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“THE FRENCH HORN”—MABEL HARKER, MY UNFORTUNATE ENGAGEMENT TO HER—MR. CRAGE AND WHARTON PARK

Though the idea to sack Monte Carlo did not occur to me till late in the year (in the September of which I first met Lucy Thatcher), I must first say something of my going down to Nesshaven in June, and the events which led to my being in a position to undertake an affair of such nerve and magnitude.

Lucy thought I should take readers straight to Monte Carlo, confining myself to that part of the work only; but, after talking it over, she agrees with me now that the adventure must be led up to in the natural way it really was or the public won’t believe in it, after all, and I shall have all my pains for nothing. So that’s what I shall do, in the shortest and best way I can; promising, like the esteemed old circus-rider Ducrow, as soon as possible to “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses.”

Well, then, it was towards the middle of June when I joined the golf club at Nesshaven, just after my militia training month was over. I was introduced by Harold Forsyth (one of our Monte Carlo band later, and one of the stanchest of them), who had the golf fever very badly, and, I must say, was beginning to make himself rather a bore with it.

He and I went down from Liverpool Street and stayed at “The French Horn,” the inn kept by Mr. Thatcher, Lucy’s father; and after Forsyth had introduced me to the club and shown me round the links, he went back to his regiment, the “Devon Borderers,” then stationed at Colchester, very angry and complaining, as soldiers mostly are when obliged to do any work. I remained behind, not that I had yet seen Lucy, but rather to keep out of Mabel Harker’s way—the young lady to whom (as Lucy knows) I happened, much against my will, to be at that time unfortunately engaged to be married.

My first visit to “The French Horn” lasted three weeks, during which time I manfully held my ground, though heavily bombarded by Mabel’s letters, regularly discharged thrice a week from her aunt’s house in Clifton Gardens at Folkestone. At last, as Mabel came to stay at her sister’s in the Regent’s Park (on purpose, I believe), I was obliged to go up to town for ten days, and there passed a sad time with her at the University match, Henley, and the Eton and Harrow; at which noted places of amusement and relaxation I cannot help thinking I was the most unhappy visitor, though, to be sure, I tried hard not to show it.

But it was dreadful when I got back to my rooms in Little St. James’s Street and attempted sleep; for I really think that not being in love with the person you have bound yourself to marry keeps more men awake more miserably than any of the so-called torments of love, which, with scarcely an exception, I have never found otherwise than agreeable.

At last Mabel went back to Folkestone, and I was free to return to “The French Horn,” and I never saw her again (thank goodness!) till the momentous interview between us in October, from which I emerged a free man; she having discovered in a boarding-house at Lucerne an architect named Byles, whom she’d the sense to see was a more determined wooer than I had ever been, and likely to make her a far better husband.

“The French Horn” is not an old house, having been built in about the year 1830, from designs made by Mr. Thatcher’s father, who had copied it from an inn he had once stayed in in Spain. For a country gentleman of old family, the father seems to have been a somewhat remarkable person. He had, for instance, been an intimate friend of the celebrated Lord Byron, and was the only man in England (so Mr. Thatcher always said) who knew the real story of the quarrel between the poet and his wife. Byron confided it to him at Pisa as the closest of secrets; but, as he had always told it to everybody when alive, and his son, my father-in-law, invariably did and still does the same, there must be a good many people in England by now who know all about it.

In fact, there was scarcely a golfer or bicyclist came to the house but Mr. Thatcher didn’t fix him sooner or later in the bar and ask him if he knew the real reason why Byron quarrelled with his wife and left England. And as it was a hundred to one chance that they didn’t, Mr. Thatcher always informed them in a loud, husky whisper, and shouted after them as they left, “But you mustn’t publish it, because it’s a family secret!”

And the reason was, according to Mr. Thatcher, that Lord Byron had killed a country girl when a young man (somebody he’d got into trouble, I suppose) and flung her body in the pond at Newstead; and that having, in a moment of loving expansion, bragged of it to his wife, Lady Byron had, very properly, promptly kicked him out of the house in Piccadilly; which, also according to Mr. Thatcher, was the origin of those touching lines:

“They tell me ’tis decided you depart:

’Tis wise, ’tis well, but not the less a pain,”

invariably quoted by him on the departure of a guest.

