The plan of campaign was cut and dried. I
called for writing materials, and indicted my epistle as
agreed upon.
'To whom are you telling her to address the answer?' asked my
accomplice. 'We're INCOG. you know. It won't do for either
of us to be known.'
'Certainly not,' said I. 'What shall it be? White? Black?
Brown? or Green?'
'Try Browne with an E,' said he. 'The E gives an
aristocratic flavour. We can't afford to risk our
respectability.'
The note sealed, I rang the bell for the landlord, desired
him to send it up to the hall and tell the messenger to wait
for an answer.
As our host was leaving the room he turned round, with his
hand on the door, and said:
'Beggin' your pardon, Mr. Cook, would you and Mr. Napeer
please to take dinner here? I've soom beatiful lamb chops,
and you could have a ducklin' and some nice young peas to
your second course. The post-boy says the 'osses is pretty
nigh done up; but by the time - '
'How did you know our names?' asked my companion.
'Law sir! The post-boy, he told me. But, beggin' your
pardon, Mr. Napeer, my daughter, she lives in Holkham
willage; and I've heard you preach afore now.'
'Let's have the dinner by all means,' said I.
'If the Bishop sequesters my living,' cried Napier, with
solemnity, 'I'll summon the landlord for defamation of
character. But time's up. You must make for the boat-house,
which is on the other side of the park. I'll go with you to
the head of the lake.'
We had not gone far, when we heard the sound of an
approaching vehicle. What did we see but an open carriage,
with two ladies in it, not a hundred yards behind us.
'The aunt! by all that's - !'
What - I never heard; for, before the sentence was
completed, the speaker's long legs were scampering out of
sight in the direction of a clump of trees, I following as
hard as I could go.
As the carriage drove past, my Friar Lawrence was lying in a
ditch, while I was behind an oak. We were near enough to
discern the niece, and consequently we feared to be
recognised. The situation was neither dignified nor
romantic. My friend was sanguine, though big ardour was
slightly damped by the ditch water. I doubted the expediency
of trying the boat-house, but he urged the risk of her
disappointment, which made the attempt imperative.
The padre returned to the inn to dry himself, and, in due
course, I rejoined him. He met me with the answer to my
note. 'The boat-house,' it declared, 'was out of the
question. But so, of course, was the POSSIBILITY of CHANGE.
We must put our trust in PROVIDENCE. Time could make NO
difference in OUR case, whatever it might do with OTHERS.
SHE, at any rate, could wait for YEARS.' Upon the whole the
result was comforting - especially as the 'years' dispensed
with the necessity of any immediate step more desperate than
dinner. This we enjoyed like men who had earned it; and long
before I deposited my dear friar in his cell both of us were
snoring in our respective corners of the chaise.
A word or two will complete this romantic episode. The next
long vacation I spent in London, bent, needless to say, on a
happy issue to my engagement. How simple, in the retrospect,
is the frustration of our hopes! I had not been a week in
town, had only danced once with my FIANCEE, when, one day,
taking a tennis lesson from the great Barre, a forced ball
grazed the frame of my racket, and broke a blood vessel in my
eye.
For five weeks I was shut up in a dark room. It was two more
before I again met my charmer. She did not tell me, but her
man did, that their wedding day was fixed for the 10th of the
following month; and he 'hoped they would have the pleasure
of seeing me at the breakfast!' [I made the following note
of the fact: N.B. - A woman's tears may cost her nothing;
but her smiles may be expensive.]
I must, however, do the young lady the justice to state that,
though her future husband was no great things as a 'man,' as
she afterwards discovered, he was the heir to a peerage and
great wealth. Both he and she, like most of my collaborators
in this world, have long since passed into the other.
The fashions of bygone days have always an interest for the
living: the greater perhaps the less remote. We like to
think of our ancestors of two or three generations off - the
heroes and heroines of Jane Austen, in their pantaloons and
high-waisted, short-skirted frocks, their pigtails and
powdered hair, their sandalled shoes, and Hessian boots. Our
near connection with them entrances our self-esteem. Their
prim manners, their affected bows and courtesies, the 'dear
Mr. So-and-So' of the wife to her husband, the 'Sir' and
'Madam' of the children to their parents, make us wonder
whether their flesh and blood were ever as warm as ours; or
whether they were a race of prigs and puppets?
My memory carries me back to the remnants of these lost
externals - that which is lost was nothing more; the men and
women were every whit as human as ourselves. My half-sisters
wore turbans with birds-of-paradise in them. My mother wore
gigot sleeves; but objected to my father's pigtail, so cut it
off.
