THERE is a curious anomaly about the way in which a self-confidence, impervious to the stabs of ill-fortune, may be paralyzed in a moment by the little prick of a snub irresponsible. Now, I would not go so far as to say that the sang-froid shown by Mr. Tuke over his virtual dismissal by Miss Royston represented the real state of his feelings; or that he did not find his appetite for a certain fruit stimulated by his disappointment of it. But, without doubt, the sting that most rankled for the moment in his vanity was that tart little rebuke administered to him by the aristocratic carline in the theatre-lobby. It was absurd, it was inexplicable—but so it was. His sense of injury in the greater matter was quite overcrowded by his feeling of humiliation in the lesser. That was a little snake, but it swallowed all the rest—so elastic is a proud stomach.
Perhaps it was all very beneficial to him. No doubt it was too much his way to affect a good-humoured tolerance of destiny; to repudiate responsibility, in speech or act, on the strength of a certain genial creed of fatality that assumed itself independent of the laws of obligation. To have that much of the vagabond in one, that one moves serenely indifferent to conventional restrictions, is excellent; but to insist upon one’s vagabondage is to be a didactic vagabond; and that is intolerable. For it is to assume that orthodox folk must accept vagabondage as the superior condition, which, being orthodox, they cannot.
Therefore it was that, upon the morning following his visit to the theatre, our gentleman started—as he had obstinately resolved he would do—upon his homeward journey, quite truculent with a sense of grievance.
There was little in the prospect about him that served to otherwise than confirm his depression. Winter, it was evident, was asserting itself with a despotic and merciless rigour that was deaf to all considerations of humanity. The sleet of the previous night had frozen into and made long icy crevasses of the road-ruts; the throat of the wind was hoarse with cold; the grey of utter lifelessness stretched from earth to sky—a grey that no fury of the stiff blast could rend or discompose.
Each hour linked itself to the next with a bolt of iron as, his teeth set to the driving chill, he urged his long way forward. The road clanked under him; the scarlet nostrils of his straining horse palpitated like blown coals against a background of ashes. He did not much care to think of anything but his own miserable discomfort; and in that he took some hard satisfaction, as if by enduring it he were shaming the callous soul who had bidden him away from his cosy fireside in the “Adelphi.”
It was at this climax of his meditations that humour and hunger ventured upon a little roguish assault on his epigastrium. Had the attack failed, he had been other than the man of this history. It did not, by any means. He sighed, drew himself up, twinkled over the collapse of his pondered heroics, broke into a laugh, half-vexed, half-jocund, and fairly plunged into that illuminating thought of the æsthetic value of appetite to a free man.
“For I am free!” he cried to the winds—“and responsible in all the world to nobody but myself!”
At the very next wayside inn he dismounted and called boisterously for food. Munching this, with a confident digestion, by a jolly fire, and delighting in every purple bead of Clos Vougeot that swam to his glass rim, he would give his fancies, as the freeborn children of a Bohemian, rein to run as they listed, and would even humour them to the top bent of his inclination. Well, their order—or absence of it—might be this: Position and respectability; a park, a carriage-road, trim servants, nice-mannered children; a stake in the county and a sober reputation to prop it; an admirable cold wife, in whom an innate artificiality should be tuned to the musical pitch of sentiment; on every side a thickset hedge of formality and restriction, where-through one decent passage alone should be pierced—the stone-flagged way to the tremendously enduring family vault;—and at the last, the precise misrepresentation of a ruled epitaph. Good! And now from the olive to the wine: Life—the life that he understood and could rejoice in—away from the flint road and spurring on to the downs; the life of heath and water and wood, of the blown blue sky and the whirled pollen of flowers; of light and gloom, risk and effort and reward; of the great breath of change and freedom, and—ah! yes: of the sympathizing soft heart to be always waiting him at the blossoming corner; the spirit to often share with him the wanderings and the marvels, and to pull him down into the sweet-smelling brake at shut of eve, and so for both to make a common cause of dreams.
Which was the happier picture? And yet a very fragrant perfume would cling about the presentment of that white gentle-born Angela; and sometimes even now it would appear a profanation to him to hold her cheaply in his thoughts.
He would not. If a certain shame-faced exultation over his latest emancipation would stir oddly in him from time to time, he would not so far abuse the trust his own heart had placed in a recent sentiment as to set up a new idol in the niche of a fallen image. Angela might be deposed; but—for the present at least—no other should usurp her throne.
Momentarily firm in this respect, and secure in his own geniality from the carping criticisms of conscience, he turned from all tender retrospections, and lazily, as he sat, reviewed a little company of late incidents. From yesterday with its snubs and its petty hurts, to the melancholy and monotonous flight of this morning—even that now had its accents to be indulgently recalled. His thoughts went back along the wintry road he had traversed, and dwelt comically upon the figure of an old oddity he had seen peering down upon him from a leaf-ruined gazebo—an oddity, the personification of much inquisitiveness, that was muffled in many capes and that held a great blue umbrella between its old head and the blast. He remembered how a half-dozen snow-buntings had fled over a hedge-row as he went by; how down a certain swoop of meadow-land a flock of screaming gulls had dived; how, where in a roadside churchyard a sexton was toiling at a grave, the titlarks had bobbed and curtsied on the newly-turned mould, desperate in their freezing hunger;—and from all this he augured that such a winter was threatening as would make the country no desirable place to live in for some months to come.
