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CONCLUSION 243

SOME SLIGHT EXPLANATION--OBJECTS OF THE EXPEDITION--LOVE THE PROMOTER--LUCY THATCHER--HER PORTRAIT BY LAMPLIGHT

THE idea occurred to me, quite unexpectedly and unsought for, early one morning in bed; and, as ideas of such magnitude are valuable and scarce , it was not long before I determined to try and realize it.

Let me say right here--to quote Mr. Brentin again--that not one of us touched one single red cent of the large amount we so fortunately secured, but that it was all expended for the purposes for which we had always intended it--with the single exception of a necklet of napoleons I had made for the fat little neck of my enchanting niece Mollie, which she always wears at parties, and keeps to this day in an old French plum-box, along with her beads and bangles and a small holy ring I once brought her from Rome; being amazingly fond of all sorts of bedizenments, as most female children are.

Mollie, therefore, was the only person who really had any of the swag, or boodle; though, of course, she doesn't know it, and thinks it was properly won at play. For as for Bob Hines, who had some for the new gymnasium and swimming-bath at his boys' school at Folkestone; and Mr. Thatcher , who got his old family estate, Wharton Park, back; and the hospitals, convalescent homes, and sanatoriums, which all shared alike; and Teddy Parsons, of my militia, who had the bill paid off that was worrying him--that was all in the original scheme, and all went to form the well-understood reasons for our undertaking the expedition; without which inducements, indeed, it would never even have started.

So if, after this clear denial in print, the public still choose to fancy anything has stuck to my fingers, all I can ask them in fairness to do is to come to our flat in Victoria Street any morning between twelve and two, when they can see the accounts and receipts for themselves, all in order and properly audited by Messrs. Fitch & Black, the eminent accountants of Lothbury, E. C....

Now, they say love is at the bottom of most of the affairs and enterprises of the world, and so I believe it mostly is. At all events, I don't fancy I should have undertaken, or, at any rate, been so prominent in this Monte Carlo affair, if I hadn't at the time been so deeply in love with Lucy, and correspondingly anxious to get her father's property back for them at Wharton Park. It is situate near Nesshaven, on the Essex coast; which, though to many it may not be a particularly attractive part of the country, is to me forever sacred as the spot where I first met the dear girl who is now my wife, coming back so rosily from her morning bath, through the whin and the sand, from the long, flat shore and the idle sea, carrying her own damp towel back to her father's inn, "The French Horn."

I can see her now as I saw her then, on that warm September morning eighteen months ago; sea and sky and monotonous Essex land all bathed in hazy sunshine, the whins still glistening with the morning mist, which at that time of the year lies heavily till the sun at mid-day warms them dry and sets the seed-cases exploding like Prince-Rupert drops--I can see her, I say, come towards me along the coast-guard path, round the pole that sticks up to mark it, and towards the wooden bridge that crosses one of the dikes.

If any line of that sweet face were faint in my memory, I have only to look across at her now, as she sits sewing under the lamp as I write, for all its charm and perfection to be present as first I saw it. I have only to put a straw-hat on the pretty, rough, dark hair, which in sunshine gleams with the bronze of chestnut, give her a freckle or two on the low, white forehead, color her round cheek a little more delicately rose-leaf, and there she is--not forgetting to take away the wedding-ring!--as she passed me on the Nesshaven golf-links that hazy September morning eighteen months ago. There is the straight nose, the short upper lip, the pure, fresh mouth, the plump and rounded chin, and the soft, pink lips that part so readily with a smile and show the beautiful white teeth, white as the youngest hazel-nuts....

Lucy felt my eyes were upon her, and looked up at me and smiled, with something of a blush, for she blushes very readily. She saw me still looking longingly, the invitation in my eyes, and after a moment's hesitation she put down her sewing and came to me at my writing-table. She bent over me and put her arms round my neck, her warm cheek against mine. Her soft lips kissed me; I felt the tender, loving palpitation of her bosom as I bent my head back. Our sitting-room seemed full of silence, happy and melodious silence, while from outside in Victoria Street I head the jingle of a passing cab....

"THE FRENCH HORN"--MABEL HARKER, MY UNFORTUNATE ENGAGEMENT TO HER --MR. CRAGE AND WHARTON PARK

THOUGH the idea to sack Monte Carlo did not occur to me till late in the year , I must first say something of my going down to Nesshaven in June, and the events which led to my being in a position to undertake an affair of such nerve and magnitude.

Lucy thought I should take readers straight to Monte Carlo, confining myself to that part of the work only; but, after talking it over, she agrees with me now that the adventure must be led up to in the natural way it really was or the public won't believe in it, after all, and I shall have all my pains for nothing. So that's what I shall do, in the shortest and best way I can; promising, like the esteemed old circus-rider Ducrow, as soon as possible to "cut the cackle and come to the 'osses."

Well, then, it was towards the middle of June when I joined the golf club at Nesshaven, just after my militia training month was over. I was introduced by Harold Forsyth , who had the golf fever very badly, and, I must say, was beginning to make himself rather a bore with it.

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 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 , 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.

At last Mabel went back to Folkestone, and I was free to return to "The French Horn," and I never saw her again 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 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 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.

It was this same father of Mr. Thatcher's who had parted with Wharton Park, their ancestral home. He had been a great gambler in his youth, and lost enormous sums at Crockford's and on the turf, so that when he died, in 1850, he had nothing to leave his only son, my Lucy's father, but three or four thousand pounds, very soon muddled away in unfortunate business speculations.

