“I called him that a month ago,” said the duke. “Hogarth would have depicted all sorts of evil ends for him. Three weeks since, I could have outrun him myself. Let George follow me on a horse if you like, but he must keep out of my sight. Half a mile behind will do.”
He got into the phaëton, concealing his twinges with determination, and drove down the avenue with a fine air, sitting very erect and smiling. Indoor existence had become unendurable, and the spring was filling the woods.
“I love the spring,” he murmured to himself. “I am sentimental about it. I love sentimentality—in myself, when I am quite alone. If I had been a writing person, I should have made verses every year in April and sent them to magazines—and they would have been returned to me.”
The Indolent Apprentice was, it is true, fat, though comely, and he was also entirely deserving of his name. Like his grace of Stone, however, he had seen other and livelier days, and now and then he was beset by recollections. He had once stepped fast, as well as with a spirited gait. During his master’s indisposition he had stood in his loose box and professed such harmlessness that he had not been annoyed by being taken out for exercise as regularly as he might have been. He did not intend, when he was taken out, to emulate the Industrious Apprentice by hastening his pace unduly and raising false hopes for the future, but he sniffed in the air the moist green of leafage and damp moss, massed with yellow primroses cuddling in it as though for warmth, and he liked the feel of the road under a pony’s feet.
Therefore, when he found himself out in the world again, he shook his head now and then and even tossed it.
“You feel it, too, do you?” said the duke. “I won’t remind you of your years.”
The drive from Stone Hover to the village of Temple Barholm was an easy one, of many charms of leaf-arched lanes and grass-edged road. The duke had always had a partiality for it, and he took it this morning.
The groom was a young man of three and twenty, and he felt the spring also. The horse he rode was a handsome animal, and he himself was not devoid of a healthy young man’s good looks. He knew his belted livery was becoming to him, and when on horseback he prided himself on what he considered an almost military bearing. Sarah Hibson, Farmer Hibson’s dimple-chinned and saucy-eyed daughter, had been “carryin’ on a good bit” with a soldier who was a smart, well-set-up, impudent fellow, and it was the manifest duty of any other young fellow who had considered himself to be “walking out with her” to look after his charge. His grace had been most particular about George’s keeping far enough behind him; and as half a mile had been mentioned as near enough, certainly one was absolved from the necessity of keeping in sight. Why should not one turn into the lane which ended at Hibson’s farm-yard, drop into the dairy, and “have it out wi’ Sarah”?
Dimpled chins and saucy eyes, and bare, dimpled arms, and hands patting butter while heads are tossed in coquettishly alluring defiance, made even “having it out” an attractive and memory-obscuring process. Sarah was a plump and sparkling imp of prettiness, and knew the power of every sly glance and every dimple and every golden freckle she possessed. George did not know it so well, and in ten minutes had lost his head and entirely forgotten even the half-mile behind.
He was lover-like, he was masterful, he brought the spring with him; he “carried on,” as Sarah put it, until he had actually outdistanced the soldier, and had her in his arms, kissing her as she laughed and prettily struggled.