Still, he was not sorry he was returning to it. In his new lust for freedom a veritable loathing for the gilded fetters of town-life was a first condition, and he would have no knowledge of passions that could only take breath in a vitiated atmosphere. If he must sin, he would sin in the woods; and of his wavering human soul “let the forest judge.”
It had been a desolate road he came by—black and gloomy with frost, and enlivened by but few passing vehicles. One of these—a post-chaise—there had been, going on monotonously before him at a distance ahead. Its steady progression (he could not tell why) annoyed and worried him. It was always there, a yellow blot in the perspective of highway; whipping down and up the hollows, swinging rhythmically in its straps, endlessly speeding on and holding him, as it were, in its wake. Once or twice he had been moved to cut past and outrun it; but the bitter push of wind in his front and an apathy bred of cold would dissuade him from the effort, and in the end he would always find himself jogging sombrely along in its rear. It was a satisfaction to him, as he came within sight of the inn at which he was to dismount, to see this persistent vehicle, its occupants and cattle refreshed, moving off on its further journey; for so, he comforted himself, he should resume his own way by and by unvexed of that aggravating accompaniment. This was all childish, of course; but so it was that it was always his habit to be impatient of anything that embarrassed his free forward outlook; and to be kept walking behind a pedestrian in the street he would regard as almost a personal affront.
However, for the rest of his day’s journey he had the road virtually to himself; and by sundown he had completed his forty-fifth mile, and was clanking into the High Street of Basingstoke.
At the “White Horse” in this town he woke on the following morning, with a sense of constriction at his heart, to find the water in his ewer a sheet of ice, and that smell of cold soot, that seems the prevailing atmosphere of hard winters, to proceed from everything about him.
His room looked upon the stable-yard, and glancing thereinto while in process of dressing, he broke into an oath at sight of a yellow chaise that stood below with horses attached, over one of which a red-nosed post-boy sprawled expectant, awaiting his fare.
“Now, by the lord!” he muttered—“if my Nemesis has not lain with me at mine own inn!”
He was scowlingly speculating as to the possibility of his having to tail a second day in the wake of this rumbling jaundice, when he uttered a startled exclamation and, drawing into the covert of the window curtains, stood peering down into the yard.
For the hirer of the chaise—to whom early rising would appear to be a right condition of posting—was at that moment issued from the inn, and was mounting, without any affectation of leisure, the step of the vehicle.
Mr. Tuke, thinking of that presentation to his view, two nights before, of a lank, long back in the pit of the theatre, came hurriedly from his hiding-place; and at that instant, the traveller turned and flashed an upward glance at the window. With the very movement, he gave a hoarse order to the post-boy, wrenched open the door of the carriage, plunged in, and, before peeping Tom could gather his perceptions, the chaise was rolling and clattering out of the yard.
So—ho! there was business afoot! Where hitherto was all avoidance and reluctance, now must be haste and scurry and pursuit. The squalid rogue Brander posting it like a lord! Surely there must be some momentous reason for the outlay.
The gentleman at this point, wild with eagerness and impatience, stood below presently on the yard-steps to bolt a mouthful of meat and bread while his horse was saddling. Ten minutes later he was off and set to the chase, pounding it along at what rate he durst on the icy roads.
“If they are pointed for Andover, well and good,” he murmured. “Do they take cross-tracks for the ‘Dog and Duck,’ I shall know what to apprehend.”
With the thought, he swerved from the main-road into the first of the homeward by-ways; cantered down a mile of close-set lanes; turned a corner leading to a stretch of open downs, and—there, going one before him, small in the distance, was the vehicle he pursued.
To overtake and constitute himself its rear-guard—such must be his object. An easily attained one, it would appear; but his horse was scarcely fresh, and a slip on those glassy ruts might ruin all.
He settled himself doggedly to the chase. Such veritably it became; for soon it was evident that the quarry knew itself to be pursued, and tactically wished to allure him on to a destructive speed. But, little by little the horseman gained on the other. He got near enough to mark Brander’s head thrust intermittently from the window—by and by to hear faintly the rascal’s voice cursing on his leaping postillion. Suddenly the leading party took an unexpected way, brought out on the high-road leading from Winchester to Stockbridge, and went careering for the latter place at a gallop.
“Ha!” cried Tuke to himself, “that double won’t draw me from the scent, my friend!”
It was all give-and-take country they raced by—desolate downland that dropped and rose like a flying sparrow. Over it the pace became terrific. The post-boy lashed his horses till they foamed; the rider galled the sides of his poor straining beast. Something, it was obvious, must happen shortly—to whom was the single question.
The pursuer was to triumph. At the crest of that very slope that led up to the high gallows-tree, the ridden post-horse shied at a dangling chain, threw his mount, brought his fellow to his knees—and in a moment carriage and cattle were a plunging tangle of confusion.
With a shout of jubilation, Tuke spurred up the hill and rode upon his enemy.