Part 20

This was why the inhabitants of the Wells saw a veteran of the Low Countries shaken up like a cherry in a basket. The sedate glories of the town were never more nicely displayed than on this famous occasion. From each bow-windowed shop came forth a bland shopkeeper and half a dozen inquisitive customers.

The little Miss Pettitoes trilled in bird-like accents: 'What an adventure!' and returned to a counter spangled with their gay little purchases, for the Miss Pettitoes were twin sisters and to-morrow was their birthday.

"What an adventure!" they trilled to each other over a dish of Hyson and 'What an adventure!' they trilled as they kissed each other 'good-night' and went each to their bed chambers, identical save for the ribbons of their fascinating little spinster night-caps.

"Hurrah! hurrah!" shouted the boys, as they pushed the maids into the puddles the better to follow so surprizing a cavalier.

"Rot me!" said Mr. Golightly of the Grey Dragoons, as he lifted his tortoise-shell rimmed monocle to his supercilious left eye, and 'Rot you!' he ejaculated, as an enthusiastick trio of youth sheltered between his remarkably tight-breeched legs.

"Shall we make such an impressive entrance, d'ye think?" asked Mr. Lovely, as he and Mr. Clare came out of Mr. Canticle's shop, followed by Mr. Canticle himself and Mr. Canticle's apprentice loaded with a huge brown-paper parcel.

"Good day, Canticle," said Charles.

"Good day, Mr. Lovely, good day, sir, and depend on't, grey will be the modish colour for gentlemen of quality; and I beg you not to be uneasy about the light-blue lining. That, sir, I venture to predict, will supply the exact touch of genteel eccentricity that consorts so amiably with the friendly madness of the season. I envy you, gentlemen, I envy you; and I beg to wish you many a pleasant adventure. The cut of that riding-coat, Mr. Lovely, will enthral the most fastidious glance, and as for your breeches, Mr. Clare, I should perhaps be considered boastful if I said that they impart a tone, sir, a very distinguished tone to the landskip. Good day, gentlemen."

The two young gentlemen laughed over Mr. Canticle's prophecies, and excused his loquacity because he had been a limner till the vogue for foreign painters compelled him to apply his art in another direction.

It was certainly a stroke of irony that the offer of a sartorial uncle should make him, a very tolerable exponent of nudity, take up the occupation of devizing cloaths.

By this time, Major Tarry's coat-tails were flapping to hedge-row winds, and his astonishing course was less universally regarded; although, even in open country, the clamorous transit caused much confusion to itinerant carters, while a pair of blackbirds forsook their hardly built nest and retired in voluble dismay to the densest coppice between Baverstock Regis and Curtain Wells.

Mr. Jeremy Daish met our hero with a very lugubrious expression, as he strolled into the coffee-room.

"What has your honour been doing to enrage Mr. Ripple? Oh, Mr. Lovely, read this."

Charles took the proffered note, and half-smiling, half-sighing, perused his decree of banishment.

THE GREAT HOUSE.

CURTAIN WELLS, PRIDIE KAL. AP.

MR. DAISH,--_The uncomfortable events of Wednesday evening compel me to announce that I cannot contemplate with equanimity the protracted Sojourn of Mr. Lovely at your hitherto peaceful House. I have no desire to inflict upon you the invidious course of summary Ejection, but at the same time I am bound to invite a trifle less cordiality in your Reception of all young gentlemen unperturbed by the Gout. The town of Curtain Wells exists for the supply of hygiastick Waters; and, since red wine is a notorious antidote to chalybeate, my civick brother the Mayor begs me to point out that we cannot lend our patronage to a house which studiously encourages the circulation of this antipathetick Beverage. In expectation, Mr. Daish, that you will presently reconstruct at once your list of wines and your list of visitors,_

_I am, Mr. Daish, your obliged_

HORACE RIPPLE.

"Console yourself, Daish," said our hero, as he handed back the Beau's exquisitely written epistle, "Mr. Clare and I propose to make a long excursion into the country this very afternoon. Have the goodness to order our horses to be in the yard at six o'clock."

"Certainly, your honour, but I hope that nothing I may have said or done or hinted--or--or--or--" poor Mr. Daish stumbled over the awkwardness of the interview, and was more like a Cremona violin than ever, a violin whose strings were snapping one by one.

