A Don José Maria de Pereda
de la Academía Real
MR. MALCOLM FITZROY
I
IT is all very well and worthy to devote a lifetime, or part of it, to the study of foreign architecture. But a friend reproachfully reminded Fred Luffington that English minsters are worth a glance. Fred did not dispute it. There was a certain charm in the novelty of the idea. So he packed his portmanteau, and took the boat to Dover, to assure himself a pleasant surprise.
At York he bethought himself of an amiable old Flemish priest, in whose company he had studied a good deal of Antwerp at a time when Antwerp wore for him the colours and glory and other attendant joys of paradise. The priest, he remembered, was settled hard by, as the chaplain of a Catholic earl. He would take the opportunity of studying village life as well as the minsters of England; and smoke a pipe of memory, and drink big draughts of the beer of other days, with his friend, the Flemish priest.
Fendon was as comfortable a little village as any to be dreamed of out of Arcadia. Its warm red roofs made a cosy circle under the queerest of rural walls, round a delightful green. A real green, a goose common, with an umbrella tree in the middle, and a village pump under an odd grey dome of stone supported by rough pillars. All the houses were buried in trees, and all the palings overgrown with honeysuckles.
Fred Luffington sniffed delightedly. Though it was June, there was plenty of damp in the air, and lovely moist smells came from the hedges and fields. Yes; this was enchantment, a whiff of pure sixteenth century, the very thing described by old-fashioned writers as ‘Merrie England.’ It did not look very merry, to be sure; rather sleepy and still. But it was not difficult to swing back upon imagination into the days of Good Queen Bess.
Fred’s glance grew vague, and the lyrical mood was upon him. He mused upon may-poles, foaming tankards, and the rosy maids and swains of the centuries when there was ‘love in a village.’ There were no rosy maids or sighing swains about, but he imagined them along with the rest of Elizabethan decorations, evoked confusedly by remembrance of past readings.
Everything combined to keep him in good humour. The name of his inn, the only inn, was ‘St. George and the Dragon.’ Who but a scoffer or a heathen could fail to sleep well at an inn so gloriously named? As an archæologist, Fred was neither, so naturally he slept the sound sleep of the believer, somebody infinitely superior to the merely just man. Anybody may be just, but it takes a special constitution to believe, in the proper manner. Fred Luffington was all that is most special in the way of constitutions, so after a charmed inspection of the sign-board—a rude picture of the saint in faded colours on a semi-effaced horse with a remarkable dragon at his feet—he sauntered in through the porch to be confronted with a perfectly ideal buxom landlady. This was more than heaven, he devoutly felt, and said his prayers on the spot to the god of chance, who so benevolently watches over the humours of romantic young men.
Mrs. Matcham, spick and span and respectable, beamed him welcome of a mediæval cordiality. He felt at once it was good to be with her, and took shame to himself for having been so long enamoured of foreign parts, and unacquainted with the pleasant aspects of English country life. She deposited his bag on a table at the bottom of a red-curtained four-poster, and remarked that she was granting him the privilege of occupying the room of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. There was such a full accompaniment of condescension and favour in her smile, and so complete a signification of the importance and fame of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, that Luffington felt abashed by his own ignorance of the personality of the local great man, and kept a discreet silence.