It was this same father of Mr. Thatcher’s who had parted with Wharton Park, their ancestral home. He had been a great gambler in his youth, and lost enormous sums at Crockford’s and on the turf, so that when he died, in 1850, he had nothing to leave his only son, my Lucy’s father, but three or four thousand pounds, very soon muddled away in unfortunate business speculations.

At last, about twenty years ago, it occurred to Mr. Thatcher to come down to Nesshaven and take “The French Horn,” close to the Park gates of his old home, where, until the golf mania set in, beyond gaining a bare livelihood, he did no particular good; having to depend on natural-history lunatics, who came there in winter and prowled the shore with shot-guns after rare birds, and, in summer, on families from Colchester—tradespeople and bank-clerks and so on—who spent their holidays lying about in the warm sand among the whins and complaining of the food. Betweenwhiles there was scarcely a soul about except the coast-guards, who came up to fill their whiskey-bottles, and a few bicyclists who ate enormous teas and never would pay more than ninepence.

But when a Colchester builder erected the club-house down on the links, Mr. Thatcher’s business looked up wonderfully, and he really began to make money, and even sometimes to turn it away, for the house was small. Harold Forsyth discovered it, being quartered so near, and it was he who introduced me, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful.

It was a curious place, as most amateur buildings are. Forsyth had not told me anything about it, and I was indeed astonished when we first drove up; for, with its colored bricks, veranda, high-pitched roof, and odd carved wood-work, it reminded me somehow of an illustration to Don Quixote, and I quite expected to see a team of belled mules and hear the gay castanet click of the fandango. Instead of which, out came Mr. Thatcher in a dirty old cricket blazer.

It was towards the middle of June, and the sun was just setting at the end of a long, warm day. Mr. Thatcher showed us our rooms, and then took us into the great hall up-stairs, from which a balcony and steps descended into the garden. It had a very high-pitched roof, and was decorated in the Moorish fashion (rather like the old London Crystal Palace; where, by-the-way, I have eaten pop-corn many a time as a boy, but cannot honestly say I ever enjoyed it), and would hold, I dare say, a hundred and fifty people; rather senseless, I thought, seeing there were only seven or eight bedrooms, but possibly useful for bean-feasts or a printer’s wayz-goose.

The broad June sun was setting, as I say, and streamed right in from the garden, as Forsyth and I ate our dinner. The only other guests were two brothers named Walton, who spent their lives playing golf. They played at Nesshaven all day, and wrote accounts of it every night, sitting close together, smoking and mumbling about the condition of the greens and their tee-shots, all of which was solemnly committed to paper.

What they would have done with themselves twenty years ago I can’t conceive—possibly taken to drink. At any rate, now they only live for golf, and their thick legs and indifferent play are to be seen wherever there’s a links and they can get permission to perform.

Mr. Thatcher’s wife, a doctor’s daughter, had long been dead; but his old mother, of the astonishing age of ninety-three, was still alive, and lived with him in the inn. At first she had not at all liked the idea of settling down almost at the gates of Wharton Park, her old home; but every year since they came she had expected would be her last, and she only lived on on sufferance, as it were, in the hope she would soon die. Sprier old lady, however, I must say, I never saw. She wasn’t in the least deaf, and never wore glasses, and she was simply the keenest hand at bezique I ever encountered; at which entertaining game, by-the-way, if she wasn’t watched, she would cheat outrageously.

She came of a good old Norfolk family, and actually remembered the jubilee of George III. in 1810; but when asked for details of that touching and patriotic event, all she could say was, “Well, I remember the blacksmith’s children dressed in white.”

Old Mrs. Thatcher and I were great friends, and used to potter about the garden together in the early mornings. Farther abroad she never ventured, except once a year, I believe, when she trotted off to the church to visit her husband’s grave and see the tablet inside was kept clean.