"Console yourself, Daish," said our hero with an incredibly magnanimous air, "you are not to blame. You must know, Daish, that for a long time past I have had a curiosity to survey this small green earth, unhampered by anything more serious than the impulse of the moment. To-night, Daish, when you retire to rest, when you gather the curtains of your serene bed, when you hark to the clock in the passage striking the moderate and orderly hour of ten o'clock, when you reflect with a sigh of proprietary contentment that you have offended no one in the course of an innkeeper's promiscuous day, when, in a word, your respectable head sinks into your respectable pillow, dally for a moment in the imagination of Charles Lovely and Anthony Clare mocking society, laughing at convention, seated in the parlour of some remote inn and dozing gratefully before a pile of logs.

"Think of us, Daish, in the cool dusks and azure silences of April, at the top of some gentle hill whence we can regard with exhilaration the prospect of a good dinner, a crimson glass, and genial intercourse with travellers. Behold us in your mind's eye, walking our horses down through the twilight, as one by one in cottage lattices the candles twinkle and, high above, the stars betray the night with silver spears. For my part, already I can hear the evening gossip of housewives, and the babble of children in small gardens, and clear against the green West, I can see the many lovers of a little town moving with slow steps along their customary path.

"Thus, my excellent Daish, each solemn nightfall will discover for us a new world, and, when the sun rises on the merry unknown streets of our pilgrimage, we shall think to ourselves what a vast number of jolly people exist in this remarkably jolly world. Oddslife--"Mr. Lovely broke off--"what a surprizing alliance."

As he looked out of the window, we had better look out of the window too, and I think you will be quite disposed to agree with Charles when I show you that vivid yellow chaise drawn by two fiery chestnut horses, and driven by that extraordinarily diminutive coachman, for inside are seated Beau Ripple and the Widow Courteen, and neither you nor I nor anybody else ever saw both so nearly disconcerted.

"Now what the deuce can be the meaning of that?" continued Mr. Lovely.

"Of what you were saying?" inquired Mr. Daish in a deprecating voice.

"The horses! the horses!" was all that Mr. Lovely saw fit to reply.

Major Tarry's earlier progress might well have been the meteor which heralds a cataclysm, for cataclysm this later apparition certainly was. I vow the noise of conversation it caused far exceeded anything of the sort that was ever known.

The Beau found the publicity of such an exit unendurable to his polite soul. That his sacred chaise, which had once bowled along at a high but decorous speed in order to meet the H--r A---- t of Great Britain, should achieve such a vulgar notoriety nearly upset the sit of his waistcoat.

His contemporaries felt the Great little Man's humiliation.

Yet compassion did not prevent them from forming numberless conjectures as to the cause of this strange affair. Some said 'Debt!'; others boldly affirmed an intrigue; but as usual nobody guessed the true reason, which was that beneath a gorgeous exterior lurked the gentlest, kindliest heart.

When the Widow, with a very noisy tale of seduction, poured forth her tears upon his cushions, Mr. Ripple instantly reproached himself and nobody else with the disaster, immediately decided he must atone for his negligence by immediately ringing his flowered bell-pull and commanding Magog, who immediately appeared, to run immediately to the stables and command the immediate harnessing of the royal horses to the royal chaise and the immediate buttoning of his diminutive coachman's slender gaiters.

It was with a shudder, if a much polished shudder, that he handed Mrs. Courteen to a place amid the fawn and ivory of the interior of his chaise. With a barely repressed shudder, too, he observed the dabbled rouge of her cheeks, and the open mouths of the cits, and the bobbing of heads at windows, and a horrid bank of black clouds in the extreme South-west that seemed to betoken a night full of rain, and last but perhaps worst of all, the lean sign-post 'To London,' a prologue to G---- knows what unendurable discomfort.

"We have an adventure to hand," said Charles to Clare, as they strolled across the yard of the _Blue Boar_. "We'll follow Ripple!"

"Ripple?"

"Ay! Which way did Mr. Ripple's chaise go?" demanded Charles of a knot of idlers.

"Lunnon Road," they replied unanimously.

"We must get ready at once," declared Charles.

* * * * *

"How pleasant 'twould be," thought Phyllida, "if I were not alone."

