The Passionate Elopement
before him all the time and whenever he paused, the wind far away over
the hillside had a melancholy and foreboding sound.
He met an elderly gentleman--a parson by the colour of his cloth--who
was poking some decayed herbage with a long cane. The elderly gentleman
looked up as Charles went by, gave him a 'very good morning,' and said
he believed he had seen an adder enter the herbage.
"Indeed," said Charles, who thought the information given demanded an
attitude of respectful surprize.
"But nothing amazes me after that wonderful February. When I tell you
that half an hour ago I saw an Orange Tip butterfly, you will understand
that nothing amazes me."
Charles left the Elderly Gentleman still investigating the decayed
herbage reputed to contain an adder, and found himself envying a mind
that could invest a day with such easy fame. He had seen an Orange Tip
butterfly. Had he met grey-eyed Athene, or beheld the roses and doves of
Cytherea, the day would scarcely have held a more splendid memory.
He envied the Elderly Gentleman. To be sure, with a Stoick complacency,
he had announced that nothing strange in the natural order could startle
him after that wonderful February, but his tone of triumphant excitement
foretold an entry in his diary that very night, perhaps was the prelude
to a paragraph in the _Gentleman's Magazine_.
He began to imagine the Elderly Gentleman sipping his Port before the
Rectory fire, on his knees an open Concordance whose pages were
illuminated by dancing butterflies, precocious heralds of the scented
spring. He heard the dignified butler told of his reverend master's
lucky discovery, heard him asked to hand down the calf-bound diary of
such and such a faded year, heard the Elderly Gentleman's chuckle when
he found, as he suspected, that the date in his own experience was
unprecedented and finally heard him order a bottle of the Port in bin
twelve, the first-fruits of the Assiento Agreement.
Charles fell to comparing himself to the Elderly Gentleman, greatly to
his own disadvantage.
Certainly the image of Phyllida danced before him in the water meadows,
eluded him at every turn and twist of the little stream, and beckoned
him along this secluded valley; but his own heart did not beat with the
proper amount of answering fervour.
Six weeks ago when he saw her first, all swansdown and blushes, he had
been duly elated. She had occupied much of his meditations ever since,
but he had no sensation of triumph, no delight in the great fact of her
existence. Perhaps that was because she belonged to the world. The
butterfly had belonged, as a phenomenon, to the Elderly Gentleman alone.
To the rest of mankind it was a legend. The discovery would be recorded
in print, but the discovery itself would flutter in secret pale wings
powdered with vivid gold, and this March morning would remain a
permanent fact in that Elderly Gentleman's heart. He would suffer no
disillusion. If others saw that butterfly, why, then, he would enjoy the
discussion of it, whether in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ beneath a
learned pseudonym or over two or three glasses of Port, with details
long drawn out to protract the delicious memory.
The ink is faded on the pages of those calf-bound diaries, the Latin
epitaph on the Elderly Gentleman's tombstone is now nearly illegible,
but since he went down to Elysium alert and heedful of the changing
seasons, I believe that his spirit still listens on summer eves to the
blackbirds in his beloved orchard and observes with interest and
curiosity each separate harebell that blossoms above his mortal remains.
Charles went on his way with much the same thoughts about the Elderly
Gentleman as I have set down for my own, and continued to envy his gift
of youth.
Presently he met Margery of Baverstock Farm.
Let me remind you, she was the wench to whom Mr. Anthony Clare had paid
light court back in the winter. Charles reproved him for his behaviour
and apparently his friend had given up his addresses, for the milkmaid
looked happy and blooming and seemed not at all displeased to giggle
over a hazel wand at Mr. Charles Lovely.
"Good morning, Margery."
"Oh, good morning, zur," said Margery.
"No longer with Farmer Hogbin?"
"I be with Farmer Hogbin's brother Jahn to High Corner Farm."
"And happy?"
"Oh, 'ess, proud and happy."
"Seen Mr. Clare lately?"
Margery blushed expansively.
"Oh! naw! I an't seen him since Baverstock Barn. I be courting."
"Eh, indeed," said Charles, "and who is the shepherd?"
"Wully Pearce."
"And you'll be married soon?"
"Come barley harvest--'ess."
"I will dance at your wedding, Margery."
"We shaant have daancing, because Wully says it leads to what oughtn't
to happen."
Charles made a wry face.
"Going to wed a Puritan, eh?"
"Nay," said the buxom maid. "He's carter to Farmer Jahn Hogbin."
"Then, surely, he will let you have a merry junketing at the bride-ale."
"Naw, indeed an' he wawnt, because his sister Molly when they were
thrawing the stocking last year fell on her back, and Wully's fam'ly is
a proud and proper fam'ly and Wully says we mun be married wi' no such
nonsense."
This long proclamation of propriety made Margery quite breathless, so
Charles, with a bow and the present of a crown, passed on his way.
Margery's case gave him more food for meditation. There was a buxom hale
wench with the bloom of a peach, throwing away her ample charms upon a
puritanical clod whose only ambition seemed to be the preservation of a
mealy-mouthed decorum. Pshaw! such prime beauty deserved a better fate.
