I first met Lucy Thatcher), I must first
say something of my going down to Nesshaven in June, and the events
which led to my being in a position to undertake an affair of such nerve
and magnitude.
Lucy thought I should take readers straight to Monte Carlo, confining
myself to that part of the work only; but, after talking it over, she
agrees with me now that the adventure must be led up to in the natural
way it really was or the public won’t believe in it, after all, and I
shall have all my pains for nothing. So that’s what I shall do, in the
shortest and best way I can; promising, like the esteemed old
circus-rider Ducrow, as soon as possible to “cut the cackle and come to
the ’osses.”
Well, then, it was towards the middle of June when I joined the golf
club at Nesshaven, just after my militia training month was over. I was
introduced by Harold Forsyth (one of our Monte Carlo band later, and one
of the stanchest of them), who had the golf fever very badly, and, I
must say, was beginning to make himself rather a bore with it.
He and I went down from Liverpool Street and stayed at “The French
Horn,” the inn kept by Mr. Thatcher, Lucy’s father; and after Forsyth
had introduced me to the club and shown me round the links, he went back
to his regiment, the “Devon Borderers,” then stationed at Colchester,
very angry and complaining, as soldiers mostly are when obliged to do
any work. I remained behind, not that I had yet seen Lucy, but rather to
keep out of Mabel Harker’s way—the young lady to whom (as Lucy knows) I
happened, much against my will, to be at that time unfortunately engaged
to be married.
My first visit to “The French Horn” lasted three weeks, during which
time I manfully held my ground, though heavily bombarded by Mabel’s
letters, regularly discharged thrice a week from her aunt’s house in
Clifton Gardens at Folkestone. At last, as Mabel came to stay at her
sister’s in the Regent’s Park (on purpose, I believe), I was obliged to
go up to town for ten days, and there passed a sad time with her at the
University match, Henley, and the Eton and Harrow; at which noted places
of amusement and relaxation I cannot help thinking I was the most
unhappy visitor, though, to be sure, I tried hard not to show it.
But it was dreadful when I got back to my rooms in Little St. James’s
Street and attempted sleep; for I really think that _not_ being in love
with the person you have bound yourself to marry keeps more men awake
_more miserably_ than any of the so-called torments of love, which, with
scarcely an exception, I have never found otherwise than agreeable.
At last Mabel went back to Folkestone, and I was free to return to “The
French Horn,” and I never saw her again (thank goodness!) till the
momentous interview between us in October, from which I emerged a free
man; she having discovered in a boarding-house at Lucerne an architect
named Byles, whom she’d the sense to see was a more determined wooer
than I had ever been, and likely to make her a far better husband.
“The French Horn” is not an old house, having been built in about the
year 1830, from designs made by Mr. Thatcher’s father, who had copied it
from an inn he had once stayed in in Spain. For a country gentleman of
old family, the father seems to have been a somewhat remarkable person.
He had, for instance, been an intimate friend of the celebrated Lord
Byron, and was the only man in England (so Mr. Thatcher always said) who
knew the real story of the quarrel between the poet and his wife. Byron
confided it to him at Pisa as the closest of secrets; but, as he had
always told it to everybody when alive, and his son, my father-in-law,
invariably did and still does the same, there must be a good many people
in England by now who know all about it.
In fact, there was scarcely a golfer or bicyclist came to the house but
Mr. Thatcher didn’t fix him sooner or later in the bar and ask him if he
knew the real reason why Byron quarrelled with his wife and left
England. And as it was a hundred to one chance that they didn’t, Mr.
Thatcher always informed them in a loud, husky whisper, and shouted
after them as they left, “But you mustn’t publish it, because it’s a
family secret!”
And the reason was, according to Mr. Thatcher, that Lord Byron had
killed a country girl when a young man (somebody he’d got into trouble,
I suppose) and flung her body in the pond at Newstead; and that having,
in a moment of loving expansion, bragged of it to his wife, Lady Byron
had, very properly, promptly kicked him out of the house in Piccadilly;
which, also according to Mr. Thatcher, was the origin of those touching
lines:
“They tell me ’tis decided you depart:
’Tis wise, ’tis well, but not the less a pain,”
invariably quoted by him on the departure of a guest.
