Chippinge Borough

by Stanley John Weyman

“I’m coming,” he answered curtly. And crossing the pavement in two strides, he swung himself up hand over hand, as the stableman released the horses. The coach started as his foot left the box of the wheel. And something else started—furiously.

His heart. For in the place behind the coachman, in the very seat which Mary Smith had occupied on that far-off April morning, sat Mary Vermuyden! For an infinitely small fraction of a second, as he turned himself to drop into his seat, his eyes swept her face. The rain had ceased to fall, the umbrellas were furled; for that infinitely short space his eyes rested on her features. Then his back was turned to her.

Her eyes had been fixed elsewhere, her face had been cold—she had not seen him. So much, in the confused pounding rush of his thoughts, as he sat tingling in every inch of his frame, he could remember; but nothing else except that in lieu of the plain Quaker-like dress which Mary Smith had worn—oh, dress to be ever remembered!—she was wearing rich furs, with a great muff and a small hat of sable, and was Mary Smith no longer.

Probably she had been there from the start, seated behind him under cover of the rain and the umbrellas. If so—and he remembered that that seat had been occupied when he got to his place—she had perceived his coming, had seen him mount, had been aware of him from the first. She could see him now, watch every movement, read his self-consciousness in the stiff pose of his head, perceive the rush of colour which dyed his ears and neck.

And he was planted there, he could not escape. And he suffered. Asked beforehand, he would have said that his uppermost feeling in such circumstances would be resentment. But, in fact, he could think of nothing except that meeting in Parliament Street, and the rudeness with which he had treated her. If he had not refused to speak to her, if he had not passed her by, rejecting her hand with disdain, he might have been his own master now; he would have been free to speak, or free to be silent, as he pleased. And she who had treated him so ill would have been the one to suffer. But, as it was, he was hot all over. The intolerable gêne of the situation rested on him and weighed him down.

Until the coachman called his attention to a passing waggon, and pointed out a something unusual in its make; which broke the spell and freed his thoughts. After that he began to feel a little of the wonder which the coincidence demanded. How came she in the same seat, on the same coach on which she had travelled before. He could not bring himself to look round and meet her eyes. But he remembered that a man-servant, doubtless in attendance on her, shared the hind seat with the clerk who had spoken to him; and the middle-aged woman who sat with her was doubtless her maid. Still, he knew Sir Robert well enough to be sure that he would not countenance her journeying, even with this attendance, on a public vehicle; and therefore, he argued, she must be doing it without Sir Robert’s knowledge, and probably in pursuance of some whim of her own. Could it be that she, too, wished to revive the bitter-sweet of recollection, the memory of that April day? And, to do so, had gone out of her way to travel on this cold wet morning on the same coach, which six months before had brought them together?

If so, she must love him in spite of all. And in that case, what must her feelings have been when she saw him take his place? What, when she knew that she would not taste the bitter-sweet alone, but in his company? What, when she foresaw that, through the day she would not pass a single thing of all those well-remembered things, that milestone which he had pointed out to her, that baiting-house of which she had asked the name, that stone bridge with the hundred balustrades which they had crossed in the gloaming—her eyes would not alight on one of these, without another heart answering to every throb of hers, and another breast aching as hers ached.

At that thought a subtle attraction, almost irresistible, drew him to her, and he could have cried to her, under the pain of separation. For it was all true. Before his eyes those things were passing. There was the milestone which he had pointed out to her. And there the ruined inn. And here were the streets of Reading opening before them, and the Market Place, and the Bear Inn, where he had saved her from injury, perhaps from death.

* * * * *

They were out of the town, they were clear of the houses, and he had not looked, he had not been able to look at her. Her weakness, her inconstancy deserved their punishment: but for all her fortune, to recover all that he had lost and she had gained, he would not have looked at her there. Yet, while the coach changed horses in the Square before the Bear, he had had a glimpse of her—reflected in the window of a shop; and he had marked with greedy eyes each line of her figure and seen that she had wound a veil round her face and hat, so that, whatever her emotions, she might defy curious eyes. And yet, as far as he was concerned, she had done it in vain. The veil could not hide the agitation, could not hide the strained rigidity of her pose, or the convulsive force with which one hand gripped the other in her lap.