At last, about twenty years ago, it occurred to Mr. Thatcher to come down to Nesshaven and take "The French Horn," close to the Park gates of his old home, where, until the golf mania set in, beyond gaining a bare livelihood, he did no particular good; having to depend on natural-history lunatics, who came there in winter and prowled the shore with shot-guns after rare birds, and, in summer, on families from Colchester--tradespeople and bank-clerks and so on--who spent their holidays lying about in the warm sand among the whins and complaining of the food. Betweenwhiles there was scarcely a soul about except the coast-guards, who came up to fill their whiskey-bottles, and a few bicyclists who ate enormous teas and never would pay more than ninepence.

But when a Colchester builder erected the club-house down on the links, Mr. Thatcher's business looked up wonderfully, and he really began to make money, and even sometimes to turn it away, for the house was small. Harold Forsyth discovered it, being quartered so near, and it was he who introduced me, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful.

It was towards the middle of June, and the sun was just setting at the end of a long, warm day. Mr. Thatcher showed us our rooms, and then took us into the great hall up-stairs, from which a balcony and steps descended into the garden. It had a very high-pitched roof, and was decorated in the Moorish fashion , and would hold, I dare say, a hundred and fifty people; rather senseless, I thought, seeing there were only seven or eight bedrooms, but possibly useful for bean-feasts or a printer's wayz-goose.

The broad June sun was setting, as I say, and streamed right in from the garden, as Forsyth and I ate our dinner. The only other guests were two brothers named Walton, who spent their lives playing golf. They played at Nesshaven all day, and wrote accounts of it every night, sitting close together, smoking and mumbling about the condition of the greens and their tee-shots, all of which was solemnly committed to paper.

What they would have done with themselves twenty years ago I can't conceive--possibly taken to drink. At any rate, now they only live for golf, and their thick legs and indifferent play are to be seen wherever there's a links and they can get permission to perform.

Mr. Thatcher's wife, a doctor's daughter, had long been dead; but his old mother, of the astonishing age of ninety-three, was still alive, and lived with him in the inn. At first she had not at all liked the idea of settling down almost at the gates of Wharton Park, her old home; but every year since they came she had expected would be her last, and she only lived on on sufferance, as it were, in the hope she would soon die. Sprier old lady, however, I must say, I never saw. She wasn't in the least deaf, and never wore glasses, and she was simply the keenest hand at bezique I ever encountered; at which entertaining game, by-the-way, if she wasn't watched, she would cheat outrageously.

Old Mrs. Thatcher and I were great friends, and used to potter about the garden together in the early mornings. Farther abroad she never ventured, except once a year, I believe, when she trotted off to the church to visit her husband's grave and see the tablet inside was kept clean.

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 , which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the misfortunes of his life.

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 , 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 , 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 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.

We got up through a small spinney to the end of the ha-ha that faces the house, and, as we were quite close, saw with our own eyes a most strange and monstrous sight--a sight so strange that many readers would scarcely credit it, had they not noticed that truth and not fiction is my object.

Hidden in the spinney, we were not more than forty yards from the house, which is long and low and not particularly beautiful--in fact, decidedly Gothic and unsightly. In front of it, lengthways and pretty broad, runs a gravel path, and up and down that broad gravel path was stamping and swearing old Mr. Crage; stamping and swearing and shaking his stick at six men who were actually carrying a coffin, a smart, brand-new coffin with dandy silver handles, on their shoulders.

The old wretch was positively rehearsing his own funeral! We could very plainly hear him cursing the men for walking too fast and jolting him, and so on; as though, once the miserable old hunks were cold, it mattered how anybody carried him.

Then he made them rest the coffin on one end while he showed them himself the pace they should travel and the demeanor they ought to exhibit; and truly, if it hadn't been scandalous and horrible it would have been ludicrous to see the way the blaspheming old scamp trailed the path before them, dragging one foot along after another, with head and shoulders bent in sham sorrow and reverence; trying, in short, to play-act the distressed, grief-stricken mourner, touched to the quick at his own loss.

When he had finished his parade, he shook his stick at the six men, and cursed them, raving and foaming, for damned scoundrels and thieves and disrespectful ruffians, who would be glad to see him dead, and would whistle and dance while carrying him off, instead of doing it all in the proper depressed manner he had just shown them; while the men stood and looked at him stupidly and sullenly, and, I've no doubt, would have liked to jump on him there and then and beat him to a pulp, finishing once and for all with so dreadful a mockery by making it real.

Dear Lucy and I stole away, quite shocked and silent. Afterwards she told me old Crage had had the coffin a long time, and rehearsed the funeral once before; but that lately, having by threats of an action screwed twenty pounds out of his daughter for money he had lent her , he had had the silver handles added; and, now that the coffin was, in his estimation, quite perfect, had doubtless gone through the unholy ceremony again, so that when the hour struck there might be no excuse for a hitch.

So Lucy and I stole away back to "The French Horn" in shocked silence. Pleasant and human it sounded, when we got on the road again, to hear a carter singing as he rattled homeward in his empty wagon.

I AM FREE OF MABEL HARKER--RETURN TO "THE FRENCH HORN"--DISASTROUS INTERFERENCE OF HAROLD FORSYTH IN MY AFFAIRS

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