The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

by Marie Van Vorst

"Oh, yes," agreed the other rather blankly. And the other man knew that he had been told only half the thought in his friend's mind.

"She may get a divorce at any time, you know, quite easily, without my taking any further steps."

"Oh, I see perfectly," Jimmy accepted; and as the door closed after his host, he said, almost aloud: "He thinks, then, there is half a chance that the Duchess will return." And wondering very much how far a woman is willing to sacrifice herself for a man, granted that she loves him, he did not finish his phrase.

The next day Bulstrode, no longer able to resist the beckoning country, went out, as it were, to it as if he said "Here I am—what will you do with me?"

If Glousceshire could, for a while, make him forget the problems he had been housed with, brush him up a bit, he thought it would be a good thing. Therefore, when his horse came up to the door he threw himself on the animal in a nervous haste to be gone, and setting off in the direction of Penhaven, obeyed its summons at last.

Westboro' had run up to London for overnight, and Bulstrode, at the Duke's something more than invitation, a sort of appeal, was to stay indefinitely on. It must be confessed that he rather selfishly looked forward to the course of an untroubled afternoon, to an evening amongst the books whose files had tempted him for days.

But the pity of all he had sympathetically been closeted with was great in his mind. Whereas his native delicacy and slow judgment had led him to keep silent until now towards his host, it was in no wise because Jimmy had not quite made up his mind that he would not spare Westboro' at all when the moment, if it ever came, should present itself for him to speak.

As he rode along he thought of the Duchess naturally in Paris, surrounded by a train of ardent admirers; she had them always, everywhere. She was disillusioned, of course, probably angry, piqued, and unfortunately she had been betrayed; and he shrugged with a gentle desperation as he made a mental picture of the last scene: the inevitable divorce, the wrecking of another household, unless—unless—one of them loved sufficiently to save the situation.

His thoughts came to a standstill as his horse stopped short before a gate: his riding had fetched him up before it. The mare stretched out her long neck, set free by a relaxing rein; she sniffed the latch and put her head over the wicket, and the rider saw that they had come across fields, and were at the entrance of a deserted property. The gate gave access to a forest road where the thick underbrush was untidy, and on whose walk the piles of leaves lay as they had fallen. He could see no farther in, and thinking to come at the end upon a forsaken garden, the precincts of an untenanted country house, he leaned down, tried the gate which fairly swung into his hand, and the mare passed through. There was the delicious intimacy about the woods which the sense of coming alone and unexpectedly upon the old and forsaken gives the traveller. He is a discoverer of secrets, a legitimate spy upon stories which he flatters himself he is the first to read. He becomes intimate with another man's past, and as he must necessarily, in all ignorance, tell himself his own tales, indiscretion may be said to be a doubtful quantity.

A bit back in the bare brown woods he saw the flash of a marble pillar; it shone white and clear in the setting of russet and against the boles of the trees. A little farther away gleamed another figure on its base of fluted marble, and still farther along, leaf-overlaid and thus effaced, he could discern the contour of a sunken garden. The place grew more pretentious as he slowly picked his way, and he was unprepared for coming suddenly onto a gravel path from which he thought the leaves had been blown away. Here Bulstrode dismounted, and, with the bridle over his arm, walked towards the path's end, pleasantly interested, and now, as he thought it should by this do, the house struck on him through an archway contrived by the training of old trees over a circle of stone. The house broke on him in the shape of an Elizabethan manse; long and old with soft rose-color of brick in places, and the color of a faded leaf in others where the dampness had soaked in and had, through countless mid-summer suns, been burned out again. Before the windows flashed the red of bright curtains. The house was distinctly, and he thought it seemed happily, occupied. He stopped where he stood by the arch, a little confused and a little balked in his romantic treat, and not the less feeling himself an intruder. But before he could turn his horse and unobtrusively lead her back the way they had come, the house's occupant, no doubt she who gave it the air of being so happily tenanted, had come out with a garden hat on her head, a pair of garden shears in her hands, and with the precision of intention, turned sharply towards the arched forest walk, and in this way squarely upon Bulstrode.