Jasper mounted Devil Dick and rode westward toward Bexhill. He was in a restless mood, driven to keep step with his own urgent thoughts. The happenings of the night were like so many thorns spread in the path of his pilgrimage. The gloom of an inevitable choice lay over him.
He rode across the great green Level of Pevensey where kingcups were all golden along the waterways, and the larks hovered and sang. Countryfolk and men on horseback were gathered at Castle End, but Jasper did not turn aside. The grey, shimmering downs swelled before him against the blue of the sky. Yonder rose Beachy Head, its beacon a heap of ashes. An insane hatred of the headland leapt into Jasper's heart. It was as though love had been martyred there, and the ashes scattered over the seas.
Devil Dick carried Jasper into Eastbourne, urged thither by a vague restlessness rather than by any desire to get anywhere in particular. The town had soon recovered from the night's scare, and being a gay place it laughed and made fun of the whole affair. Eastbourne had a certain fashionable reputation, and by the Sea Houses where the London coach started, and where the great circular redoubt had been thrown up, idlers enjoyed the sunshine and aired their little genteel vanities as though there were no such thing as war.
Jasper rode Devil Dick to the edge of this little world of valetudinarianism, gossip, and dissipation. Blue sea and sky and the grey gloom of Beachy Head formed the background, while the space between the houses and the redoubt was stippled over with the little coloured figures that idled to and fro. Here were leering old men, foppishly dressed, yet unable to hide their tainted bodies behind the craft of valet and tailor. There were women to keep these old men in countenance, mature, sly, scandalous old women who still triumphed, and rouged, and tattled. It was a quick-witted, gay, cynical crowd, vicious according to the conceptions of the moralists, but having the laugh of the moralists in the matter of enjoyment.
Jasper drew rein, the serious gloom of youthful romanticism refusing to mingle with this mature frivolity. He had turned Devil Dick, and was walking the horse away from the Sea Houses and the redoubt when he heard some one calling him by name.
"Meester Benham, Meester Benham."
Jasper became aware of a group close on his left, one tall and stately cypress in the midst of a smother of flowering shrubs. The cypress bowed and swept a hat. The flowering shrubs exhaled perfumes, and delighted the eyes with colour.
It was the Chevalier de Rothan, and with him four or five gay ladies in Empire gowns and bonnets, very seductive, very merry, very frail. They were classic in more than the mere incidents of dress. One had black hair, huge dark "orbs," and a melancholy mouth. Another was a little, red-haired woman, wonderfully dainty, with china-blue eyes, and every feminine impertinence for the provoking of men. They were looking at Jasper with the eyes of connoisseurs. A somewhat elderly charmer had levelled an ebony-handled lorgnette.
De Rothan had a way of enveloping people and entangling their activities in the net of his magnificent manners.
"Meester Benham, our friends were in ecstasy over your horse. I thought I knew both the horse and the rider. It is a splendid animal, ladies, and splendidly ridden, eh?"