Now sudden inspiration came to Master Ned gossip. He perceived that the lady had been standing upon a grating. Like a thief, in good earnest, he stole back to the scene of the contretemps, and went into a silent fit of laughter. Two little high red heels, bristling with nails, were firmly wedged between the bars of the grille. With a guilty round-about glance, he squatted, and dug and beat them out with a sharp stone. Then (observe the embryonic crudeness of romance in the shell), he put them—nails and all—into his tail-pocket.
CHAPTER II.
Had Lord Murk been of a present inclination less reserved and withdrawing, he had months before found easy access to the presence of the merry maid, whose little red heels seemed now, as it were, to have taken his misogamy by the tail. For, indeed, when at last he sought, he found this young lady’s identity established in a word. She was neither more nor less (with a reservation in respect to the gossips) than the adopted daughter of a very notable gouvernante to a royal family; and she happened to have already sojourned in Bury some six months, during which he, the hermit-crab, had chosen to tuck himself away apathetic into his shell.
Ned had, of course, heard of the not altogether peaceful invasion of the drowsy little town by one particularly hybrid company of emigrants that was, in fact, the travelling suite of Mademoiselle d’Orléans, whom the Duke her father had, for safety, shipped to England towards the latter end of the previous year. The importance of mademoiselle’s advent was signified rather in her rank than her maturity, which presented her as a lymphatic little body, some fifteen years of age, with pink eye-places and a somewhat pathetic trick of expression. But, if her title proclaimed her nominal suzerainty over the valetaille that, in its habits of volubility and swagger, was to inflame the popular sense of decorum by-and-by to a rather feverish pitch of resentment, the very practical conduct of the expedition was in the hands of that wonderful woman whom an irreverent virtuosity had entitled “Rousseau’s hen.”
Ned had not in the least desired to make the acquaintance of this Madame de Genlis. His position in the neighbourhood rather entailed upon him the courtesy of a welcome to the royal little red-eyed stranger at his gates; yet, adapting his unsociability to popular rumour of the formidable bas-bleu that dragoned her, he delayed a duty until its fulfilment became an impossibility. And even a chance report or so that had reached him of the beauty of madame’s adopted child—the flower-faced Pamela (“notre petit bijou”), in praise of whose name, abbreviated, a dozen local squireens were flogging their tuneless brains for any rhyme less natural to the effort than “damn!”—moved him only to some sardonic reflections on the uncomplimentary significance of a gift that seemed designed in principle for a stimulant to fools.
To fools had been his thought; and now here he was, having for the first time happened upon this actual Pamela, not only awake of a sudden to a glaring sense of the social solecism he had committed, but awake, also, to a sentiment much less intimate (as he thought) to the world of ordinary emotions. It was astounding, it was humiliating so to truckle to the thrall of a couple of blue eyes that, for all purposes of vision, were no better than his own. He stood astonished; he rebelled—but he pursued. He felt his very amour-propre giving before the incursion of a force, stranger yet akin to it. So the big brown rat (oh, vile analogy!) usurped the kingdom of his little black cousin.
Why, then, did the unfortunate young man not reject and cast forth the spell that seemed to drain him of all the ichor of independence? Why did he wantonly stimulate in himself a fancy that his calm judgment pronounced hysterical? How can these things be answered? How could any sober reason analyse the motives of a person who kept in his tail-pocket, and frequently sat upon, a charm that absolutely bristled with spikes? It is the way of love. When the mystic bolt flies, the philosopher apart must take his chance of a wound with the man who lives in a street.
Anyhow, it must be recorded how Ned took to haunting—with the persistent casualness of one whose unattainable mistress is, as suggested by his preoccupied manner, the thing farthest from his thoughts—the neighbourhood of a certain house in Bury St Edmunds.
This house—a dignified, two-storeyed, red-brick building, with a stiff white porch standing out into the road, and, on the floor above the porch, five tall windows looking arrogantly down from behind a green balcony at the lesser lights in the barber’s and fruiterer’s shops opposite—was situate, about the middle of the town, on a slope known as Abbey Hill, and had for actual neighbour a chief hotel, the Angel, then pretty newly built. It faced—across that sort of homely place, or town quadrangle, that is so usual a feature in English old market boroughs—a flaked and hoary Norman tower that had once been the gateway to a graveyard long since passed with its dead into the limbo of memories. Madame la gouvernante could see the solemn eyebrows of this very doyen of antiquity bent upon her as she sat at the second déjeuner, and it made her nervous. Sometimes, even, she would send a servant to half close the blinds of the window over against her.
“One cannot evade oneself of its senile addresses,” she said on a certain occasion to a florid gentleman in black, who had come down from London to be her particular guest for a while. “I feel like Vesta being made the courted of an old Time. It is always heere the mummy at the feast.”