"One village and one woman—that's all. Deuce knows how many other women there were who could claim to come into the yarn, but I've forgotten them all but that one. There were plenty of villages, too, round about, including our own, but I'm only going to tell you of hers. Ours was not so much a village as a kingdom under the absolute rule of the most tyrannical old despot in this world—if he is in it still—I mean my father. He bullied and bossed the whole parish, including the parson, insulting the poor devil and threatening to have him suspended every other Sunday. He himself snarled out the lessons in church, and he made me learn texts by rote before I could read; for my father was one of those hard-bitten old saints who breed sinners like me the whole world over.
"But three miles from our village, which was in a constant simmer of discontent and suppressed rebellion, lay just the sweetest and most peaceful spot on earth, where it seems to me now that the sun was always shining. It was one long, old street of yellow walls and red tiles, and when you got to the end of it, there was the thatched church and the rectory, and the good old rector with his two hands stretched out to greet you, and hovering about him, to a certainty, the purest angel that ever wasted her love on a devil incarnate. I won't tell you the name of the village nor yet of the county. You'll be going back to the old dust one of these days, and you might run across my people. I don't want you to know it if you do. You may take your oath you won't hear of me from them; they've done their best to forget my existence. Oh, dear, yes, my name on the station books is as false as hell, like the rest of me. But I don't mind telling you her name. It was Edith, and I used to call her Edie. Jolly name, Edie, sweet and simple like the poor little thing herself. Rum thing, isn't it, how easily it still slips off my tongue?"
He stopped to smile me his strange impersonal smile, and to attend to his cigar. So far he had been holding it between finger and thumb, and admiring it as he talked.
"You will see how rum this is presently," he continued, with his eye on three fresh rings that were circling upward from his mouth. "We had been boy and girl together, but when we wanted to be man and wife, Edie's old father would not let us be engaged, because he knew of my blackguard ways. He did not give that as his reason. Edie was very young, a delicate slip of a girl, too, and it must have been a long engagement in any case. We were to remain friends, however. I think the dear old boy trusted to his girl to straighten me out first; if she couldn't, then nobody else could.
"But I was a hopeless case. The country-side rang with my sins long before I was sent down from Oxford; and went on ringing afterwards, louder and louder, when I settled in London and was nominally reading for the bar; but so long as I came down in time for prayers when I was at home, and went to hear our poor brow-beaten devil on Sundays, my father stopped his ears and shook his stick at those who tried to tell him of my misdeeds. I don't think he much cared what I did so long as he saw the soles of my boots at morning prayers. But my good old friend in the next parish was different. I can see him now, and the sorrow in his kind old face, when he forbade me the rectory once and for all. I felt that, too, and on my way home whom should I meet in the fields but Edith herself? So I made as clean a breast of everything as one could to a young girl. Young as she was though, you wouldn't believe how that girl sympathised and understood; and you won't believe this either, but her kindness fetched the tears to my eyes. She was a God's angel to me that summer day. I took her in my arms, little white feather that she was, and I vowed and vowed that I would keep straight for her sake even if I never saw her any more. And when I wouldn't touch her with my foul mouth she raised her pure lips—I can feel them now—and kissed my cheek of her own accord. She did indeed!"
His voice had become very sad and soft—so soft that I had to bend forward to catch some of the words—but there was a quiet bitter note in it that cut to the heart. And as he paused, and went on smoking, the queer sardonic smile came back to him. His cigar was now one half snowy ash, the other glossy brown leaf, and as he smoked a little red ring divided the two. He remarked afresh on the excellence of the ash before resuming his story in a lighter, louder tone that lasted him almost to the end.
"Now I'm going to tell you a very singular thing. I made my peace with the old rector, partly by letter, partly by Edie's intervention, and at Christmas-time I was to have her if she was still of her old mind; so at Christmas-time down I came from town with the engagement ring in my pocket. I knew that the girl would keep true to me through thick and thin, though I did hope that she had not heard of a certain matter which had got my name into the papers that autumn. Never mind what it was. My father had written very violently on the subject, but I had not heard a word from hers. So I hoped for the best. I was not as yet a fully reformed character, but I was about to become one. The night before I left town I never went to bed at all. It was my last orgy; but I was sober enough in the early morning to go to Covent Garden in my dress clothes, and to buy flowers to take down to Edie with the ring. I chose roses, because they were the most expensive at that time of year; and red ones, because the girl was naturally so pale. Then I had a sleep in my chambers all the morning, and went down by an afternoon train.
"It was dark when I landed at the market-town where the dog-cart used to meet one. I hadn't ordered it this time, because I wasn't going straight home. I found it freezing down there, and I thought I would walk out to the rectory through the crisp night air, so as to arrive there fresh, for by now I felt the effects of the previous night. It was so very dark, however, that I bought a lantern and made them light it before I would set out on my three miles' walk. I remember going out of my way to a shop where I was not known. That market-town was our nearest one of any size, I had made it too hot to hold me before I was one-and-twenty, and it hadn't cooled down yet.
"The frost had followed a long spell of dirty weather, and the roads were fluted ribbons of frozen mud. My footsteps resounded merrily as I pushed into the darkness, the centre of a moving circle of light thrown upon the ground by my lantern. I shall never forget that walk. The box of flowers I carried in one hand, my lantern in the other, and for all my full hands I must needs keep feeling for the ring in my pocket, to make sure that I had it safe. And I felt as though my back was turned forever upon the town, and all that. We would be married without unnecessary delay, and we would live well outside London—either in the Thames Valley or among the Surrey Hills, I thought. At any price we would keep clear of the town; I would go in as late as possible in the mornings and return quite early in the afternoon. My old haunts should know me no more. With such a prospect and so many good resolutions to occupy my mind, the way seemed short enough, and I was glowing as much from my own thoughts as from the keen clean air when I swung open the rectory gate and walked briskly up the well-known drive; my heart was beating mountains high, for the dear old place had always been infinitely more homelike to me than my own home.
"The house struck me as being poorly lighted, but then I was purposely taking them by surprise. As I came up to it, my eyes mounted to Edie's bedroom window, and I was astonished to see it standing wide open to the bitter air. There was no light in the room either. The front door was opened by the rector himself. He seemed agitated at the sight of me; nor would he shake my hand, and I knew, then, that he had seen in the papers that which I hoped had escaped his notice. With a sinking heart I asked for Edie. The old man peered at me for a moment; then he answered that she was gone.