Sancho Panza showed to the immortal knight, who ever failed to elevate him.
"Give me an open country, not your slash and scratch-pins." There was nothing Tom loved more than talking as if he had followed hounds from his infancy, instead of growing up under a dish-cover; but romancing on such subjects would not go down with me.
"Surely you might have brought us by a better road than this, George. I have had my bad times, I don't mind them in a burst; but I'm blessed if I like being scratched to pieces, with nothing whatever to show for it."
"To talk about, you mean, Tom. Well, here we get out into as pretty a bit of firland as can be found even in Surrey; and that may challenge all England to equal it. But I never go in for the picturesque."
"To be sure, not. The ladies do it ever so much better. To own the land, or at any rate the shooting, is the chief thing for us to care about. And the shooting is worth twice as much as the crops, in the present condition of the market. Never mind, George, I won't talk about that, for I know it is a very sore subject. Do you mean to say that all this belonged to you, not more than fifty years ago?"
"Out of the frying-pan into the fire, as regards the subject," I answered with a smile, for I knew that he never meant to vex me. "But I am sorry that we cannot give you leave even to poke about here with your gun, and pot blackbirds and magpies. There go two magpies! You don't often get so near them."
"Two for a wedding – don't they say? A good omen for you, George. But where the deuce does your nymph hang out? Aha! good hit of mine! A nymph means a bride, doesn't she, in Greek?"
"Shut up!" I said, for this talk was very paltry, and perhaps Tom Erricker's appearance was not quite up to the mark of a romantic moment. My chief desire was to gaze across the valley, down the further side of which, about a mile away, I could trace pretty clearly by its fringe of bushes the windings of the brook which I had crossed that day on my return from Guildford. It seemed to be ages ago, whereas it was only four weeks; but I had thought about it enough to make a very broad space of time. And here was Tom chaffing, and eager to make fun, with his red plaid trousers forced up to his knees by his jerking about in the saddle, and his loftiest air of acquaintance with the world, and his largest smiles of superiority to women. For the moment I longed to deposit him in an ant-hill.
"Well, what can I see? Or what am I to look for?" He spoke as if he had paid me for a view and I was bound to make it worth the money. Whereas, though I did ask his opinion at a distance, it was the last thing I should think of now; and in plain truth, what business had he here at all, and spying about through a shilling eyeglass? But it was not for me to take things as he did. Let him long to enter into them.
"All right," I said. "We will come another day. This may or it may not be the place. Look at your poor legs. They are fat enough; but what a sight for a lady! What a fool you were, not to take my straps!"
"Bless the fellow! Well, you are hard hit, or you would not carry on in this style." Tom turned his eyeglass upon me in a manner which might have provoked me, if I had been capable of thinking twice about him now. "In a blue study, George? Everything looks blue, even the mist in the valley. Has she got blue eyes? Ah! there is nothing like them."
"Blue eyes have no depth. What do you know about eyes?" I spoke with some warmth, as was natural. And then, just to show him how calmly I took his childish and shallow observation, I proceeded as if he had never spoken.
"You see that long mass of black ivy to the right, cutting a sort of jag, or perhaps it is a great curve out of the flat steep line of the meadow?"
"Yes, to be sure I do. Nothing could be plainer. A jag which is a curve at the same time; and a flat meadow which is also steep!"
"Never mind the meadow. You are not so stupid that you can't see the wall, and the ivy on it. Now, Tom Erricker, what do you suppose that to be?"
"How can I tell, about two miles away? Let us go on, and make it out, old chap."
"Not another step. I am not at all sure that I ought to have brought you so far as this. However, you can hold your tongue, I know; and you are upon your honour about all this. Well, that is the wall of an old monastery, more than five hundred years old, I believe, and connected with that ancient chapel on the hills. Naturally, it is all in ruins now, and there has been an attempt to set a mill up in its place."
"The best thing to be done with it," Tom replied, for his nature was not reverent. "But a mill should have paid, if it had any water. Free trade has not had time to destroy the pounders yet, although it has killed the producers. But I don't want to hear about monks and mills. The lovely nuns are more to my taste."
"What nuns could there be in a monastery, Tom? You are even more abroad than usual. But though I have not been near the place, since the time I told you of, and we have nothing to do with that valley now, I have put a few quiet questions here and there, and I find that the old place has been sold to a foreign gentleman, whose name our fine fellows cannot pronounce."
"Oho! That becomes very interesting. He's papa of the beautiful nymph, no doubt. But you never mean to say that you left off there?"
"Certainly I do. How could I go prying? What Englishman would ever think of meddling with his neighbours? And a foreigner, too, who has come here for quiet – "
"Bother!" replied Tom. "If they have lovely daughters, everybody has a right to find out all about them. I'll bet you a hat it is some wicked old conspirator, a Nihilist perhaps, or at least an Anarchist, taking advantage of our stupid hospitality, to hatch some fiendish plot, and blow up some foreign monarch, with whom we pretend to be in strict friendship. Why, only a few months ago – "
"No more of that. I hoped to have found a little common-sense in you. As if it were possible that that – that perfect – "
"Angel!" cried Tom. "You can't get beyond that. And I am blessed if I ever could have believed that a sensible, slow-going bloke like you, George – "
I took hold of his bridle, and turned Amabel homeward, and gave her such a sharp little flick behind that my friend had as much as he could do to keep in the saddle, for the best part of the way back to our cottage. For we never grudged oats to our horses.
CHAPTER IV
MR. STONEMAN
No man who has to contend with the world, and support those he loves against it, cares twopence about being taken for a fool by the people he has to contend with. Their opinion to this effect frequently is of some service to him, and very seldom hurts him, unless he wants to get into their employment, or to borrow money from them. And in the latter point it even helps him, when he has good security to give.
There is a certain worm, whose name I know not, being all abroad in natural history, whose habit it is to come out of the ground and give himself an airing late at night. And then if you moisten him from above, in September or October, so grateful is he – or, if you deny him that lofty feeling, so sensitive – that he glitters like any glow-worm.
With no less amplitude, perhaps, a man who has deep emotions, such as shy ambition, or literary yearnings, or passionate humanity, or true love of a woman, sometimes lets himself out at night, when small things are lost to the eyes, and the larger objects begin to assert themselves. For after all, what are the toys of the day, for which we sweat, and fight, and crawl, and rack our poor brains till they cry for the revolver – even if we get such gauds, what are they, to make up for the gentle delight we have lost, of the days when we loved all the world, and the moments when some one tried to do the like to us?
Now nothing of this kind comes in here, for verily I had been cheated too often to rush
