We were both making for the same little town, it appeared, and as the sun was setting we reached it together. I entered the town over the bridge, and the stream under it, washing the walls of the high-piled, many-gabled old inn where I proposed to pass the night. I should hear it still rippling on with its gentle harpsichord tinkle, as I stretched myself down among the cool lavendered sheets, and little by little let slip the multifarious world.
The inn windows beamed cheerily, a home of ruddy rest. Having ordered my dinner and found my room, I threw down my knapsack and then came out again to smoke an ante-prandial pipe, listen to the evensong of the stream, and think great thoughts. The stream was still there, and singing the same sweet old song. You could hear it long after it was out of sight, in the gathering darkness, like an old nurse humming lullabies in the twilight.
The dinner was good, the wine was old, and oh! the rest was sweet! Nothing fills one with so exquisite a weariness as a day spent in good resolutions and great thoughts. There is something perilously sensuous in the relaxation of one's muscles, both of mind and body, after a day thus well spent.
Lighting up my pipe once more, and drawing to the fire, I suddenly realised a sense of loneliness. Of course, I was lonely for a book,—Apuleius or Fielding or Boccaccio!
An hour ago they had seemed dangerous companions for so lofty a mood; but now, under the gentle influences of dinner, the mood had not indeed changed—but mellowed. So to say, we would split the difference between the ideal and the human, and be, say, twenty-five.
It was in this genial attitude of mind that I strode up the quaint circular staircase to fetch Fielding from my room, and, shade of Tom Jones! what should be leaving my room, as I advanced to enter it, but—well, it's no use, resolutions are all very well, but facts are facts, especially when they're natural, and here was I face to face with the most natural little natural fact, and withal the most charming and merry-eyed, that—well, in short, as I came to enter my room I was confronted by the roundest, ruddiest little chambermaid ever created for the trial of mortal frailty.
And the worst of it was that her merry eye was in partnership with a merry tongue. Indeed, for some unexplained reason, she was bubbling over with congested laughter, the reason for which mere embarrassment set one inquiring. At last, between little gushes of laughter which shook her plump shoulders in a way that aroused wistful memories of Hebe, she archly asked me, with mock solemnity, if I should need a lady's maid.
"Certainly," I replied with inane promptitude, for I had no notion of her drift; but then she ran off in a scurry of laughter, and still puzzled I turned into my room, TO FIND, neatly hung over the end of the bed, nothing less than the dainty petticoat and silk stockings of Sylvia Joy.
You can imagine the colour of my cheeks at the discovery. No doubt I was already the laughing-stock of the whole inn. What folly! What a young vixen! Oh, what's to be done? Pay my bill and sneak off at once to the next town; but how pass through the grinning line of boots, and waiter, and chambermaid, and ironically respectful landlord and landlady, in the hall...
But while I thus deliberated, something soft pressed in at the door; and, making a sudden dart, I had the little baggage who had brought about my dilemma a prisoner in my arms.