Such a wedding as hers should have made old wives' fireside gossip for a
score of years and the tale of it quickened the hearts of every lover
and his lass that listened beneath the golden summer moon. Had he the
control of the ceremony, by Heaven! they should have danced the dawn in,
and every man and every maid should have gone to sleep with a face as
pale as the morning sky. It was ridiculous that young Cupid should be
breeched for the bidding of a lubberly half-baked ploughboy.
And yet, to be honest with himself, was not he behaving in much the same
way as the despised Wully Pearce? Was not his chief objection to Vernon
based on the latter's reputation as a man of intrigue? It was Phyllida's
attraction to Vernon that made him indignant. Had she chosen to bestow
herself on a middle-aged squire with acres and a gaunt square hall and a
pack of hounds, would he have been at all seriously disconcerted by the
prospect? And Vernon could have no honest love for her, because if a man
means to wed a young woman, he does not stigmatize her behaviour in
scurrilous verses, even to secure an advantage over a supposed rival. Or
does he--when he is not quite a gentleman?
Then occurred to him the story he had heard many years ago of a thin
unhappy-looking woman who had spoken kindly to him at some crowded Al
Fresco entertainment where he and his father and mother had gone one
fine July afternoon. He had asked about her as they drove home to the
lodgings, and he remembered his mother's warning finger, while his
father laughed over Lord B---- and Mrs. D----.
At the end of the tale his mother, a gentle Christian soul, had said it
served the baggage right, and bade him never talk to people to whom he
had not been presented by his parents. No doubt the circumstances of the
two cases were totally different, but he connected them vaguely in his
mind.
Moreover, without any doubt, Phyllida had caught his fancy. She
disturbed his view. Yet there was nothing that singled her out from a
dozen handsome young women with whom he had danced, whose existence save
as a bevy he no longer recognized. Still, whatever he thought about the
affair, his opinion would never again be invited and, disinherited by
Beau Ripple, he must consider his own position with an eye to the
future.
He was bracing himself preparatory to this great mental effort, when he
perceived round the next bend of the stream Mr. Anthony Clare, pensively
leaning against the rugged stem of a pollard willow-tree.
"Tony," said Charles, "Ripple has dismissed me."
"I know," said his friend, "your writ of banishment, signed, sealed and
delivered, is pasted on the window of every coffee-house and occupies a
large and distinguished space in the vestibule of the Assembly Rooms.
What do you propose to do?"
"I might hire myself out to the amiable Hogbin as carter."
"Pshaw," said Tony, "be serious."
"Or I might take to the road."
"Nonsense, man."
"Nay! I vow such a career has many advantages for a poor man, since he
may live and, what is more, die at the public charge."
"You are not in earnest, Charles?" said Mr. Clare, laying an anxious
hand upon his friend's wrist.
"And why not, i' faith?"
"What would you gain by such an impulse of folly?"
"My livelihood and, as I said, very possibly my funeral expenses."
"Such flippancy is ill-timed," said Mr. Clare, who was a serious young
man and spent much of his leisure with the theory of estate-management.
"Nay! I am not treating the matter as a jest, but truly considering the
benefit of adopting such a novel method of existence in these hard
times."
"Novel!" said Clare, with a scoffing laugh. "Novel! why, every
ne'er-do-weel blackguard for the past hundred years has tried this novel
method of existence and every one of them has come at last to the same
windy death."
"Oh, as to the last scene," interrupted Charles, "indeed I vow 'tis the
best in the play, for it never fails to please the populace, and sure in
this dull world a man should try to give a little amusement; I hold that
the author of a diverting comedy and the thief who makes a brave exit
are the truest benefactors of humanity."
"All this is very pretty fooling, but leads nowhere," said Clare, who
had a proposal to make and was vexed by Charles' levity.
"But ponder, Tony, the Gothick atmosphere of such an escapade. Imagine
the moated grange, the haunted lane, the shadowy coppice, the
phantastick oaths and gestures, the pursuit by moonlight, the clatter of
hoofs, the jingle of spurs--all this appeals to an aspect of my
character too long subdued by the bonds of convention and the trammels
of polite society."
"But, you fool, you would be taken at once. You have no cant of the road
and, as a Dilettante, would certainly be regarded with odious suspicion
by every regular highway-man between Berwick and Dover. Oddslife, I'll
not argue with you further, for I do not believe you mean a word of what
you say, and, harkee, I have a plan that will suit either of us better
than your cut-throat Braggadocio."
As a matter of fact, Charles had once or twice thought quite seriously
of taking to the road. After all, it was in accordance with every
precedent of outlawry. As soon as a man was banished from Society, he
should compensate himself for the discomfort he incurred. Tony, however,
now came forward with a project which, while it preserved much of the
charm of highway robbery, held none of its dangers or difficulties. He
suggested that since neither he nor Charles had very many ties to attach
them fast to Curtain Wells, they should spend a year in making the Grand
Tour of the British Islands.
Charles objected on the score of money.
"I have three hundred guineas," said Clare. "That will equip us with all
that we require as travellers, and I am sure the world will entertain us
for our pleasant appearance and company."
"In fact we are to become beggars--in velvet gowns," Charles commented.
"Adventurers, knights at arms, what you will," added Clare.
Charles was enraptured with the idea, so deeply enraptured that he saw
no absurdity in grave Mr. Anthony Clare setting out upon such a career