Even alone, it was very pleasant to bowl along a level road at an equable rate of speed. It was very pleasant to try on the peacock-blue riding hood that so became her. It was very pleasant to see the cheerful faces of the many wayfarers encountered by the chariot. The backs of the postillions glowed with scarlet, and a gay contrast they made to the flaming gorse of a wild open stretch of country. Every cottage that nestled back from the road with clipped yews to guard the gate seemed to Phyllida a desirable place to live and love in for ever. It was pleasant to watch the lambs in the meadows, and exciting indeed to count the still sparse primroses starring the hedgerows. It was pleasant to watch the children stand on the topmost rung of a five-barred gate and cheer as they rattled past. Very pleasant it was, though the sight brought a slight lump in her throat, as she thought how often she had done the same thing with Dick Combleton the Squire's youngest son.

Up-hill with many a groan and grunt, and down-hill with a clatter and a dash, and along the level with a ring and a jingle went the post-chariot in the afternoon sunlight. Past farm-house and farm-yard, past villages and churches, and inns with waving signs, past ponds and geese, past many a tired woman trudging home from market and many a jovial carter; past sign-posts and cross-roads and milestones; past smithies with roaring fires and monstrous bellows, past lowing cows and crowing cocks, past journeymen tinkers and journeymen barbers, past a great dancing bear which, had Phyllida but known it, danced not a whit more foolishly for bumpkins than rose-pink Phyllida herself for the malicious eyes of the world of fashion.

After a long climb up a heavy hill, whence a very fair champagne spread before her, the great black and purple cloud caught the westering sun, and suffused the whole landskip with a queer metallick sheen. It made the rooks that swayed in the bare branches of a windy clump of elms take on a strange green lustre over their plumage, and cast a stillness over the world. That view remained with Phyllida all her life, as a pause wherein she had contemplated existence for the briefest moment. Years afterwards, an old woman, sitting in a dim ingle-nook, would see that fair champagne in the clouds of smoke that curled ceaselessly up the wide chimney, and, above the scent of burning logs, would be wafted the perfume of the white March violets that blossomed at the foot of those swaying elms where the rooks cawed and the dead leaves raced round and round.

"Stop, you blackguards," cried a rasping voice above the noise of fast approaching hoofs.

"Crack! crack!" went Dickie Maggs' big pistol.

"'Ighwayman, Miss," he added cheerfully, as the sound of something soft falling was heard, followed by horse-hoofs in mad retreat down the long heavy hill.

In a moment, the chariot was rocking in a wild gallop down the opposite decline.

Raindrops began to fall, deliberately at first, but soon fast enough, while the earth was slowly blotted out by storm and rain and twilight.

On the summit of the hill, Major Constantine Tarry lay face downwards, having paid the extreme penalty of interference with other people's business. Poor Tarry, he was a bore and a braggart, and had not the slightest intention of being killed, yet I for one regret the manner of his death, up there on the top of that wind-swept hill. And for all he told you such very long stories when he asked you to dine with him at Oudenarde Grange and Malplaquet Lodge and Ramilies House, he gave you some capital Port, and Sherry nearly as dry as his own anecdotes. Moreover, he really fought in that bloody fight of Fontenoy, and that was a very great honour and should make us forgive a very great deal.

A flash of lightning illuminated the dead body of the veteran lying face downwards in the mud of an English high-road, and a distant volley of thunder accorded military honours to his somewhat grotesque death.

_Chapter the Twenty-ninth_

THE BASKET OF ROSES

Some four-and-twenty miles from Curtain Wells on the Great West Road is a tangle of briers among whose blossoms an old damask rose is sometimes visible. If the curious traveller should pause and examine this fragrant wilderness, he will plainly perceive the remains of an ancient garden, and if he be of an imaginative character of mind will readily recall the legend of the Sleeping Beauty in her mouldering palace; for some enchantment still enthralls the spot, so that he who bravely dares the thorns is well rewarded with pensive dreams and, as he lingers a while gathering the flowers or watching their petals flutter to the green shadows beneath, will haply see elusive Beauty hurry past.

Here at the date of this tale stood the _Basket of Roses_ Inn, a mile or so away from a small village. When coaches ceased to run, the house began to lose its custom and, as stone is scarce hereabouts, was presently pulled down in order to provide the Parson with a peculiarly bleak Parochial Hall.

However, this melancholy fate was still distant, and old Simon Tabrum had a fine custom from the coaches and private travellers who delighted to spend a night in so sweet a lodging.

