IT was six o’clock of a cold September morning when Sir Robert—or Mr. Tuke, as we must now know him—woke in his room off the stable-yard of the old “George” inn at Winchester. Lying lazily snoozed amongst the pillows, he reviewed, with some amused satisfaction, the first courses of that scheme of reformation he had mapped out for himself, whereof two rather sleepless nights at Farnham and his present quarters—the result of an abstention in the matter of numerous “nightcaps,” which habit had made necessary to slumber—were the prologue. Now, the little battle fought and won, he preened his moral feathers smugly, and felt clear-eyed and very good indeed. As to the mysterious estate—the last stage on the journey to which he should cover that day—he had soon learned to accept its acquisition with that sweetness of irresponsibility that was his most engaging and aggravating characteristic. But, after all, he had an excellent digestion—in common with a great many men of the eighteenth century—and was little inclined to dyspeptic brooding over problems.
Now, as he lay, his half-dreaming glance was arrested by a coloured print after George Morland hanging on the wall over against him. The like he remembered dimly to have known in a nursery of long ago—a picture that had often set his young soul wandering by lanes of enchantment. Nothing could have served better to confirm and make abiding his present mood. He was a boy again, an apple-skinned Ulysses, with the limitless possibilities of the unknown before him. Without stain or guile he passed beyond the narrow margins of the print into a land that no mortal foot but his own had yet trodden.
Indeed, for the moment he was a child again, and there is nothing in after-life like the pure imaginings of such. To the child every incident is a picture framed and hung upon a wall. The memory of these pictures abides long, then fades a little and a little more. We are hardly conscious of them in old age, or at least feel hardly the ecstasy of their atmosphere. In acquiring our identities (Keats’s phrase), what don’t we lose? We find a fact for a dream—a wretched exchange. But the first possession doesn’t altogether go. It recurs to us at odd moments in little sweet mental vertigoes—never so much, perhaps, as during that half-waking hour of dawn when we are least conscious of our material selves.
Then to think of a dewy morning down; of a pleached alley of fruit-trees in blossom; of a windy common; of the mystery of snow and brooding distances; of a Christmas-tree, even, and the mingled ravishing smell of lighted tapers and banked fir-branches, is momentarily to recall the amazing romance and illimitableness of life; is to be quit of the dreariness of conviction, and to stand once more at the foot of the green slope, and look up and wonder whither the clouds are sailing over the far summit. A few artists, a few writers, a few musicians, have the power, or the instinct, to inspire us with these ancient imaginings; and such as can, we must dearly love, though they may never stand in the front ranks of their fellows. The child is the only real genius; and perhaps these have remained morally children. In mid-life they can arrest and record the fugitive retrospections that to the most of us are only bubbles broken away from the far-distant spring of life, to be caught at and to vanish on the prick of possession. God bless them! they are our best earnest of the spiritual.
Out of his luminous stupor on that grassy borderland of dawn, the dreamer came with a full heart, and, it must be confessed, a biting consciousness of emptiness in his stomach.
He sprang out of bed, and bathed and dressed to the hissing accompaniment of ostlers in the yard below and to the clank of horse-hoofs on the cobble-stones.
He breakfasted, as men did in those days, as if he were victualling for a siege, and had great thoughts of kissing the chambermaid when he fee’d her—but refrained.
By half-past nine he was on the road, with a heart full of gaiety, and a recurring wonder for his destination, and clattered under the old west gateway of the town with a song on his lips—
She was throated like the stare—
Well-a-day!
She was white as buds of May—
Well-a-day!
And all with their sweet scent
Her bodie was besprent,
That to kiss her was a joy beyond compare,
If her mouth the scarlet hips—
Well-a-day!
Would for redness all dismay—
Well-a-day!
Ah! it took its comely stain
From the truths that she had slain;
For falser than the serpent were her lips.
Once with passion I did rave—
Well-a-day!
Now I will not, though she say
Well-a-day!
For the cry of damnéd Love
All her beauty doth disprove,
And her heart it is a stone above his grave.
Mr. Tuke had not a good voice. The chords of vibration were beyond his control. But his breast was lined with romance, and this led him to give some melodious effect to the sentiment of words that did not seem, it must be admitted, appropriate to his rather riotous character.
He left the old city and took the Stockbridge road; and presently, entering between country hedgerows, looped his reins slackly and let his horse amble fairly as he listed.
The sunshine in his soul was constitutional, inextinguishable, and not reflected from his surroundings; for the day was bitter for the time of year, and the wind stuck as rigidly in the northeast as if the stiff-pointing weathercocks had nailed it there. The greyness, however, emphasized the sparkle of hip and holly and all red berries; for every dull mood of Nature has its compensations to shame us out of peevishness. A squirrel ran from branch to root of a beech-tree like a stain of rust; a cloud of fieldfares went down the sky and wheeled, disintegrated, as if they were so much blown powder; the ruddocks twinkled in the hedges like dead leaves flicked by the wind.
