"Lord, Master George, how you do go on! Why, Mr. Carruthers's new house is the far side of the Park."
"I know, nurse. It's all the same thing. No. No more wine, thank you, and nothing to eat. Good-bye.--How am I to get out, though? Not through the window, and up the area wall, am I?"
"I'll show you, Master George. This way."
George Dallas buttoned his coat tightly across his breast, carefully put on his gloves, and took up his hat. As he followed Mrs. Brookes through the long stone passages of the basement story, he looked curiously about him, noting the details of comfort and convenience. "How much better off than I are my mother's servants!" he thought, idly rather than bitterly. When they reached a door which opened upon the court-yard, Mrs. Brookes bade him farewell, not without emotion.
"The great gates are open," she said. "All the servants are either in the hall or the servants' hall. None of the carriages have been called yet. You can slip past without being seen; or if any one sees you, they'll think you belong to the place."
"A serious mistake, dear old woman," said George, with a half-smile, as he once more shook her hand, and stepped out into the cold and darkness. A bitter sense of desolation came over him as the door closed behind him. The court-yard was empty, except of carriages, and he crossed it quickly, and went through the great gates into the avenue, which swept round the terrace. Following it, he found himself brought again by a different route in front of the lighted ball-room; but he did not delay to glance at the scene.
"So I am going away," he said to himself, "richer by ten pounds and my mother's promise. Stop, though! There's the sprig of myrtle. I must not forget or lose the unconscious gift of the great heiress. I wish I had asked nurse what sort of girl she is. I might have taken time to do that. It's not so cold as it was." He had been warmed and fed, and his spirits had risen. It did not take much to raise George Dallas's spirits, even now when the excesses of his wasted life were beginning to tell upon him. "I feel quite strong again. The night is lighter; the village must be a wretched place. I have a great mind to push on to Amherst. It's only seven miles, and Carruthers can't hear that I have been there; but he might hear of me at the village, and bother my mother about it."
He took his way down the avenue and reached the gate, which lay open. One feeble light twinkled from the upper window of the gate lodge. Bulger and family had retired to rest, the excitement of the arrivals being over, and Bulger would leave the gate to take care of itself until morning. Unquestioned, unseen, George Dallas left Poynings, and, turning to the right under the park wall, set forth at a steady pace towards Amherst.
The town of Amherst is very much like the other towns in that part of the country. Close by the railway station lies the Railway Tavern, snug and comfortable, with a "quick draught" of homebrewed ale and bitter beer, thanks to the powers of suction of porters, guards, and admiring friends of both, who vent their admiration in "standing glasses round." Not a little of its custom does the Railway Tavern own to that small plot of waste ground in front of it, where, even on this desolate night, you might trace the magic circle left by the "ring" of Signor Quagliasco's Mammoth Circus on its visit last autumn, and the holes for the pole and tent-pegs, and the most recent ruts on which were left by the wheels of the cart of the travelling photographer who "took" the entire town at Christmas, and, in addition to the photograph, presented each sitter with a blue card embossed with a scarlet robin bearing in its mouth the legend, "A happy new year to you." Then villas; Mr. Cobb's, the corn-chandler and coal-merchant, with a speckled imitation-granite porch, white and black, as if it had been daubed with a mixture of its owner's flour and coal-dust; Mr. Lawson's, the attorney, with a big brass plate on its outer gate, and two stone pine-apples flanking the entrance; Mr. Charlton Biggs's, the hop-merchant, in all the gentility of a little chaise-house leaning against the street door, approached by a little carriage-drive so narrow that the pony had never yet walked up it properly, but had always been ignominiously "backed" into its tiny home. Then the outskirts of the town; the Independent Chapel, very square, very red-faced, and very compact, not to say sat upon; the Literary Institute, with more green damp on its stuccoed walls than had been originally intended by its architect, and with fragmentary bills of "Mr. Lens's Starry Carpet, or the Heavens at a Glance," fluttering in the night wind from its portico. Merton house comes next, formerly the stronghold of the Merton-Mertons, the great Kentish family, now Mr. Bompas's Classical and Commercial Academy, with a full view of the white dimity bedsteads through the open window, and with "Old Bompas's Blaggards" inscribed--by the boys of the National School, with whom the grand Bompasians waged constant warfare--on the doorpost. The commencement of the town, a mouldy old bay-windowed shop, known to Mr. Bompas's boys as "Mother Jennings's," and as the repository of "tuck," said tuck consisting of stale buns, hardbake, "all sorts," toffee, treacle, new rolls, sugar mutton-chops elegantly painted and gilt, sugar rum and gin bottles, whipcord, pegtops, and marbles; then Bullenger's, apparently a small ironmonger's, but in reality another lure for the money of Bompas's boys, for in a parlour behind his back shop Bullenger vended fireworks and half-crown detonating pistols, catapults, and cross-bows, and all sorts of such-like instruments dear to predatory boys. Then the ordinary lot of butchers, bakers, tailors, hosiers, grocers, chemists (Mr. Hotten, member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, also strongly reliant on Bompas's custom for cigars and hair-oil for the big boys, and bath-pipe and liquorice for the little ones), and then the police-station; the old gray church, with its square ivy-covered tower, its billowy graves and its half-obliterated sun-dial over the porch, and then the fresh green fields again.
All these particulars George Dallas noted in the morning, when, having early left the bed he had procured at the inn, he called in at the station and learned from the friendly porter, who was again engaged in mending his shoes with tin and tacks, when the next train would start for London, and where he could find a tailor's shop, walked briskly through the little town, with feelings very different from those which had possessed him on his first arrival at the Amherst station. Now, his step was free and light, he carried his head erect, and though he occasionally shivered as the cold wind came sweeping over the downs and gave him a sharp unfriendly nip as it hurried by him in its progress to the sea, he bore the insult with tolerable fortitude, and seemed to derive immediate comfort from plunging his hand into his trousers pocket, where lay the ten-pound note he had received from his mother. It was there, stiff and crisp to his touch. He had taken it out and looked at it twice or thrice on the road, but he could not do that now in the town; he must content himself with touching it, and the crinkling sound was music in his ear; he had been so long without money, that he derived the keenest pleasure from the possession of this actual tangible sum, and felt so little inclined to part with it, that, though he had passed, and noticed in passing, the tailor's shop to which he had been recommended by the porter, he still walked on. It was not until he had made a circuit of the old churchyard at the end of the town, where even on summer days the wind is generally at play, and where on winter nights it ramps and rages in a manner terrible to hear and feel, that George Dallas began to comprehend the necessity of at once procuring some warmer clothing, and, turning back, made straight for the tailor's shop.