“For I am free!” he cried to the winds—“and responsible in all the world to nobody but myself!”
At the very next wayside inn he dismounted and called boisterously for food. Munching this, with a confident digestion, by a jolly fire, and delighting in every purple bead of Clos Vougeot that swam to his glass rim, he would give his fancies, as the freeborn children of a Bohemian, rein to run as they listed, and would even humour them to the top bent of his inclination. Well, their order—or absence of it—might be this: Position and respectability; a park, a carriage-road, trim servants, nice-mannered children; a stake in the county and a sober reputation to prop it; an admirable cold wife, in whom an innate artificiality should be tuned to the musical pitch of sentiment; on every side a thickset hedge of formality and restriction, where-through one decent passage alone should be pierced—the stone-flagged way to the tremendously enduring family vault;—and at the last, the precise misrepresentation of a ruled epitaph. Good! And now from the olive to the wine: Life—the life that he understood and could rejoice in—away from the flint road and spurring on to the downs; the life of heath and water and wood, of the blown blue sky and the whirled pollen of flowers; of light and gloom, risk and effort and reward; of the great breath of change and freedom, and—ah! yes: of the sympathizing soft heart to be always waiting him at the blossoming corner; the spirit to often share with him the wanderings and the marvels, and to pull him down into the sweet-smelling brake at shut of eve, and so for both to make a common cause of dreams.
Which was the happier picture? And yet a very fragrant perfume would cling about the presentment of that white gentle-born Angela; and sometimes even now it would appear a profanation to him to hold her cheaply in his thoughts.
He would not. If a certain shame-faced exultation over his latest emancipation would stir oddly in him from time to time, he would not so far abuse the trust his own heart had placed in a recent sentiment as to set up a new idol in the niche of a fallen image. Angela might be deposed; but—for the present at least—no other should usurp her throne.
Momentarily firm in this respect, and secure in his own geniality from the carping criticisms of conscience, he turned from all tender retrospections, and lazily, as he sat, reviewed a little company of late incidents. From yesterday with its snubs and its petty hurts, to the melancholy and monotonous flight of this morning—even that now had its accents to be indulgently recalled. His thoughts went back along the wintry road he had traversed, and dwelt comically upon the figure of an old oddity he had seen peering down upon him from a leaf-ruined gazebo—an oddity, the personification of much inquisitiveness, that was muffled in many capes and that held a great blue umbrella between its old head and the blast. He remembered how a half-dozen snow-buntings had fled over a hedge-row as he went by; how down a certain swoop of meadow-land a flock of screaming gulls had dived; how, where in a roadside churchyard a sexton was toiling at a grave, the titlarks had bobbed and curtsied on the newly-turned mould, desperate in their freezing hunger;—and from all this he augured that such a winter was threatening as would make the country no desirable place to live in for some months to come.
Still, he was not sorry he was returning to it. In his new lust for freedom a veritable loathing for the gilded fetters of town-life was a first condition, and he would have no knowledge of passions that could only take breath in a vitiated atmosphere. If he must sin, he would sin in the woods; and of his wavering human soul “let the forest judge.”
It had been a desolate road he came by—black and gloomy with frost, and enlivened by but few passing vehicles. One of these—a post-chaise—there had been, going on monotonously before him at a distance ahead. Its steady progression (he could not tell why) annoyed and worried him. It was always there, a yellow blot in the perspective of highway; whipping down and up the hollows, swinging rhythmically in its straps, endlessly speeding on and holding him, as it were, in its wake. Once or twice he had been moved to cut past and outrun it; but the bitter push of wind in his front and an apathy bred of cold would dissuade him from the effort, and in the end he would always find himself jogging sombrely along in its rear. It was a satisfaction to him, as he came within sight of the inn at which he was to dismount, to see this persistent vehicle, its occupants and cattle refreshed, moving off on its further journey; for so, he comforted himself, he should resume his own way by and by unvexed of that aggravating accompaniment. This was all childish, of course; but so it was that it was always his habit to be impatient of anything that embarrassed his free forward outlook; and to be kept walking behind a pedestrian in the street he would regard as almost a personal affront.
However, for the rest of his day’s journey he had the road virtually to himself; and by sundown he had completed his forty-fifth mile, and was clanking into the High Street of Basingstoke.
At the “White Horse” in this town he woke on the following morning, with a sense of constriction at his heart, to find the water in his ewer a sheet of ice, and that smell of cold soot, that seems the prevailing atmosphere of hard winters, to proceed from everything about him.
His room looked upon the stable-yard, and glancing thereinto while in process of dressing, he broke into an oath at sight of a yellow chaise that stood below with horses attached, over one of which a red-nosed post-boy sprawled expectant, awaiting his fare.