What has this to do with the glove? True, not much; and yet it has a connection—it accounts for me.
Well, for twelve years I have followed the impulses of the wandering spirit that dwells in me. I have seen the sun rise in Finland, and gild the Devil's Knuckles as he sank behind the Drachensberg. I have caught the barba and the gamer yellow-fish in the Vaal River, taken muskelunge and black-bass in Canada, thrown a fly over guapote and cavallo in Central American lakes, and choked the monster eels of the Mauritius with a cunningly faked-up duckling. But I have been shy as a chub at the shadow of a woman.
Well, it happened last year I came back on business,—another confounded legacy; end of June too, just as I was off to Finland. But Messrs. Thimble and Rigg, the highly respectable firm who look after my affairs, represented that I owed it to others, whom I kept out of their share of the legacy, to stay near town till affairs were wound up. They told me, with a view to reconcile me perhaps, of a trout stream with a decent inn near it,—an unknown stream in Kent. It seems a junior member of the firm is an angler; at least he sometimes catches pike or perch in the Medway, some way from the stream where the trout rise in audacious security from artificial lures. I stipulated for a clerk to come down with any papers to be signed, and started at once for Victoria. I decline to tell the name of my find, firstly because the trout are the gamest little fish that ever rose to fly, and run to a good two pounds; secondly, I have paid for all the rooms in the inn for the next year, and I want it to myself. The glove is lying on the table next me as I write. If it isn't in my breast-pocket or under my pillow, it is some place where I can see it. It has a delicate gray body (Suede, I think they call it), with a whipping of silver round the top and a darker gray-silk tag to fasten it. It is marked 5-3/4 inside, and has a delicious scent about it,—to keep off moths, I suppose; naphthaline is better. It reminds me of a "silver-sedge" tied on a ten hook.
I startled the good landlady of the little inn (there is no village, fortunately) when I arrived, with the only porter of the tiny station, laden with traps. She hesitated about a private sitting-room; but eventually we compromised matters, as I was willing to share it with the other visitor. I got into knickerbockers at once, collared a boy to get me worms and minnow for the morrow; and as I felt too lazy to unpack tackle, I just sat in the shiny arm-chair (made comfortable by the successive sitting of former occupants) at the open window, and looked out. The river (not the trout stream) winds to the right, and the trees cast trembling shadows into its clear depths; the red tiles of a farm roof show between the beeches, and break the monotony of blue sky background. A dusty wagoner is slaking his thirst with a tankard of ale. I am conscious of the strange lonely feeling that a visit to England always gives me. Away in strange lands, even in solitary places, one doesn't feel it somehow,—one is filled with the hunter's lust, bent on a "kill;" but at home in the quiet country, with the smoke curling up from some fireside, the mowers busy laying the hay in swaths, the children tumbling under the trees in the orchards, and a girl singing as she spreads the clothes on the sweetbrier hedge,—amid a scene quick with home sights and sounds, a strange lack creeps in and makes itself felt in a dull, aching way. Oddly enough, too, I had a sense of uneasiness, a "something going to happen." I had often experienced it when out alone in a great forest, or on an unknown lake; and it always meant "ware danger" of some kind. But why should I feel it here? Yet I did, and I couldn't shake it off. I took to examining the room. It was a commonplace one of the usual type. But there was a work-basket on the table, a dainty thing, lined with blue satin. There was a bit of lace stretched over shiny blue linen, with the needle sticking in it,—such fairy work, like cobwebs seen from below, spun from a branch against a background of sky. A gold thimble too, with initials,—not the landlady's, I know. What pretty things, too, in the basket!—a pair of scissors, a capital shape for fly-making; a little file, and some floss silk and tinsel, the identical color I want for a new fly I have in my head, one that will be a demon to kill,—the "northern devil" I mean to call him. Some one looks in behind me, and a light step passes upstairs. I drop the basket, I don't know why. There are some reviews near it. I take up one, and am soon buried in an article on Tasmanian fauna. It is strange, but whenever I do know anything about a subject, I always find these writing fellows either entirely ignorant or damned wrong.
After supper, I took a stroll to see the river. It was a silver-gray evening, with just the last lemon and pink streaks of the sunset staining the sky. There had been a shower, and someway the smell of the dust after rain mingled with the mignonette in the garden brought back vanished scenes of small-boyhood, when I caught minnows in a bottle, and dreamt of a shilling rod as happiness unattainable. I turned aside from the road in accordance with directions, and walked toward the stream. Holloa! some one before me,—what a bore! The angler is hidden by an elder-bush, but I can see the fly drop delicately, artistically, on the water. Fishing up the stream, too! There is a bit of broken water there, and the midges dance in myriads; a silver gleam, and the line spins out, and the fly falls just in the right place. It is growing dusk, but the fellow is an adept at quick, fine casting. I wonder what fly he has on, why he's going to try down stream now! I hurry forward, and as I near him I swerve to the left out of the way. S-s-s-s! a sudden sting in the lobe of my ear. "Hey!" I cry, as I find I am caught; the tail-fly is fast in it. A slight, gray-clad woman holding the rod lays it carefully down and comes toward me through the gathering dusk. My first impulse is to snap the gut and take to my heels; but I am held by something less tangible but far more powerful than the grip of the Limerick hook in my ear.
"I am very sorry!" she says in a voice that matched the evening, it was so quiet and soft; "but it was exceedingly stupid of you to come behind like that."
"I didn't think you threw such a long line; I thought I was safe," I stammered.
"Hold this!" she says, giving me a diminutive fly-book, out of which she has taken a pair of scissors. I obey meekly. She snips the gut.
"Have you a sharp knife? If I strip the hook you can push it through; it is lucky it isn't in the cartilage."
I suppose I am an awful idiot, but I only handed her the knife, and she proceeded as calmly as if stripping a hook in a man's ear were an every-day occurrence. Her gown is of some soft gray stuff, and her gray-leather belt is silver clasped. Her hands are soft and cool and steady, but there is a rarely disturbing thrill in their gentle touch. The thought flashed through my mind that I had just missed that—a woman's voluntary tender touch, not a paid caress—all my life.