Sir Richard felt to his chin.
“That is soon remedied,” said he. “And so, till my oath is redeemed, to consign my razors to rust!” And with these words, bowing profoundly, he turned and left the room.
Shortly after this he sailed to rejoin his expedition, and was not again in England during a period of eighteen months.
At the end of that time, being once more in London, he devoted himself—his affairs having now been ordered with the view to his permanent residence in the country—to some guarded inquiries about the Fair with Golden Hair. For some days, the season of the town being inauspicious, he was unable to discover anything definite about her. And then, suddenly, the news which he sought and desired came in a clap.
He was walking, one day, down a street of poor and genteel houses, when he saw her before him. He stood transfixed. There was no doubting his own eyesight. It was she: tall, slender, crowned with her accustomed glory, the flower of her beauty a little wan, as if seen by moonlight. But what confounded him was her condition. Her dress was mean, her gloves mended; every tag of cheap ribbon which hung upon her seemed the label to a separate tragedy. Thus he saw her again, the Fair with Golden Hair; but how deposed and fallen from her insolent estate!
She mounted a step to a shabby door. While she stood there, waiting to be admitted, an old jaunty cavalier came ruffling it down the street, accosted her, and accompanied her within. She might have glanced at Avenant without recognizing him. The rough dark beard he wore was his sufficient disguise.
Sir Richard made up his mind on the spot, and acted promptly. Having no intention to procure himself a notoriety in this business, he rigidly eschewed personal inquiry, and employed an official informer, at a safe figure, to ferret out the truth for him. This, epitomized, discovered itself as follows:—
Cytherea—Venus Calva—Madonna of the magic girdle, who had once reigned supreme between wealth and loveliness, who had once eaten hearts raw for breakfast, feeding her roses as vampires do, was desolate and impoverished—and even, perhaps, hungry. A scoundrelly guardian had eloped with trust funds: the crash had followed at a blow. Robbed of her recommendation to respect; deposed, at once, from the world’s idolatry to its vicious solicitation, she had fled, with her hair and her poor derided virtue, into squalid oblivion; that, at least, she hoped. But, alas for the fateful recoils on Vanity! She drives with a tight rein; and woe to her if the rein snap! A certain libidinous and crafty nobleman, of threescore or so years, had secured, in the days of the Fair’s prosperity, some little bills of paper bearing that beauty’s signature. These he had politicly withheld himself from negotiating, on the mere chance that they might serve him some day for a means to humiliate one who, in the arrogance of her power, had scoffed at his amatory, and perfectly honourable, addresses. That precaution had justified itself. The peer was now come to woo again, and less scrupulously, with his hand on a paper weapon, one stroke from which alone was needed to give the Fair’s poor drabbled fortune its quietus. She was at bay, between ruin and dishonour.
Sir Richard came immediately to a resolve, and lost no time in giving it effect. He wrote a formal note to the Fair, recalling himself courteously to her remembrance, reminding her of his original offer, and renewing it in so many words. He would do himself the honour, he said, to wait upon her for her answer on such and such a day.
To this he received no reply; nor, perhaps, expected one. He went, nevertheless, to his self-made appointment with the imperturbable confidence of a strong man.