It was this same father of Mr. Thatcher’s who had parted with Wharton
Park, their ancestral home. He had been a great gambler in his youth,
and lost enormous sums at Crockford’s and on the turf, so that when he
died, in 1850, he had nothing to leave his only son, my Lucy’s father,
but three or four thousand pounds, very soon muddled away in unfortunate
business speculations.
At last, about twenty years ago, it occurred to Mr. Thatcher to come
down to Nesshaven and take “The French Horn,” close to the Park gates of
his old home, where, until the golf mania set in, beyond gaining a bare
livelihood, he did no particular good; having to depend on
natural-history lunatics, who came there in winter and prowled the shore
with shot-guns after rare birds, and, in summer, on families from
Colchester—tradespeople and bank-clerks and so on—who spent their
holidays lying about in the warm sand among the whins and complaining of
the food. Betweenwhiles there was scarcely a soul about except the
coast-guards, who came up to fill their whiskey-bottles, and a few
bicyclists who ate enormous teas and never would pay more than
ninepence.
But when a Colchester builder erected the club-house down on the links,
Mr. Thatcher’s business looked up wonderfully, and he really began to
make money, and even sometimes to turn it away, for the house was small.
Harold Forsyth discovered it, being quartered so near, and it was he who
introduced me, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful.
It was a curious place, as most amateur buildings are. Forsyth had not
told me anything about it, and I was indeed astonished when we first
drove up; for, with its colored bricks, veranda, high-pitched roof, and
odd carved wood-work, it reminded me somehow of an illustration to _Don
Quixote_, and I quite expected to see a team of belled mules and hear
the gay castanet click of the fandango. Instead of which, out came Mr.
Thatcher in a dirty old cricket blazer.
It was towards the middle of June, and the sun was just setting at the
end of a long, warm day. Mr. Thatcher showed us our rooms, and then took
us into the great hall up-stairs, from which a balcony and steps
descended into the garden. It had a very high-pitched roof, and was
decorated in the Moorish fashion (rather like the old London Crystal
Palace; where, by-the-way, I have eaten pop-corn many a time as a boy,
but cannot honestly say I ever enjoyed it), and would hold, I dare say,
a hundred and fifty people; rather senseless, I thought, seeing there
were only seven or eight bedrooms, but possibly useful for bean-feasts
or a printer’s wayz-goose.
The broad June sun was setting, as I say, and streamed right in from the
garden, as Forsyth and I ate our dinner. The only other guests were two
brothers named Walton, who spent their lives playing golf. They played
at Nesshaven all day, and wrote accounts of it every night, sitting
close together, smoking and mumbling about the condition of the greens
and their tee-shots, all of which was solemnly committed to paper.
What they would have done with themselves twenty years ago I can’t
conceive—possibly taken to drink. At any rate, now they only live for
golf, and their thick legs and indifferent play are to be seen wherever
there’s a links and they can get permission to perform.
Mr. Thatcher’s wife, a doctor’s daughter, had long been dead; but his
old mother, of the astonishing age of ninety-three, was still alive, and
lived with him in the inn. At first she had not at all liked the idea of
settling down almost at the gates of Wharton Park, her old home; but
every year since they came she had expected would be her last, and she
only lived on on sufferance, as it were, in the hope she would soon die.
Sprier old lady, however, I must say, I never saw. She wasn’t in the
least deaf, and never wore glasses, and she was simply the keenest hand
at bezique I ever encountered; at which entertaining game, by-the-way,
if she wasn’t watched, she would cheat outrageously.
She came of a good old Norfolk family, and actually remembered the
jubilee of George III. in 1810; but when asked for details of that
touching and patriotic event, all she could say was, “Well, I remember
the blacksmith’s children dressed in white.”
Old Mrs. Thatcher and I were great friends, and used to potter about the
garden together in the early mornings. Farther abroad she never
ventured, except once a year, I believe, when she trotted off to the
church to visit her husband’s grave and see the tablet inside was kept
clean.
