He and I went down from Liverpool Street and stayed at “The French Horn,” the inn kept by Mr. Thatcher, Lucy’s father; and after Forsyth had introduced me to the club and shown me round the links, he went back to his regiment, the “Devon Borderers,” then stationed at Colchester, very angry and complaining, as soldiers mostly are when obliged to do any work. I remained behind, not that I had yet seen Lucy, but rather to keep out of Mabel Harker’s way—the young lady to whom (as Lucy knows) I happened, much against my will, to be at that time unfortunately engaged to be married.
My first visit to “The French Horn” lasted three weeks, during which time I manfully held my ground, though heavily bombarded by Mabel’s letters, regularly discharged thrice a week from her aunt’s house in Clifton Gardens at Folkestone. At last, as Mabel came to stay at her sister’s in the Regent’s Park (on purpose, I believe), I was obliged to go up to town for ten days, and there passed a sad time with her at the University match, Henley, and the Eton and Harrow; at which noted places of amusement and relaxation I cannot help thinking I was the most unhappy visitor, though, to be sure, I tried hard not to show it.
But it was dreadful when I got back to my rooms in Little St. James’s Street and attempted sleep; for I really think that not being in love with the person you have bound yourself to marry keeps more men awake more miserably than any of the so-called torments of love, which, with scarcely an exception, I have never found otherwise than agreeable.
At last Mabel went back to Folkestone, and I was free to return to “The French Horn,” and I never saw her again (thank goodness!) till the momentous interview between us in October, from which I emerged a free man; she having discovered in a boarding-house at Lucerne an architect named Byles, whom she’d the sense to see was a more determined wooer than I had ever been, and likely to make her a far better husband.
“The French Horn” is not an old house, having been built in about the year 1830, from designs made by Mr. Thatcher’s father, who had copied it from an inn he had once stayed in in Spain. For a country gentleman of old family, the father seems to have been a somewhat remarkable person. He had, for instance, been an intimate friend of the celebrated Lord Byron, and was the only man in England (so Mr. Thatcher always said) who knew the real story of the quarrel between the poet and his wife. Byron confided it to him at Pisa as the closest of secrets; but, as he had always told it to everybody when alive, and his son, my father-in-law, invariably did and still does the same, there must be a good many people in England by now who know all about it.
In fact, there was scarcely a golfer or bicyclist came to the house but Mr. Thatcher didn’t fix him sooner or later in the bar and ask him if he knew the real reason why Byron quarrelled with his wife and left England. And as it was a hundred to one chance that they didn’t, Mr. Thatcher always informed them in a loud, husky whisper, and shouted after them as they left, “But you mustn’t publish it, because it’s a family secret!”
And the reason was, according to Mr. Thatcher, that Lord Byron had killed a country girl when a young man (somebody he’d got into trouble, I suppose) and flung her body in the pond at Newstead; and that having, in a moment of loving expansion, bragged of it to his wife, Lady Byron had, very properly, promptly kicked him out of the house in Piccadilly; which, also according to Mr. Thatcher, was the origin of those touching lines:
“They tell me ’tis decided you depart:
’Tis wise, ’tis well, but not the less a pain,”
invariably quoted by him on the departure of a guest.