So June and part of July slipped away, diversified, as I have explained, by a visit to London and some melancholy pleasures sipped in Mabel Harker’s society, from which I returned to “The French Horn” in a truly desperate and pitiable frame of mind. Indeed, so low and forlorn was I at times that Mr. Thatcher, with great sympathy, once or twice fetched me out a bottle of old port (and not bad tipple, either, for a country inn), which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the misfortunes of his life.

Chief among them was the loss of his ancestral home, Wharton Park. The Thatchers had lived there since the first of them, a Lord Mayor of the time of Henry VIII., had built the house in the year 1543—of which original structure only the stables, in an extremely ramshackle condition, remained. A drunken Thatcher with a bedroom candle had burned the rest, towards the end of the last century, when the present house was built by my father-in-law’s grandfather; a bad man, apparently, since though he had a wife and children established in Portman Square, he kept a mistress in one of the wings of Wharton Park, where one night she went suddenly raving mad (treading on her long boa and believing it a serpent come from the lower regions to claim and devour her), and filled the air with her screechings till, a year later, she died.

Mr. Thatcher’s father had mortgaged the place heavily to Mr. Crage, an attorney and moneylender of Clement’s Inn, and soon after his death, in 1850, the mortgage was foreclosed, and Mr. Crage took possession and had lived there with great disrepute ever since. He was a very vile old man, who had killed his wife with ill-treatment and turned his daughters out-of-doors; no female domestic servant was safe from his dreadful advances, and at last he was left with no one to serve him but the gardener and his wife, with whom, especially when they all got drunk together on gin-and-water in the kitchen, he was as often as not engaged in hand-to-hand fighting.

When I first saw him he was well over eighty, and a more abandoned-looking old villain I never set eyes on; with a gashed, slobbering mouth, in which the yellow teeth stuck up out of the under-jaw like an old hound’s; a broken nose, which had once been hooked, until displaced by a young carpenter in the village, whose sweetheart he had been rude to; and the most extraordinary, bushy, black eyebrows. His hand shook so he always cut himself shaving, and his chin was always dabbled with dry blood. In short, a more malignant and gaunt personality I never saw, as I first did quite close, leaning on a gate and mumbling to himself, dressed in a tight body-coat, gaiters, and a dull, square, black hat, like a horse-coper’s.

I remember he called out to me over the gate in a rasping voice, “Hi, there, you young Cockney! what’s the time?” Whereupon I haughtily replied it was time he thought of his latter end and behaved himself. At which he fell to cursing and shaking his stick, and making sham, impotent efforts to get over the gate. For they told me he was mortally afraid of dying, as all bad (and, for the matter of that, many good) men are. He knew, of course, Mr. Thatcher was the rightful owner of the place, and he would sometimes come down to “The French Horn” and jeer him about it, offering it for £30,000, which, he dared say, Mr. Thatcher had in the house. And more than once, curse his senile impudence! Mr. Thatcher told me he had offered to marry Lucy!—but this is really too horrible a subject to be dwelt on.

In short, I loathed the old wretch so heartily that it was perhaps the happiest moment of my life (with the exception of that blessed February morning when I stood at the altar of Nesshaven church with Lucy and heard her sweet and tremulous “I will”) when, after our triumphant return from Monte Carlo, Mr. Thatcher and I went up to Wharton Park with the £30,000 in notes and gold and paid the old ruffian out over the coarse kitchen-table, almost the only furniture of the grand drawing-room, where there were still the old yellow silk hangings—as will all come in its place, later on.

Lucy Thatcher at this time, in June and July, was staying with her aunt, Miss Young, her mother’s sister, who kept a girls’ school in the Ladbroke Grove Road, out at Notting Hill. She taught some of the younger children and made herself generally useful, taking them out walks in Kensington Gardens; for Mr. Thatcher wisely thought her too beautiful to be always at “The French Horn,” since bicyclists and golfers are somewhat apt to be too boldly attentive to the lovely faces they meet with on their roundabouts. Nor can I altogether blame them. So, as I have said, I never saw her till my return in September, when her beauty and modesty—which in my judgment are synonymous—at once captured me, and always will hold me captive till I die.

CHAPTER III

I CONTINUE TO KEEP OUT OF MABEL HARKER’S WAY AND GO TO GORING—RETURN TO “THE FRENCH HORN”—WANDERINGS WITH LUCY—MR. CRAGE REHEARSES HIS OWN FUNERAL

As August approached I began to feel apprehensive as to the right course to pursue with regard to Mabel Harker, my fiancée. I don’t want to say anything unkind about her here in print, but, the fact is, the engagement had been an unfortunate one from the first. Let me only observe that I really honestly think if a man is to choose between behaving like a brute (as people say you do when you break off an engagement) and making himself miserable for life (as I most certainly should if I had married Mabel), he had much better select the former course. At any rate, I know now that if I had had the brutality, or the courage, to tell Mabel point-blank at first that I was very sorry, but I didn’t care for her sufficiently to marry her, I should have spared myself a vast deal of annoyance and self-reproach, which now I understand to have been altogether unnecessary; seeing, I know now very well, she didn’t really care for me in the least, but simply regarded me as a lay-figure (with eight hundred a year) to stand beside her at the altar rails and mechanically say “I will” and “I do” and the rest of it.