The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

by Marie Van Vorst

Before him, as he stood, the brown vistas of the winter forest opened out here and there into ochre circles and filled at this hour with brilliant sunlight, their round openings overflowing; the light filtered gently out and was swallowed up by the cold and closer wood. Under his feet there was only the faint ghost of the late snowfall on the turned-up, curled-up edges of the dry leaves. There beeches, red as copper, and iron-strong oaks struck their roots deep down into the mould. Westboro' did not know where he had wandered to, but here and there through the bare trees gleamed the white of a statue on its mossy base, and a little farther along, a broken pedestal held its slender column up amongst the tree trunks as mossy and veined as they, and right in the heart of the bowl, on a brick pedestal was a sundial, a round brass disc, cut into with the tooth of time, and all black and green. The sun at this moment shone full on it and its slight shadow fell along the noon. The Duke stooped down and through the glass read the inscription:

Utere dum licet.

"I'm a trespasser," he thought. "This is Bulstrode's property."

Through an opening just to the right he could see a brown path, and at the end of it a gate.

"What the deuce could Jimmy have so wanted this old place for? What was he hiding here?"

He turned back with the intention of taking as sudden leave of the place as he had made an entrance. He saw his dogs in front of him and called them. Before him lay the clean low fall of the meadow with the line of high hedge, and directly opposite him he could see the elms of his own park. He had not gone more than a couple of hundred feet away before he paused again and turned about to have one last look back at the enchanting place. As he stood thus, in Jimmy's property, he at first took it to be a trick of vision, for he stood perfectly rigid, peering back at the opening he had left not five minutes before. He leaned forwards, setting his eyeglass and staring at two figures who had come into the bowl and stood close by the big dial.

He set his gun on the ground and leaned upon it. There was a cordial meeting; he could hear the voices but he could not distinguish their words, and during all the interview, which must have consumed some fifteen minutes, the Duke never stirred. Finally, and curiously enough it seemed a short time to him, they took leave of each other, the man going out of the forest by a different path, the woman slowly turning down the neat walk that led to the brick arch, and to the old house. Whether or not the Duke had at this moment the vaguest suspicion of her, suspicion of his friend or of his wife that did them wrong, he never had time or clearness to reflect or to ask himself. A dense blindness took his senses away from him. He put his hands out to steady himself in vain, and staggered. His dogs were at his feet, he fell over them, struggled to get his balance back and like a stricken tree went down. In his heavy fall on his gun it discharged, filling his upper arm and shoulder with a quantity of bird shot. The scattering pain, instead of finishing his faint, roused him with a sharp, ugly sting, and the rush of the warm, wet blood. He half picked himself up, and then, aware of the pain tearing his muscles and flesh, he fell back like a dog on his haunches. Through his confusion he still contrived to remember a little path, and inch by inch he dragged himself towards it. He pulled along over the leaves and russet paths of ground. His bare hand finally struck the bricks of the little walk and he could still know that he was wonderfully in the road. There was a cloud before his swimming eyes and his troubled mind; his face, pale as death, was lifted towards the arch; leaving a bloody trail as he crawled along the ground, he contrived to reach the gate and fell across its threshold. His head lay on his arm, the string of his broken eyeglass wound pathetically about his wrist. The Duke proved to be a modern replica of the poor knight who fell, face downwards, on the grass when Elizabeth's carriage passed him by, some four hundred years before the present Duke.

After Bulstrode had left her, the Duchess of Westboro' hurried back to the house that was not her home; to the little long drawing-room that was not hers. For the first time since her voluntary exile, since her occupation of this asylum, she found it bereft of charm and the cosey, dear place as cold to her as if the snows had drifted in and filled a deserted nest. It had nevertheless been a cloister, and she knew it, where the best of her had prayed, where the true woman—and the true woman is always something of a saint—had folded submissive hands, where self had gone away and left nothing at all but love.

On this Christmas Eve, The Dials was the loneliest corner of England. The scarcely occupied house suggested to the Duchess the thought of a stocking hung before a chimney when there were no children who cared whether it was filled or not, when there was no reason why St. Nicholas should pass. But it was only the very edge of her thoughts that touched anything so fantastic as this picture. The Duchess was serious and lonely. With a sigh, and winking back tears she threw off her furs, laid off her hat, and, after poking up the fire into sparkling brightness, she wandered up-stairs to the apartment that she had made her bedroom. Under the low eaves the bed-chamber shone out gay with chintz, fresh and sweet as a midwinter bouquet, the frostiness coming in around it through the slightly opened window, and there was the scent of the firs and the cedar wood that closely hemmed the old place in.

"Heavens!" thought the Duchess, half aloud. "How dreadfully in love Jimmy Bulstrode is, how dreadfully, faithfully in love!" And then she went on to say: "How dreadfully I am myself in love, and no one is hurrying to me!"