After her visit to her sister’s in the Regent’s Park, in July, she had gone back to Folkestone, and I was in some tremor whether she might not desire me to spend the holiday months with them there; but, most fortunately, Mrs. Harker, her aunt, received a very good offer for her house in Clifton Gardens, which she determined to take, and go abroad to Switzerland, where she and Mabel could live in a pension and save quite three-fourths of the home rent.
Mabel wanted me to join them, but I managed to get out of it, and very lucky I did; for it was at that very pension at Lucerne she met Charles Byles, the architect, her present husband, and a great ass he must have looked with that small face of his and huge mustache, and a rope round him for going up Pilatus; besides being slightly bandy.
As for me, I went off down to my sister’s, Mrs. Rivers, married to the publisher, who had taken a little house on the river at Taplow, where I spent the end of August and early part of September with great content, more especially in the middle of the week, when my precious brother-in-law (a dull fellow and a prig) was away doing his publishing in town.
I left Taplow the second week in September, and something gentle, yet persuasive and strong, seeming to call me back to “The French Horn,” off I went there; and there, as I have already mentioned, I met and fell madly in love with Lucy Thatcher at first sight, a passion deepening to a tempest before October dawned.
Now, as I am telling the truth in this work, and not writing a romance, I have to admit that the month I had of Lucy’s dear companionship, before I knew I was free, was by no means spent idly, and that I made all the running with her of which my amorous wits are capable, just as though I had been really unappropriated.
Nor was this altogether wrong, for I felt quite sure Providence would stand my good friend, as always in such affairs before, and direct Mabel Harker’s hopes into another, sounder matrimonial channel than mine. Even if Providence had not, but had stood aloof and fought shy, I should then most certainly have deemed it necessary to play the part myself, seeing how deeply and truly my heart was now for the first time engaged.
Dear! dear! at what amazing speed that happy month flew past; how little there seems I can say about it now. Isn’t it strange that Time, whom poets prefigure as an ancient person with anchylosed joints, further encumbered, notwithstanding his great age, with a scythe and an enormous hour-glass, is yet on occasion capable of showing the panting hurry of a sprinter?
With Lucy I was alone almost all the time, for Mr. Thatcher, very properly, wouldn’t allow her to help in the bar—a department he gracefully presided over himself in his dirty blazer, grasping the handle of the beer engine, and sometimes, on Saturday nights mostly, slightly shaken with a gentlemanly but unmistakable attack of hiccoughs. So dear Lucy had nothing much to do but go bathing and help her grandmother in the garden, gathering the plums and raking down the ripening apples. And though there were days when, womanlike, she shunned me and kept out of my way (so as not to make herself too cheap), yet she was very frank and simple and trusting in giving me at other times her constant companionship; and as on the days when she desired to be more alone I always respected her wish and kept away (just turning at the fourth hole on the links to watch her light, firm figure crossing down to her bathing-tent on the shore, and waving the putter at her), she was, as she has since told me, pleased at my delicacy and perception, and showed her pleasure when we again met by the extraordinary brightness of her eyes and the sweet readiness of her smile.
It was harvest-time, and though Mr. Thatcher had no acreage of his own, still there was plenty of it round him under cultivation, and a fine time it was for the Tap, for which there was a separate entrance, with a painted hand pointing to it for those who couldn’t read. While my sweetheart and I strolled about the lanes by day, gathering blackberries and plucking at the wisps of corn caught by the high hedges and low branches from the passing wagons, on warm evenings we would sit alone in the garden, listening to the hearty rustic revelry of premature harvest-homes from the inn, and, when it was very still, hearing the faint, mysterious rustle of the waves on the long, sandy shore, as though the lulling sea were whispering to the land, “Hush! hush! now go to sleep like a good child. You’ve had a long day and must be tired—hush!”
It was at this time, as I very well remember, we strolled up late one afternoon to Wharton Park, her old ancestral home, and a very curious and unedifying sight we witnessed there. We went in at the empty lodge gates, and had a look in first at the church in the Park grounds, of which Mr. Thatcher kept the key in the bar; for there was no rectory, and the parson came over only on Sundays from Nesshaven for an afternoon service—at six in summer and at three in winter.