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I CONTINUE TO KEEP OUT OF MABEL HARKER’S WAY AND GO TO GORING—RETURN TO “THE FRENCH HORN”—WANDERINGS WITH LUCY—MR. CRAGE REHEARSES HIS OWN FUNERAL

As August approached I began to feel apprehensive as to the right course to pursue with regard to Mabel Harker, my fiancée. I don’t want to say anything unkind about her here in print, but, the fact is, the engagement had been an unfortunate one from the first. Let me only observe that I really honestly think if a man is to choose between behaving like a brute (as people say you do when you break off an engagement) and making himself miserable for life (as I most certainly should if I had married Mabel), he had much better select the former course. At any rate, I know now that if I had had the brutality, or the courage, to tell Mabel point-blank at first that I was very sorry, but I didn’t care for her sufficiently to marry her, I should have spared myself a vast deal of annoyance and self-reproach, which now I understand to have been altogether unnecessary; seeing, I know now very well, she didn’t really care for me in the least, but simply regarded me as a lay-figure (with eight hundred a year) to stand beside her at the altar rails and mechanically say “I will” and “I do” and the rest of it.

After her visit to her sister’s in the Regent’s Park, in July, she had gone back to Folkestone, and I was in some tremor whether she might not desire me to spend the holiday months with them there; but, most fortunately, Mrs. Harker, her aunt, received a very good offer for her house in Clifton Gardens, which she determined to take, and go abroad to Switzerland, where she and Mabel could live in a pension and save quite three-fourths of the home rent.

Mabel wanted me to join them, but I managed to get out of it, and very lucky I did; for it was at that very pension at Lucerne she met Charles Byles, the architect, her present husband, and a great ass he must have looked with that small face of his and huge mustache, and a rope round him for going up Pilatus; besides being slightly bandy.

As for me, I went off down to my sister’s, Mrs. Rivers, married to the publisher, who had taken a little house on the river at Taplow, where I spent the end of August and early part of September with great content, more especially in the middle of the week, when my precious brother-in-law (a dull fellow and a prig) was away doing his publishing in town.

I left Taplow the second week in September, and something gentle, yet persuasive and strong, seeming to call me back to “The French Horn,” off I went there; and there, as I have already mentioned, I met and fell madly in love with Lucy Thatcher at first sight, a passion deepening to a tempest before October dawned.

Now, as I am telling the truth in this work, and not writing a romance, I have to admit that the month I had of Lucy’s dear companionship, before I knew I was free, was by no means spent idly, and that I made all the running with her of which my amorous wits are capable, just as though I had been really unappropriated.

Nor was this altogether wrong, for I felt quite sure Providence would stand my good friend, as always in such affairs before, and direct Mabel Harker’s hopes into another, sounder matrimonial channel than mine. Even if Providence had not, but had stood aloof and fought shy, I should then most certainly have deemed it necessary to play the part myself, seeing how deeply and truly my heart was now for the first time engaged.

Dear! dear! at what amazing speed that happy month flew past; how little there seems I can say about it now. Isn’t it strange that Time, whom poets prefigure as an ancient person with anchylosed joints, further encumbered, notwithstanding his great age, with a scythe and an enormous hour-glass, is yet on occasion capable of showing the panting hurry of a sprinter?

With Lucy I was alone almost all the time, for Mr. Thatcher, very properly, wouldn’t allow her to help in the bar—a department he gracefully presided over himself in his dirty blazer, grasping the handle of the beer engine, and sometimes, on Saturday nights mostly, slightly shaken with a gentlemanly but unmistakable attack of hiccoughs. So dear Lucy had nothing much to do but go bathing and help her grandmother in the garden, gathering the plums and raking down the ripening apples. And though there were days when, womanlike, she shunned me and kept out of my way (so as not to make herself too cheap), yet she was very frank and simple and trusting in giving me at other times her constant companionship; and as on the days when she desired to be more alone I always respected her wish and kept away (just turning at the fourth hole on the links to watch her light, firm figure crossing down to her bathing-tent on the shore, and waving the putter at her), she was, as she has since told me, pleased at my delicacy and perception, and showed her pleasure when we again met by the extraordinary brightness of her eyes and the sweet readiness of her smile.

It was harvest-time, and though Mr. Thatcher had no acreage of his own, still there was plenty of it round him under cultivation, and a fine time it was for the Tap, for which there was a separate entrance, with a painted hand pointing to it for those who couldn’t read. While my sweetheart and I strolled about the lanes by day, gathering blackberries and plucking at the wisps of corn caught by the high hedges and low branches from the passing wagons, on warm evenings we would sit alone in the garden, listening to the hearty rustic revelry of premature harvest-homes from the inn, and, when it was very still, hearing the faint, mysterious rustle of the waves on the long, sandy shore, as though the lulling sea were whispering to the land, “Hush! hush! now go to sleep like a good child. You’ve had a long day and must be tired—hush!”

