I
Do not imagine that this is to be a love-story. Very few experiences furnish material for such. Rarer still is the ability to use the material, when it falls in one's way. At any rate, I make no pretension thereto.
But it sometimes happens during the earlier and more tumultuous period of a man's life, that casual occurrences take place, which do not indeed at the time immediately influence his actions or his fortunes, but which in later days may be recalled with interest. Of this sort—if I mistake not, or if I do not mar them in the telling—were my three meetings with Mary Verner. I only met her thrice.
The first time—many a year has sped away since; but it seems, if I shut my mental eye to events and feelings with which the interval has been crowded, and my bodily eye to the library table before me, as if the little scene were being enacted here, now, to-day.
Whence this power of summoning up the ghosts of long ago? Why should the comparatively recent refuse to be stamped upon the memory, and the old impressions refuse to fade? Let philosophers answer; I have no more inclination to write an essay than to tell a love-tale. My purpose I have already stated; though I omitted to mention that I write my own veritable experience—with a change of names, a studied obscurity of dates, and a very slight change otherwise.
The precise year I do not remember, nor, consequently, my own exact age; but I must have been about fourteen. George Verner, Mary's brother—poor fellow! I saw his death registered, the other day, in that odious corner of the Times—was my class-mate and play-mate at a school some few miles from London. He was a good-looking and good-tempered fellow, if not remarkable for his abilities. It chanced that I was—in the choice language of the time and place—"a dab at Latin verses." I helped George once in a while with his exercises; and once in a while with the mince-pies, that his mother's a cook used to send him on the sly. The first time that I saw her—Mary Verner I mean, not the cook—was on a whole holiday; George, who lived in the neighbourhood, had invited me to pass it with him. The old family coach came for us at ten o'clock, with the fat old horses and the fat old family coachman, just for all the world as you may often meet them in the story-books that are called "exceedingly natural," and as you now-a-days rarely find them in real life. Pony-phaetons, britzkas, coupés, "Croydon-baskets," and nondescript vehicles that, being neither close carriages nor open, are palmed off as both—these have superseded the full-bodied of my early recollections.
I fancy that I see her now.... You perceive that though I note the modern change in the carriage department, I recognize none such in the phraseology of our tongue. I fancy I see her now. You may, if you please, alter the wording; but that's the plain English of it.
As we drove up the sweep that led from the lodge to the front entrance of a very beautiful suburban villa, I leaned out of the window, with the curiosity natural to a boy of fourteen, on strange ground.
Mary Verner—I knew, by the family likeness, that she was George's elder sister, the moment my eye lighted on her—was trimming or watering her geraniums, in one of the recesses on either side of the porch.
"Here, Mary, here's Cuthbert tertius," said George, running up the steps, and pushing me before him.
"I know him; how d'ye do? I'm glad to see you," was the frank reception, spoken in a clear, round-toned, springy voice, that seemed to drop without effort out of a rose-lipped mouth well-filled with well-knit teeth. And as she spoke smilingly, she opened a pair of large brown eyes that I have since thought—for boys don't know much about the law of colours—were designed to harmonize with what we call a clear brunette complexion. Certainly, if the ballad of "The Nut Brown Mayde" be a model imitation of the antique, Mary Verner might have sat for the portrait.
But it was not so much her eyes that took hold of me, open though they did by degrees, wider and wider, until I wondered when they would cease opening; nor her coal-black hair, dressed as you may see it in the likenesses by Sir Thomas Lawrence; nor her rosy mouth; nor her even teeth; nor her figure full of grace, svelte as the French call it, for which we have no answering word. It was not these, or any of them. It was the carolling of her few words, so free and unconcerned in tone. If I had not met her subsequently, I might have forgotten her looks; I doubt whether her voice could have passed from me.
I need not tax my memory or my invention about the trifling though happy events of that day. It was pretty evident who was mistress of the house, though the fond and proud mother of Mary Verner had the air of a dignified and well-bred woman. Silent or talking, it was Mary who dispensed the honours, at least so far as the stranger was concerned. Probably it was the same with all comers; but this is only a surmise.
Well; the whole holiday came to an end, and we were driven back to the old school by the old coachman, our pockets full of chestnuts, and our boyish hearts full of a sense of supreme enjoyment, such we believe as, in later life, women feel after the best ball of the season, and men after a splendid whitebait dinner at Blackwall. I recollect telling the fellows in the dormitory what a jolly time we had been having, and how capitally George's pony leaped the fence on the common, round the corner, out of sight of the house. By the way, it was partly owing to that pony having engrossed so much of our time, that I had not regularly fallen in love with Mary Verner. Partly, I say, because I was further saved from this predicament by a standing devotion to my pretty cousin Rose, which the temptation had been strong enough, but not long enough to disturb. I never went to George's house again; and ere long the image of his sister was stowed away on one of the upper shelves of my memory. There it might have been smothered in dust, or even converted into it, if chance had not taken it down and given it an airing.