The _Basket of Roses_ was the fairest, dearest inn down all that billowy London road. The counter, sheathed in a case of pewter, the glasses all in a row, the sleek barrels and the irregular lines of home-brewed cordials, charmed the casual visitor to a more intimate acquaintance. Behind the tap was the Travellers' Room, and what a room it was--with great open fireplaces and spits and bubbling kettles and blackened ingles. Long-buried ancestors of the village had carved their rude initials over each high-backed bench and battered the bottoms of the great tankards into unexpected dents by many rollicking choruses in the merry dead past. The walls of this room knew the pedigree of every bullock and the legend of every ghost for many miles round. Here was the cleanest floor, the clearest fire in England.

Old Tabrum the landlord was the very man for the house--the very man to bring out all that was most worthy in his guests. He always produced good wine and a piping hot supper, never asked for his money till his guests were satisfied and always wore an apron as white as the foam of his cool deep ale.

He was eighty years old now, with a bloom on his cheeks like an autumn pippin and two limpid blue eyes that looked straight into yours and, if you had any reverence at all, made the tears well involuntarily at the sight of such gentle beauty.

Once he was a famous Basso Profundo, but now his voice was high and thin, and seemed already fraught with faint aerial music. The ancient man was a great gardener as properly became a landlord whose sign was a swinging posy. What a garden there was at the back of this glorious inn. The bowling-green surrounded by four grey walls was the finest ever known, and as for the borders, deep borders twelve feet wide, they were full of every sweet flower. There were Columbines and Canterbury Bells and blue Bells of Coventry and Lilies and Candy Goldilocks with Penny flowers or White Sattin and Fair Maids of France and Fair Maids of Kent and London Pride.

There was Herb of Grace and Rosemary and Lavender to pluck and crush between your fingers, while some one rolled the jack across the level green of the ground. In Spring there were Tulips and Jacynths, Dames' Violets and Primroses, Cowslips of Jerusalem, Daffodils and Pansies, Lupins like spires in the dusk, and Ladies' Smocks in the shadowed corners. As for Summer, why the very heart of high June and hot July dwelt in that fragrant enclosure. Sweet Johns and Sweet Williams with Dragon flowers and crimson Peaseblossom and tumbling Peonies, Blue Moonwort and the Melancholy Gentlemen, Larksheels, Marigolds, Hearts, Hollyhocks and Candy Tufts. There was Venus' Looking Glass and Flower of Bristol and Apple of Love and Blue Helmets and Herb Paris and Campion and Love in a Mist and Ladies' Laces and Sweet Sultans or Turkey Cornflowers, Gillyflower Carnations (Ruffling Rob of Westminster amongst them) with Dittany and Sops in Wine and Floramor, Widow Wail and Bergamot, True Thyme and Gilded Thyme, Good Night at Noon and Flower de Luce, Golden Mouse-ear, Princes' Feathers, Pinks, and deep-red Damask Roses.

It was a very wonderful garden indeed.

And because the old man loved flowers, tending them in the early twilight with water and releasing them from many a small weed which he was fain to destroy, but in the end always replanted in a small clearing on the shady side of his farthest meadow, because he loved flowers, the old man, whose first wife died years and years ago on a long past primrose-tide, married in the hale winter of his life a comfortable wench whom he could trust as he trusted his flowers to be true to their seasons. This second wife, more like a daughter than a wife, he delighted to surprize with fragrant rolls of gaily sprigged cloths; and never a summer morning broke but he was abroad in the dewy grass to gather her such a posy of freshness and beauty as can only be taken in the earliest hours of the morning. Mrs. Tabrum, for all she was so young and rosy, had a great feeling for the importance of her position as mistress of a famous hostelry and ordered about little Polly Patch, newly arrived from Mrs. Margery Severe's select charity school, with a great air of ladyship. Little Polly Patch was a very important young woman too; for the _Basket of Roses_ was not a large galleried inn full of grooms and hostlers and waiters and chambermaids, but a house of quite another character, where you were never bewildered by superfluous service but always received with a quiet dignity. Therefore you paid a great deal of respectful attention to little Polly Patch who had a great deal to do with your night's rest and your morning's breakfast. I think Mr. Vernon was a very wise man to choose a domestick fairyland so apt to soothe the sweet alarms of his Phyllida.

