They may have been handsome to look at, but to me they were five living horrors. With a chill feeling coming over my chest and shoulders, I pretended closer attention to my meal. I knew they were looking at me, but they entered the next compartment and called for ale and spirits. When the landlord came I overheard the conversation.
"I don't know who the young man is," said the host of the inn, as if in reply to a question. "He came off the coach, I take it."
"He's an officer," observed another.
"You're wrong," said a third. "Where are his shoulder-knots?"
"I observed him close," put in the second speaker, "and, ecod! it strikes me he is part officer and part private. It's the uniform of the Somersetshire Foot-guard. I know it."
I was almost choking in my efforts to bolt a great bit of mutton, but from the tail of my eye I saw that two heads were thrust about the corner, and they were piping me off. So I turned my back and looked out of the window. There came a laugh in a minute, and some whispering in which I caught the words "curling-tongs and the barber," probably in allusion to my great need of both.
Now I am honestly very sorry that I never paid the landlord for that good meal of his, but I acted on an impulse that more than like saved me from total discomforture. I was taken aback fore and aft, completely staggered with the idea that their curiosity would pass bounds, and they would begin to sift me. The window was wide open, and the sward on the outside came to within two feet of the sill. Making no noise, I crawled out of it headforemost, and walking quickly across the court-yard, I dodged behind a row of stables, and crept along beneath a line of hedge; and this time I did not take the big hat with me, but left it mounting guard over the remains of my meal.
Now I really should like to have heard what the redcoats said, and I fear that the landlord could not have been complimentary.
The hedge that I was following ran up to a high wall, on the other side of which was evidently one of the parks of a nobleman or an aristocrat. By dint of scratching and hauling and sheer strength, I struggled over the top and came down on a level stretch of lawn, dotted about with handsome beech-trees, and farther on edged by a noble line of oaks. No one was in sight, and driven by a nameless dread, I started running. A great pheasant scurried across my path and tore up into the air with a whir, making me shy to one side, like a runaway horse. I kept up my speed but a few hundred yards, however, when the idea came to me that this would never do at all. So I threw myself down at the foot of a tree and tried to compose my ideas.