“Oh, please, please!” Dolly entreated. “Go home, Mr. Hopkins, before he kills you! James, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, fighting like a common man. You have disgraced me!”
Jim, who was recovering his coat, looked up at her out of his one serviceable eye in astonishment. Then, turning to his opponent, he said: “We’ll finish this some other time, if you want to.”
He then walked off the field of battle, his coat slung across his shoulder and his dark hair falling over his forehead, while Mr. Hopkins sat down upon the stump of a tree and spat the blood out of his mouth.
For many days thereafter Dolly would hardly speak to her disfigured husband, except to tell him, when he walked abroad with his blackened eye, that he had no shame. Farmer Hopkins, however, mended his wagon in time, and Jim mended his bridge; and there, save for much village head-shaking at the “Green Man” and melancholy talk at the vicarage, the matter ended. It was a regrettable affair, and the general opinion in the village was that “Black Rupert” was a man to be avoided. Miss Proudfoote, in fact, would hardly bow to him when next she passed him in the lane; and even Mr. Glenning, who quarrelled with no man, gazed at him, in church on the following Sunday, with an expression of deep reproof upon his venerable face.
It was after this painful incident that Jim formed the habit of going for long rambling walks by himself, or of wandering deep into the woods near the manor. Sometimes he would sit for hours upon a stile in the fields, sucking a straw and staring vacantly into the distance at the misty towers and spires of the ancient University, or lie in the grass, gazing up at the sky, listening to the far-off bells, his arms behind his head. Sometimes he would take a book from his uncle’s library—some eighteenth-century romance, or a volume of Elizabethan poetry—and go with it into the woods, there to remain for a whole afternoon, reading in it or in the book of Nature.
These woods had a curious effect upon him, and entering them seemed to be like finding sanctuary. It was not that his life, at this period, was altogether unhappy: his heart was full of tenderness towards Dolly, and, if her behaviour was beginning to disappoint him, his attitude was at first but one of vague disquietude. Yet here amongst the understanding trees he felt that he was taking refuge from some menace which he could not define; and at times he wondered whether the sensation was due to a mental throw-back to some outlawed ancestor who had roamed the merry greenwood, in the manner of Adam Bell and Clim of the Clough and William Cloudesley in the ancient ballads of the North of England.
He was conscious of a decided sense of failure and he felt that he was a useless individual. To a limited extent he used his brains and his pen in writing the verses which always amused him, but he rarely finished any such piece of work, and seldom composed a poem of any considerable length.
His character was not of the kind which would be likely to appeal to the stay-at-home Englishman. He did not play golf, and though as a youth he had been fond of cricket and tennis, his wandering life had given him no opportunities of maintaining his skill in these games, and now it was too late to begin again. He was not particularly interested in horseflesh, and he had no mechanical turn which might vent itself in motoring. His habits were modest and temperate; he preferred pitch-and-toss or “shove-ha’penny” to bridge; and he was a poor judge of port wine. He was sociable where the company was to his taste, but neither his neighbours at and around Eversfield, nor the professors at Oxford, were congenial to him. When there were visitors to the manor he was generally not able to be found; and when he was obliged to accompany his wife to the houses of other people, he was conscious that her eyes were upon him anxiously, lest he should show himself for what he was—a rebel and an outlaw.
On one occasion the vicar persuaded him to sing and play his guitar at a village concert; but the result was disastrous, and the invitation was never repeated. He chose to sing them Kipling’s “Mandalay”; but the pathos and the romance of the rough words were lost upon his stolid audience, to whom there was no meaning in the picture of the mist on the rice-fields and the sunshine on the palms, nor sense in the contrasting description of the “blasted Henglish drizzle” and the housemaids with beefy faces and grubby hands.
He himself was carried away by the words, and he sang with fervour:—