On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar’s remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre (presumptive) of a certain event in which I was interested.
An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea struck him—he opened the window and got out. Now some such inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when simply at will I might be a traveller—a tentative explorer, at least—and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting.
A tingle of adventure was in this as well as a vengeful resolution. It would be something, after all, to breathe a novel air into my stagnant lungs. I had lived so long remote and self-contained, that the prospect of even a Cockney suburb was a prospect potential of romance to me. No one would note my absence, and, if anyone did, how would it concern me? I was free, and my own master.
And so, the very next morning, valise in hand, I strode away, walking determinedly, with no effort at concealment. I went out by the wicket, and took the road to Footover, and thence a train to Waterloo. I was young, green, gullible, no doubt; but a certain hardness of muscle and disposition was always at my service and that of others. Few minor mishaps of the way have befallen me through life, and I was early in expanding to the practical knowledge which overrides difficulties. I mention this merely to explain the ease with which my inexperience resolved these first small problems of self-dependence—my introduction to the roaring traffics of existence, to the wiles and hypocrisies of men. I spent that night at an hotel in the Waterloo Bridge Road; and my initiation into its ways profited me.
Early on the following day I walked through the seethe of the streets to the Victoria Station, and so, by the local service, reached Clapham Road. I will not say that I greeted this goal to my adventure, shapeless as that was, without a certain excitement and hurrying of the blood. Here, somehow and somewhere, had been enacted the prologue to my young unprofitable life. This same busy street, going up southward through a dull avenue of bricks and windows, had housed, perhaps, the germ of that secret, which, dark and poignant a one as it appeared to me, was nevertheless of the commonest breed of secrets all the world over. And, indeed, its setting here seemed prosy enough—monotonous, respectable, unlovely—houses built for the most part in the sober chocolate hue of a century earlier; staid rows of shops; moderate traffic of omnibuses passing back and forth—everything betokening a condition of decent prosperity.
But, coming presently into a sort of little open place or circus, where the single road split out into a fan of three, I was refreshingly struck by some more definite suggestion there of an atmosphere which had already thinly appealed to me. This atmosphere was faintly redolent of past coaching days. It breathed from the tavern doors of the old “Plough Inn,” about which were congregated a half dozen or so of the very legitimate descendants of Tony Veller, but fallen, alas! upon degenerate times. The omnibuses, which they drove in these, stood ranked, yellow and green and red, by the kerb. When any one of the loiterers, detaching himself rubicundly from his fellows, would mount a box, and gather the greasy ribbons into his gloved hands, a whiff of Henry Alken, of his coachmen and stable-tubs and ostlers, would seem irresistibly borne into one’s senses. So, too, the rows of white posts and rails, skirting that side of the common which made for Tooting (Tooting! What suggestion in the very word of windy horns and galloping mails!), seemed to carry one into far perspectives of dead and past adventure. It was this way—though I did not know it then—streamed the enormous traffic of the Derby week, a page snatched out of the Regency eld, and still keeping the gay characteristics of that reckless hard-drinking era. But now the road appeared peaceful enough—a sunny road skirting a great sunny common, where lazy gipsy men, of the true Romany Chal type, kept a paddock of donkeys for hire, and little rookeries of crazy tenements marked at intervals the camping-grounds of dead and gone squatters.
Perhaps it was the result of my reading, or of a purposeless sentiment, or of Fate—let it be what you will; but I was moved to take that road, in an easy sauntering mood. Its freedom, its inviting openness appealed to me. I am no believer in the divinity which hedges kings or exacts its wages of sin; but I am a believer in Luck. Luck is the only power, so it seems to me, who can reconcile the discordant claims of the creeds. Some men—most, one may say—pray to him in vain. I have an idea that he was the nameless, the unknown God of the Greeks.
And, no doubt, of his nature, it is fruitless to appeal to Luck. Perversity is his rule of Godhead—his rules prove the exception. He smiles not on his votaries, nor frowns on his maligners. Incuriousness about him is the only way—but by no means the inevitable one—to attract his notice. Whereby, I really think I became his casual protégé. In all these days my creed was never other than a creed of indifferent and independent fatalism—if to fatalism can be applied such a term of belief. In any case it was near enough to aggravate Luck into seeking to win me to his worship instead. He made a first tentative bid for my suffrage on the present occasion.
I had sauntered a half mile, perhaps, up this pleasant old coaching way, the open common, with its ponds and trees and gorse thickets, to my right hand, to my left a long rank of houses, comfortable, mellow, prosperous, having for the great part bushy gardens in front, when my eye was caught by vision of a cosy tavern, standing across the way in a copse of elm-trees, and bearing in its every appointment and circumstance the tokens of a vanished era. The little paddock of turf in front, planted with the sign of the “Windmill,” and having its own private posts and rails, round which the drive swept; the wooden horse trough; the brown of the walls and the gold and grass-green canvas hung up on them, inviting irresistibly to somebody’s “Entire”—here was the right Regency travellers’ rest-and-be-thankful. It was mild bright weather, and a water cart went by sprinkling up an aromatic scent of dust. I thought of beer, beer in a glass, amber and sparkling, with a kiss of foam at the lip, and I crossed the road to the tavern. And there, over its door, stuck up before my eyes, was the legend “Richard Gaskett, licensed dealer in beer, tobacco and spirits.”
A sort of catalepsy seized me, as I looked and gaped. The coincidence, of course, might be just a coincidence. Yet Gaskett was not what one might call an everyday name—and then Richard Gaskett, and to occur in this place of all places!