The horseman had an eye and a heart for all. He was of good, lovable material, whatever the hitherto courses of his bad days and worser nights.
By and by he came out upon country very wild and barren. The road heaved and dropped by way of grim and treeless downs, through whose cropped surface-grass the white chalk smote upwards like death in a sick man’s face. For leagues the sterile slopes seemed stretching onwards; and no sign of life was on them all, but here and there a flapping crow—no music of it, but, in some more sheltered hollow, the sweet lark’s broken ground-song.
And the further he rode, the more confirmed in desolation grew the scenery. There was a wild forlorn beauty about it all, nevertheless—a clean-blown freshness that seemed to set the hillsides pulsing with opal tints, like near-extinguished ashes breathed upon.
Something, familiar to those days, was wanting, however; and the solitary rider peered for the something, unwilling to believe that a tract so lonely could be innocent of a certain unchancy landmark. He had already loosened his pistols in the holsters, and was riding with a greater regard for surprises.
He topped a hillock, and “Ah!” quoth he; “I could not be mistaken.”
On a high swell of ground, right in his path, as it seemed, a structure like a massive clothes’-horse, open at an angle, stood up against the sky. From its crowning beams a short slack or two of chain depended; but these were quit for the time of any ugly burden—a void that by no means pleased the traveller.
“When the boggart tumbles, the crows re-gather,” he murmured sententiously; but he set to singing again, though with an eye alert for mishaps.
Nothing occurred, however; nor had he sighted a solitary soul moving in the breadth of the wide landscape, when—without a change being obvious in the character of the latter—he found himself descending a steep slope to a little long township of queer and ancient houses.
Here at a pleasant small tavern—on whose sign-board, as he approached, he read the legend “The First Inn” (the reverse slyly exhibited, to the eternal merriment of chuckleheads, the obvious antiperistasis of “The Last Out”)—he drew rein, and found he had reached the village of Stockbridge, which was in truth that halting-place on his last stage, from which he was, as he had learned, to take a by-road, some five or six miles, to his destination.
Into the tap he strode; and there were a few gaping rustics swilling their muddy quarts, and the landlord, a wizened, bent-stick of a man, behind the bar.
“Oblige me by sending some one to look after my horse,” said Mr. Tuke to this person.
The person shifted a glass or two, covertly eyeing the stranger through rheumy slits of lids; but answer made he none.
Mr. Tuke repeated his request—still without result. He turned sharply on one of the grinning hinds.
“What ails the old faggot?” he said.
“He be stone deaf, master.”
Then the fellow bawled: “Jarge! Jar-rge! the gen’leman warnts ’s oss tended.”
The old man put a wrinkled claw to his ear, and shook his head.
“Eh!” said Mr. Tuke. “You refuse?”
He flushed in surprised anger, when at the moment a girl came into the bar, and addressed him in a bright civil voice.
“Grandfather’s deaf, sir,” she said; “and I was out of the way. I’ll send your horse to the stable. And what shall I draw for your honour?”
She was fresh and desirable as a spring of sweet water to a thirsty traveller. An old yellow handkerchief, of cherished silk, was knotted about her head, yet none so jealously but that a curl or two might escape—like tendrils of Tantalus his vine—for the teasing of fervid souls; and her gown, girdled under her bosom and fastened there with a favour of Michaelmas daisy, smelt of lavender and was the colour of it. She was tall, too, for a Hebe of the downs, and her arms, bare to the elbow, were tanned of a soft ivory—as were her hands, that were fine and capable-looking.
She gazed honestly at our gentleman from eyes as full of brown harmonies as a starling’s back; and he had no thought but to return her gaze with complete admiration.
“Can you give me to eat?” he said. “Anything will do.” And “Surely, sir,” she answered, “if simple fare will serve your honour.”
She showed him into a queer little parlour, with a long latticed window that looked into a vegetable garden ruddy with apple-trees, and fetched cloth and salt from a corner cupboard, while he sat down by an old grumbling grandfather clock and watched her movements.
“Who is the landlord of this good tavern?” said he.
“George Pollack, sir; and I am his granddaughter, at your service.”
“Would you were. And what is your name, my pretty maid?”
“Elizabeth, I was christened,” said she; “and Betty am I called.”
His last words suggesting an old nursery rhyme—“And what is your fortune, my pretty maid?” he could not help murmuring.
“Self-possession,” said she with a smile, and whisked out of the room.