“No,” he replied; “no, I”—his attention wandered—“I am not.”
“I hope we may have the honour of keeping you tonight, sir?” she said.
“Yes, I”—was that the coach starting?—“I think I shall stay the night.” And then, “Sir Robert’s carriage is not here?” he asked, setting down his glass.
“No, sir. But two gentlemen have just driven in from Sir Robert’s in a chaise. They are posting to Bath. One’s Colonel Brereton, sir. The other’s a young gentleman, short and stout. Quite the gentleman, sir, but that positive, the postboy told me, and talkative, you’d think he was the Emperor of China! That’s their chaise coming out of the yard now, sir.”
A thought, keen as a knife-stab, darted through Vaughan’s mind. In three strides he was out of the bar-parlour, in three more he was at the door of the Angel.
The coach was in the act of starting, the ostlers were falling back, the guard was swinging himself up; and Mary Vermuyden was where he had left her, in the place behind the coachman. And in the box-seat, the very seat which he had vacated, was Bob Flixton, settling himself in his wraps and turning to talk to her.
Vaughan let fall a word which we will not chronicle. It was true, then! They were engaged! Doubtless Flixton had come to meet her, and all was over. Fan-fa-ra! Fan-fa-ra! The coach was growing small in the distance. It veered a little, a block of houses hid it, Vaughan saw it again. Then in the dusk of the October evening the descent to the bridge swallowed it, and he turned away miserable.
He walked a little distance from the door that his face might not be seen. He did not tell himself that, because the view grew misty before his eyes, he was taking the blow contemptibly; he told himself only that he was very wretched, and that she was gone. It seemed as if so much had gone with her; so much of the hope and youth and fortune, and the homage of men, which had been his when he and she first saw the streets of Chippenham together and he alighted to talk to Isaac White, and mounted again to ride on by her side.
He was standing with his back to the inn thinking of this—and not bitterly, but in a broken fashion—when he heard his name called, and he turned and saw Colonel Brereton striding after him.
“I thought it was you,” Brereton said. But though he had not met Vaughan for some months, and the two had liked one another, he spoke with little cordiality, and there was a vague look in his face. “I was not sure,” he added.