It was at this time, as I very well remember, we strolled up late one afternoon to Wharton Park, her old ancestral home, and a very curious and unedifying sight we witnessed there. We went in at the empty lodge gates, and had a look in first at the church in the Park grounds, of which Mr. Thatcher kept the key in the bar; for there was no rectory, and the parson came over only on Sundays from Nesshaven for an afternoon service—at six in summer and at three in winter.

The ancient, bird-haunted edifice was pretty full of deceased Thatchers—all of them, in fact, I believe, lie there, except the Lord Mayor of Henry VIII.’s reign, who gets what rest he can in a church off Cornhill, and Mr. Thatcher’s grandfather, who is buried out at Florence; and where there aren’t tablets and tombs of old-time, worthy Thatchers, there are kindly memorials to their servants, house-keepers, and bailiffs for forty years and so on; which when Lucy and I had duly and reverently inspected and sighed over, we had a peep in at the vestry, where hung the parson’s crisp surplice behind a piece of religious arras, and a framed and glazed view of Wharton in 1750 (the mansion that was burned), with pompous gentlemen in three-cornered hats giving their hands to ladies in immense hoops up the centre path; and a tattered, begrimed notice of the reign of Queen Anne, affording the clergy instructions for sending parishioners up to St. James’s to be touched for the king’s evil.

And when we had mourned over these things, and inspected the fragment of the holy-water scoop, and the blunt, whitewashed squint, and the broken place where once the mass-priests sat, and the Wharton pew, with an icy cold stove in it and a little frame of dingy red curtain hung round on rods and rings, so that the hinds shouldn’t see when the quality Thatchers fell asleep—not in the Lord!—on drowsy summer Sunday afternoons—as, alas! they haven’t had the opportunity of doing for many years past now; then we went on up to the house, leaving the drive, however, and dodging across the fields to the ha-ha, for fear of meeting that old villain Crage.

We got up through a small spinney to the end of the ha-ha that faces the house, and, as we were quite close, saw with our own eyes a most strange and monstrous sight—a sight so strange that many readers would scarcely credit it, had they not noticed that truth and not fiction is my object.

Hidden in the spinney, we were not more than forty yards from the house, which is long and low and not particularly beautiful—in fact, decidedly Gothic and unsightly. In front of it, lengthways and pretty broad, runs a gravel path, and up and down that broad gravel path was stamping and swearing old Mr. Crage; stamping and swearing and shaking his stick at six men (laborers of his, Lucy said, and all men she knew) who were actually carrying a coffin, a smart, brand-new coffin with dandy silver handles, on their shoulders.

The old wretch was positively rehearsing his own funeral! We could very plainly hear him cursing the men for walking too fast and jolting him, and so on; as though, once the miserable old hunks were cold, it mattered how anybody carried him.

Then he made them rest the coffin on one end while he showed them himself the pace they should travel and the demeanor they ought to exhibit; and truly, if it hadn’t been scandalous and horrible it would have been ludicrous to see the way the blaspheming old scamp trailed the path before them, dragging one foot along after another, with head and shoulders bent in sham sorrow and reverence; trying, in short, to play-act the distressed, grief-stricken mourner, touched to the quick at his own loss.

When he had finished his parade, he shook his stick at the six men, and cursed them, raving and foaming, for damned scoundrels and thieves and disrespectful ruffians, who would be glad to see him dead, and would whistle and dance while carrying him off, instead of doing it all in the proper depressed manner he had just shown them; while the men stood and looked at him stupidly and sullenly, and, I’ve no doubt, would have liked to jump on him there and then and beat him to a pulp, finishing once and for all with so dreadful a mockery by making it real.

Dear Lucy and I stole away, quite shocked and silent. Afterwards she told me old Crage had had the coffin a long time, and rehearsed the funeral once before; but that lately, having by threats of an action screwed twenty pounds out of his daughter for money he had lent her (on which, by-the-way, Miss Crage had promptly run away and got married), he had had the silver handles added; and, now that the coffin was, in his estimation, quite perfect, had doubtless gone through the unholy ceremony again, so that when the hour struck there might be no excuse for a hitch.

So Lucy and I stole away back to “The French Horn” in shocked silence. Pleasant and human it sounded, when we got on the road again, to hear a carter singing as he rattled homeward in his empty wagon.