“I notice you take it for granted that I’ll be willing to continue busking with them,” Sylvia said.
That evening Airdale and she went out as usual; but the loss of the other two seemed somehow to have robbed the entertainment of its romantic distinction, and Sylvia was dismayed to find with what a shameful timidity she now took herself and her guitar into saloon-bars; she felt like a beggar and was humiliated by Jack’s apologetic manner, and still more by her own instinctive support of such cringing to the benevolence of potmen and barmaids.
One evening, after about a week of these distasteful peregrinations, the two mountebanks came out of a public house in Fulham Road where they had been forced to endure a more than usually intolerable patronage. Sylvia vowed she would not perform again under such conditions, and they turned up Tinderbox Lane to wander home. This thoroughfare, only used by pedestrians, was very still, and trees planted down the middle of the pavement gave to the mild March evening an effluence of spring. Sylvia began to strum upon her guitar the tune that Arthur Madden and she sang together from the windows at Hampstead on the night she met him first; her companion soon caught hold of the air, and they strolled slowly along, dreaming, she looking downward of the past, he of the future with his eyes fixed on the chimneys of the high flats that encircled the little houses and long gardens of Tinderbox Lane. They were passing a wall on their right in which numbered doors were set at intervals. From one of these a tall figure emerged and stopped a moment to say good-by to somebody standing in the entrance. The two musicians with a simultaneous instinct for an audience that might appreciate them stopped and addressed their song to the parting pair, a tall old gentleman with drooping gray whiskers, very much muffled up, and an exceedingly stout woman of ripe middle age.
“Bravo!” said the old gentleman, in a tremulous voice, as he tapped his cane on the pavement. “Polly, this is devilish appropriate. By gad! it makes me feel inclined to dance again, Polly,” and the old gentleman forthwith postured with his thin legs like a cardboard antic at the end of a string. The fat woman standing in the doorway came out into the lamplight, and clasping her hands in alarm, begged him not to take cold, but the old gentleman would not stop until Polly had made a pretense of dancing a few steps with him, after which he again piped, “Bravo,” vowed he must have a whisky, and invited Sylvia and Jack to come inside and join them.
“Dashwood is my name, Major-General Dashwood, and this is Mrs. Gainsborough.”
“Come along,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “The captain—”
“She will call me Captain,” said the general, with a chuckle. “Obstinate gal! Knew me first when I was a captain, thirty-six years ago, and has never called me anything since. What a woman, though!”
“He’s very gay to-night. We’ve been celebrating our anniversary,” Mrs. Gainsborough explained, while the four of them walked along a gravel path toward a small square creeper-covered house at the end of a very long garden.
“We met first at the Argyll Rooms in March, 1867, and in September, 1869, Mulberry Cottage was finished. I planted those mulberry-trees myself, and they’ll outlive us both,” said the general.
“Now don’t let’s have any more dismals,” Mrs. Gainsborough begged. “We’ve had quite enough to-night, talking over old times.”