Into the Highways and Hedges

by F. F. Montrésor

"For commend me to a preacher for hunting down a scandal, and to a good woman for a hard sentence," he thought bitterly. Yet, if she could only know, even then, even in his rowdy, unsatisfactory boyhood, he had not been so utterly bad.

"Innocence" had never been the worse for him—never once. It was not "innocence" that he had flirted with in the hotel in the market town of Clayton; he and all the rest of the rather fast set he had affected in those days. There are country girls as far from simplicity as any town maiden; as there are town maidens as freshly innocent as cowslips in a field. Lydia Tremnell, the pretty saucy school-friend of the hotel-keeper's daughter, certainly had not belonged to the latter genus; and, possibly, Mr. Sauls wouldn't have paid her attention if she had.

At one and twenty George had had no liking for bread-and-butter misses. If he had met a girl of Meg's type then, he would have found her dull; but he followed the prevailing fashion and raved about Lydia, who, indeed, was pretty enough to charm most men's senses, and witty, too, in a rather pert fashion.

Now he came to think of it (but it was all so long ago!) he had a faint recollection of a very irate cousin of Lydia's who came to fetch her home, very much against her will; could that have been Barnabas Thorpe?

He had kept up a half-joking correspondence with her afterwards; but no one could have been more astonished than he was when the young woman turned up at his rooms in London one day, and threw herself utterly and completely on his protection!

Looking back now across the years that separated his ambitious and successful manhood from his unpromising youth, Mr. Sauls said to himself, "what a young idiot he had been!" but it had been no case of betrayal.

He had never promised Lydia marriage; he had never lured her up to town; he would have sent her home, if she had chosen—only he was no Joseph. Yes! what a fool he had been; Meg would call him by a harder name!

There had been a very curious end to the vulgar story. Lydia fell ill with a most malignant form of small-pox when she had been with him a week.

She clung desperately to him then, entreating him to hold by her, not to send her away to die in a hospital; she had an absolute unreasoning fear of hospitals. She hardly expected him to accede to her agonised prayers; she would not have stood by him or by any one else in a like case; and, what there was of good in George Sauls, she had never been the woman to find out; but he did accede to them, greatly to her wonder.

George was not in love with her, he had not a shred of respect for her; but, when she turned to him in direst need, the something not ignoble in him responded and he did not desert her. To say that that loathsome disease had no terrors for him would scarcely be true; but he had a constitutional dislike to running away, and he faced the terrors; which, perhaps, on the whole, might be counted very much to his credit.