The Wayfarers

by J. C. Snaith

"To my lord the Duke of Salop," says I, importantly, dwelling on each syllable of her title for the jest's sake, "and you can call her my Lady Cynthia Mary Jane Carew."

"Dom'd if I don't then," says he. "And here come the clean clouts and the warm water. Here, Jenny, put them down there for his lordship and her ladyship. And we'll leave his lordship and her ladyship to do their dressing, and then they'll please condescend to honour our humble meal. Now, then, my girl, off with you below; and how dare you have the impertinence to stand grinning there like a Cheshire cat, before my lord and my lady, too!"

With a great guffaw for the honour of his own wit, the farmer left us to our much-needed toilets. The reflections with which we made them would have served a philosopher of the kidney of my grandfather, for instance, for a monstrous fine homily on the true value of rank and title. What were they worth when enclosed in a suit of homespun? They required all the appurtenances with which they are hedged about in the public mind to be of any value whatever. It seemed that a lord derived the consideration of the world from his silk stockings and the congees of his servants—not from any intrinsic merits within himself; and it was with this trite reflection that I looked in the hand-glass, and smiled in something of a cynical manner at the unredeemed villainy of the countenance that I found there. A lively scrubbing did a little for it, it is true, but that could not obliterate the traces of my recent bout with the farmer, nor the growth of beard upon my chin, nor enhance the rude, ill-fitting clothes in which my friend the Jew had, as it seemed, so effectually disguised me. Cynthia, however, who had the true feminine ingenuity in these matters, having washed her face and trimmed up her curls a little—Lord knows how!—contrived to make a very much better appearance in the role of the duke's daughter than ever I was like to do in that of the noble wearer of the Order of the Garter. When we were sufficiently furbished to think of going down to that delicious meal, in which the greater part of our thoughts were centred, says I as we descended:

"Remember now, we are under no alias whatever. I am my lord, and you are my lady."

"But surely," says Cynthia, who in so many ways had the true feminine imperviousness to the whimsicality of things, "is this not the very height of imprudency? If we leave evidences behind us at every place at which we tarry we shall be certainly taken in three days."

"Rest content," says I, "they will never inquire in out-of-the-way places of this sort. In dangerous places we can still be incognito. But do you not see the cream of this affair is that our real names are the best disguises we can wish to have? We are far less likely to be recognized by them than any we might adopt."

It was with this conviction that we came in to breakfast, and confronted the farmer and his wife. Determined to play up to my part, I bowed to the farmer's wife with a most sweeping air, as though she were a woman of the first fashion, and I made her as gracious a speech as I could possibly make. There were a thousand apologies in it, and a great many compliments to her, her husband, her kitchen, and more sincerely, the hot meal we were dying to partake of. I did it with all the breeding I could summon, and to see such ceremony issuing from so common not to say low a person, dumbfounded the good wife so completely, that even her powers of speech forsook her. She blinked, and nodded her head, and fidgeted this way and that; and when little Cynthia, taking her cue from me, curtsied to her with the best grace of a lady-in-waiting to her most gracious Majesty, as indeed the naughty miss was destined to be, the poor goodwife was so taken by confusion that she trod on the cat, and the cat I doubt not would have knocked over the dish of bacon on the hearth in its fright, had not I, in anticipation of some such disaster, very gallantly interposed between them.

The farmer himself, although equally at a loss to reconcile our manners with our appearance and presence in that place, was evidently too much of a lover of his joke to let the occasion pass.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you, wife," says he, "that these are a lady and gentleman of the first nobility. You would run on so when they first came in that you gave me no chance of saying who they were. Just tell the mis'ess, my lord, who your lordship and her ladyship may be, for I domm'd if I don't forget."

This I did with a good deal of unction, for seeing what a comic effect our manners had had on the good woman, our names in all probability would have one still more singular. This proved to be the case, for no sooner had I, with much apologetic modesty for the circumstances which had impelled me to it, played the herald to my fair companion and myself, than our hostess became the victim of an even more remarkable nervousness, and grew as apologetic on her part as she had been cross-grained before.