Here they would sup while the horses were being changed, and hence they would set out in the darkness, preserving, as they galloped along, a sense of peace and quiet beauty that should be to her the fortunate prelude of a happy adventure.

Vernon had sent word to the house of their arrival, hinted at the fatigues of a gay bridal, and let it be supposed they desired no intrusion.

To the ancient man such a confidence was enough to set his old brain agog with the gallant scenes of his youth. He chuckled over every tankard of ale he drew, told every one of his daffodils the merry secret and piped away at long forgotten melodies until his wife in despair sat him down in the ingle, put a broken fiddle in his hand and bade him play his fancies to sleep. The storm that rose at sunset shrieked about the inn, and the hollow groaning in the mazes of the huge chimney consorted in fitting harmonies with the old man's eerie tunes.

"March is going out wi' thunder and tempest like a roaring lion," he muttered, as a sudden gust of hail was blown against the lattice which pattered and rattled as if a crowd of elfin drummers were beating a wild tattoo without.

"Aye, 'tis a main ugly night," said Mrs. Dorothy Tabrum, who was laying the shining silver about the snowy tablecloth.

"So 'tis, my peony, so 'tis! A main ugly night for daffodils and young brides. Is her chamber ready?" he went on.

"Aye! Aye!"

"Wi' rosy curtains drawn close?"

Mrs. Tabrum nodded.

"Wi' candlelight and the cracking of logs and green bayleaves in the presses?"

"Why, do'ee think I'm gone daft to forget suchlike?"

"And a vase of daffodils by her mirrour?" the ancient one persisted.

Polly Patch came in at that moment.

"All be ready, mistress," she said in a slow voice, solemnly nodding her enormous mobcap while she spoke.

"Now Polly," said Mrs. Tabrum, "lend a hand wi' this table and lets put 'un a thought nearer to the fire. Ugh! how it blows!" A vivid flash of lightning illuminated the room, and on the heels of a terrifick roar of thunder there was a cry of 'House! House!'

"Hurry, hurry, my daisies, and make who comes there welcome. Jacob! Jacob!" cried the old landlord as, much excited, he rose from his seat in the ingle and quavered towards the taproom.

"You are sure the candles are lighted, Polly?"

"Sarten, mistress."

"And the logs burning brightly?"

"'Ess mistress."

"And the curtains pinned together?"

"'Ess mistress."

"Then stand by the door, curtsey when you're spoken to, and don't put your thumb in the soup."

"No, mistress."

"Is Mary Maria watching the fowls?"

"Wi' both her eyes, mistress."

"Hark!"

"I'm harking away, mistress."

And while the mistress and the maid harked vigilantly the ancient landlord ushered Miss Phyllida Courteen into the Travellers' Room of the _Basket of Roses_ Inn.

As he entered, old Tabrum looked very much like a sexton leading a shy maid to the altar. She, flustered, expectant, murmured soft thanks into the farthest recesses of her swansdown muff, stumbled frequently to the voluble distress of her guide, and seemed afraid to look round the well-ordered comfortable room after so many miles of wind and driving rain.

"Dear soul! And where's the bridegroom?" exclaimed Mrs. Tabrum, as she led Phyllida to a high-backed chair right before the heart of the blazing fire.

Phyllida blushed as she explained Mr. Amor was travelling on horseback.

"Indeed, I expected to find him here," she stammered, "Oh! I hope nothing has happened to him."

"Now, don't 'ee fret thyself, sweet marjoram," said the ancient one, humming round her like a bee. "A'most anything might have happened to him on such a dreadful night."

"Don't 'ee hark to the ancient dodderer," interrupted the dodderer's wife.

"Killed by a falling tree, withered to a cinder by bloody lightning."

"You alarm me," exclaimed Phyllida, jumping up.

"Hold thy ancient foolish tongue," commanded Mrs. Tabrum peremptorily, "and go see that Mary Maria keeps the fowls turning a while yet."

"Very well, my gillyflower, very well," piped senility, "but don't 'ee take on, my little blue love-in-a-mist, happen 'tis no more than a broken leg has overtook your husband."

"Polly," said Mrs. Tabrum, who saw that Phyllida was on the verge of tears, "take thy ancient master away. Hark," she finished, with an impressive forefinger.

"What are us to hark to, pretty pink?"

"Ef I doant hear a great tom-cat a-scratching in the tulips, my name be'ant Dorothy Ann Tabrum."