He turned away after this impromptu and joined a bibulous-looking individual with white hair and an enormous face, Joshua Yeo, his editor, and the nearest approach to a friend that he had.
Frederic turned to the spotty-faced youth and found him grinning vacantly.
“Quite balmy,” said the spotty-faced youth.
“I think he’s splendid,” returned Frederic, amazed at his own enthusiasm.
“Wants a new coat,” said the spotty-faced youth. “He’s worn that ever since I’ve known him, and it’s green with age. He gets fighting roaring blind once a month, and his sons lock him up. I know one of them—Bennett Lawrie—a bee-yooti-ful young man, High-Church and all that. May have been to your governor’s show. The old man’s a Presbyterian as much as he’s anything. He used to be in a bank, same bank that Randolph Caldecott used to be in. But he quarrelled, quarrels with every one.”
“Do you think he made that up—about youth and our town?”
“Comes easy to him. When he’s drunk he talks blank verse. He was run in once, and he harangued the beak like Mark Antony at Cæsar’s funeral.”
They were called back to the stage, and Frederic found that he was not nearly so pleased with himself in his part as he had been. He began to think the play foolish and shoddy.
After the rehearsal he had an appointment with the spotty-faced youth to meet two girls on Kersley Moors, a high, dark, treeless common just outside the northern suburbs. From Kersley the road ran into the town past the bishop’s palace, and here nightly young men and maidens foregathered and stalked each other and exchanged mysterious greetings, sometimes stopping and talking, sometimes passing and disappearing down the dark lanes that enclosed the bishop’s huge garden. The spotty-faced youth, who had been impressed by Frederic’s braggadocio of the things that were much better done in France, had introduced him to this exchange and mart of foolish emotions and transitory affections. They went there in search of pleasure and adventure, and they generally found them, though more puny and debased than they were prepared to admit. They went there now only half believing that the girls with whom they had made their assignation would turn up, for they had seemed so superior to the usual quarry. They did not know their names or where they lived. It was enough for them that both the girls were pretty and responsive to such wit as they could produce.