How long I slept I do not know, but I was very roughly awakened by violent tossings and heavings, and looking hastily through my curtains saw a wet hedge moving past the window.
So we were on the march.
I lay back on my pillow and wondered who was leading my horse. They might at least have brought me some breakfast. Also the motion was extremely disagreeable, and likely to give me a headache. But presently, after a dizzy swoop round, a pause and much talking showed me we had come to a gate, and I understood that we had been getting over the stubble and were now about to rejoin the road. Once on that the motion was not unbearable—not nearly so unbearable, I said to myself, as tramping in the rain; but I could not help thinking it very strange that none of them had thought to give me breakfast, and in my wife the omission was more than strange, it was positively illegal. If love did not bring her to my bedside with hot coffee and perhaps a couple of (lightly boiled) eggs, why did not duty? A fasting man does not mind which brings her, so long as one of them does.
My impulse was to ring the bell angrily, but it died away on my recollecting that there was no bell. The rain, I could see, had now lightened and thinned into a drizzle, and I could hear cheerful talk going on between some persons evidently walking just outside. One voice seemed to be Jellaby’s, but how could it be he who was cheerful after the night he must have had? And the other was a woman’s—no doubt, I thought bitterly, Edelgard’s, who, warmed herself and invigorated by a proper morning meal, cared nothing that her husband should be lying there within a stone’s throw like a cold, neglected tomb.
Presently, instead of the hedge, the walls and gates of gardens passed the window, and then came houses, singly at first, but soon joining on to each other in an uninterrupted string, and raising myself on my elbow and putting two and two together, I decided that this must be Wadhurst.
It was. To my surprise about the middle of the village the caravan stopped, and raising myself once more on my elbow I was forced immediately to sink back again, for I encountered a row of eager faces pressed against the pane with eyes rudely staring at the contents of the caravan, which, of course, included myself as soon as I came into view from between the curtains of the berth.
This was very disagreeable. Again I instinctively and frantically sought the bell that was not there. How long was I to be left thus in the street of a village with my window-curtains unclosed and the entire population looking in? I could not get out and close them myself, for I am staunch to the night attire, abruptly terminating, that is still, thank heaven, characteristic during the hours of darkness of every honest German gentleman: in other words, I do not dress myself, as the English do, in a coat and trousers in order to go to bed. But on this occasion I wished that I did, for then I could have leaped out of my berth and drawn the curtains in an instant myself, and the German attire allows no margin for the leaping out of berths. As it was, all I could do was to lie there holding the berth-curtains carefully together until such time as it should please my dear wife to honour me with a visit.
This she did after, I should say, at least half an hour had passed, with the completely composed face of one who has no reproaches to make herself, and a cup of weak tea in one hand and a small slice of dry toast on a plate in the other, though she knows I never touch tea and that it is absurd to offer a large-framed, fine man one piece of toast with no butter on it for his breakfast.
“What are we stopping for?” I at once asked on her appearing.
“For breakfast,” said she.