So June and part of July slipped away, diversified, as I have explained,
by a visit to London and some melancholy pleasures sipped in Mabel
Harker’s society, from which I returned to “The French Horn” in a truly
desperate and pitiable frame of mind. Indeed, so low and forlorn was I
at times that Mr. Thatcher, with great sympathy, once or twice fetched
me out a bottle of old port (and not bad tipple, either, for a country
inn), which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the
misfortunes of his life.
Chief among them was the loss of his ancestral home, Wharton Park. The
Thatchers had lived there since the first of them, a Lord Mayor of the
time of Henry VIII., had built the house in the year 1543—of which
original structure only the stables, in an extremely ramshackle
condition, remained. A drunken Thatcher with a bedroom candle had burned
the rest, towards the end of the last century, when the present house
was built by my father-in-law’s grandfather; a bad man, apparently,
since though he had a wife and children established in Portman Square,
he kept a mistress in one of the wings of Wharton Park, where one night
she went suddenly raving mad (treading on her long boa and believing it
a serpent come from the lower regions to claim and devour her), and
filled the air with her screechings till, a year later, she died.
Mr. Thatcher’s father had mortgaged the place heavily to Mr. Crage, an
attorney and moneylender of Clement’s Inn, and soon after his death, in
1850, the mortgage was foreclosed, and Mr. Crage took possession and had
lived there with great disrepute ever since. He was a very vile old man,
who had killed his wife with ill-treatment and turned his daughters
out-of-doors; no female domestic servant was safe from his dreadful
advances, and at last he was left with no one to serve him but the
gardener and his wife, with whom, especially when they all got drunk
together on gin-and-water in the kitchen, he was as often as not engaged
in hand-to-hand fighting.
When I first saw him he was well over eighty, and a more
abandoned-looking old villain I never set eyes on; with a gashed,
slobbering mouth, in which the yellow teeth stuck up out of the
under-jaw like an old hound’s; a broken nose, which had once been
hooked, until displaced by a young carpenter in the village, whose
sweetheart he had been rude to; and the most extraordinary, bushy, black
eyebrows. His hand shook so he always cut himself shaving, and his chin
was always dabbled with dry blood. In short, a more malignant and gaunt
personality I never saw, as I first did quite close, leaning on a gate
and mumbling to himself, dressed in a tight body-coat, gaiters, and a
dull, square, black hat, like a horse-coper’s.
I remember he called out to me over the gate in a rasping voice, “Hi,
there, you young Cockney! what’s the time?” Whereupon I haughtily
replied it was time he thought of his latter end and behaved himself. At
which he fell to cursing and shaking his stick, and making sham,
impotent efforts to get over the gate. For they told me he was mortally
afraid of dying, as all bad (and, for the matter of that, many good) men
are. He knew, of course, Mr. Thatcher was the rightful owner of the
place, and he would sometimes come down to “The French Horn” and jeer
him about it, offering it for £30,000, which, he dared say, Mr. Thatcher
had in the house. And more than once, curse his senile impudence! Mr.
Thatcher told me he had offered to marry Lucy!—but this is really too
horrible a subject to be dwelt on.
In short, I loathed the old wretch so heartily that it was perhaps the
happiest moment of my life (with the exception of that blessed February
morning when I stood at the altar of Nesshaven church with Lucy and
heard her sweet and tremulous “I will”) when, after our triumphant
return from Monte Carlo, Mr. Thatcher and I went up to Wharton Park with
the £30,000 in notes and gold and paid the old ruffian out over the
coarse kitchen-table, almost the only furniture of the grand
drawing-room, where there were still the old yellow silk hangings—as
will all come in its place, later on.
Lucy Thatcher at this time, in June and July, was staying with her aunt,
Miss Young, her mother’s sister, who kept a girls’ school in the
Ladbroke Grove Road, out at Notting Hill. She taught some of the younger
children and made herself generally useful, taking them out walks in
Kensington Gardens; for Mr. Thatcher wisely thought her too beautiful to
be always at “The French Horn,” since bicyclists and golfers are
somewhat apt to be too boldly attentive to the lovely faces they meet
with on their roundabouts. Nor can I altogether blame them. So, as I
have said, I never saw her till my return in September, when her beauty
and modesty—which in my judgment are synonymous—at once captured me,
and always will hold me captive till I die.