As I have mentioned, Aurelius had asked me to take him to Abercorran House, because I had attracted his fancy with something I had said about the Morgans or the house. It was a lucky introduction. For all liked him, and he was soon free to stay at the house for a night or a month, at pleasure. It was one of his virtues to admire Jessie. He must have felt at once that she was alone among women, since he never knelt to her or made any of his long, lofty speeches to her as to other fair women whom he met elsewhere, as at my home. She saw his merit instantly. To please him she would go on and on singing for him “The Cuckoo,” “Midsummer Maid,” “Hob-y-deri-dando,” “Crockamy Daisy Kitty-alone.”
When for a time he was a bookseller’s assistant in London, it was Jessie discovered him, as she was passing with her mother at night. She said he was standing outside like one of those young men in “The Arabian Nights” who open a stall in a market at Bagdad because they hope to capture someone long-lost or much-desired among their customers. But he soon wearied of dry goods, and was not seen after that for over a year, though Mr Torrance brought word that he had written from Dean Prior in Devonshire, where (he said) a great poet lived who would have been sorry to die in 1674 if he had known he was going to miss Aurelius by doing so. Which may be absurd, but Mr Torrance said it, and he knew both Herrick and Aurelius extremely well. He did try to explain the likeness, but to an audience that only knew Herrick as the author of “Bid me to live” and as an immoral clergyman, and at this distance of time I cannot reconstruct the likeness. But it may have been that Aurelius wrote verses which Mr Torrance, in the kindness of his heart, believed to resemble Herrick’s. I know nothing of that. The nearest to poetry I ever saw of his was a pack of cards which he spent his life, off and on, in painting. Jessie was one of the Queens, and rightly so. That this pack was found in the cottage where he stayed before he finally disappeared, proves, to me at any rate, that he regarded this life as at an end.
CHAPTER VI
OUR COUNTRY
“It was a good day, Arthur, that first brought you to Abercorran House,” said old Ann, as she went to the door to deliver the stray pigeon to its owner.
“Yes,” I said, a little pathetically for Ann’s taste and with thought too deep for tears, at least in her company. I looked round the kitchen, remembering the glory that was Abercorran ... Philip ... Jessie ... Roland ... Aurelius.... It was no unselfish memory, for I wished with all my heart that I was fifteen again, that the month was April, the hour noon, and the scene the yard of Abercorran House with all the family assembled, all the dogs, Aurelius, and Mr Torrance (there being still some days left of the Easter holidays), yes, and Higgs also, and most certainly the respectable Mr Stodham.
“Yes, it was a good day,” continued Ann, returning, “if it had not been for you we should never have known Aurelius.”
This was so like the old Ann that I was delighted, with all my conceit. I remembered that first visit well, limping into the yard the day after the paper-chase, and seeing big Jack (aged then about twenty) and tall Roland (less than two years younger) discussing a greyhound with a blackguard in an orange neck-tie, Jessie (my own age) surrounded by pigeons, Mr Morgan and Mr Torrance at the top of the steps looking on, and away on the pond under the elms little Harry and Lewis crying for help to release their craft from the water-lilies of that perilous sea. When the limper was introduced as “Arthur,” Mr Torrance said:
“Not that same Arthur, that with spear in rest