So June and part of July slipped away, diversified, as I have explained, by a visit to London and some melancholy pleasures sipped in Mabel Harker’s society, from which I returned to “The French Horn” in a truly desperate and pitiable frame of mind. Indeed, so low and forlorn was I at times that Mr. Thatcher, with great sympathy, once or twice fetched me out a bottle of old port (and not bad tipple, either, for a country inn), which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the misfortunes of his life.

Chief among them was the loss of his ancestral home, Wharton Park. The Thatchers had lived there since the first of them, a Lord Mayor of the time of Henry VIII., had built the house in the year 1543—of which original structure only the stables, in an extremely ramshackle condition, remained. A drunken Thatcher with a bedroom candle had burned the rest, towards the end of the last century, when the present house was built by my father-in-law’s grandfather; a bad man, apparently, since though he had a wife and children established in Portman Square, he kept a mistress in one of the wings of Wharton Park, where one night she went suddenly raving mad (treading on her long boa and believing it a serpent come from the lower regions to claim and devour her), and filled the air with her screechings till, a year later, she died.

Mr. Thatcher’s father had mortgaged the place heavily to Mr. Crage, an attorney and moneylender of Clement’s Inn, and soon after his death, in 1850, the mortgage was foreclosed, and Mr. Crage took possession and had lived there with great disrepute ever since. He was a very vile old man, who had killed his wife with ill-treatment and turned his daughters out-of-doors; no female domestic servant was safe from his dreadful advances, and at last he was left with no one to serve him but the gardener and his wife, with whom, especially when they all got drunk together on gin-and-water in the kitchen, he was as often as not engaged in hand-to-hand fighting.

When I first saw him he was well over eighty, and a more abandoned-looking old villain I never set eyes on; with a gashed, slobbering mouth, in which the yellow teeth stuck up out of the under-jaw like an old hound’s; a broken nose, which had once been hooked, until displaced by a young carpenter in the village, whose sweetheart he had been rude to; and the most extraordinary, bushy, black eyebrows. His hand shook so he always cut himself shaving, and his chin was always dabbled with dry blood. In short, a more malignant and gaunt personality I never saw, as I first did quite close, leaning on a gate and mumbling to himself, dressed in a tight body-coat, gaiters, and a dull, square, black hat, like a horse-coper’s.

I remember he called out to me over the gate in a rasping voice, “Hi, there, you young Cockney! what’s the time?” Whereupon I haughtily replied it was time he thought of his latter end and behaved himself. At which he fell to cursing and shaking his stick, and making sham, impotent efforts to get over the gate. For they told me he was mortally afraid of dying, as all bad (and, for the matter of that, many good) men are. He knew, of course, Mr. Thatcher was the rightful owner of the place, and he would sometimes come down to “The French Horn” and jeer him about it, offering it for £30,000, which, he dared say, Mr. Thatcher had in the house. And more than once, curse his senile impudence! Mr. Thatcher told me he had offered to marry Lucy!—but this is really too horrible a subject to be dwelt on.

In short, I loathed the old wretch so heartily that it was perhaps the happiest moment of my life (with the exception of that blessed February morning when I stood at the altar of Nesshaven church with Lucy and heard her sweet and tremulous “I will”) when, after our triumphant return from Monte Carlo, Mr. Thatcher and I went up to Wharton Park with the £30,000 in notes and gold and paid the old ruffian out over the coarse kitchen-table, almost the only furniture of the grand drawing-room, where there were still the old yellow silk hangings—as will all come in its place, later on.

Lucy Thatcher at this time, in June and July, was staying with her aunt, Miss Young, her mother’s sister, who kept a girls’ school in the Ladbroke Grove Road, out at Notting Hill. She taught some of the younger children and made herself generally useful, taking them out walks in Kensington Gardens; for Mr. Thatcher wisely thought her too beautiful to be always at “The French Horn,” since bicyclists and golfers are somewhat apt to be too boldly attentive to the lovely faces they meet with on their roundabouts. Nor can I altogether blame them. So, as I have said, I never saw her till my return in September, when her beauty and modesty—which in my judgment are synonymous—at once captured me, and always will hold me captive till I die.