CHAPTER XX

AT THE SIGN OF THE JOLLY CRICKETERS

The passing by of the pair of horsemen, who so little suspected the

treasure existing behind the small inn's narrow window did homage in

Aminta's mind to her protector's adroitness. Their eyes met without a

smile, though they perceived the grisly comic of the incident. Their

thoughts were on the chariot to follow.

Aminta had barely uttered a syllable since the start of the flight from

Ashead. She had rocked in a swing between sensation and imagination,

exultant, rich with the broad valley of the plain and the high green

waves of the downs at their giant's bound in the flow of curves and sunny

creases to the final fling-off of the dip on sky. Here was a twisted

hawthorn carved clean to the way of the wind; a sheltered clump of

chestnuts holding their blossoms up, as with a thousand cresset-clasping

hands; here were grasses that nodded swept from green to grey; flowers

yellow, white, and blue, significant of a marvellous unknown through the

gates of colour; and gorse-covers giving out the bird, squares of young

wheat, a single fallow threaded by a hare, and cottage gardens, shadowy

garths, wayside flint-heap, woods of the mounds and the dells, fluttering

leaves, clouds: all were swallowed, all were the one unworried

significance. Scenery flew, shifted, returned; again the line of the

downs raced and the hollows reposed simultaneously. They were the same in

change to an eye grown older; they promised, as at the first, happiness

for recklessness. The whole woman was urged to delirious recklessness in

happiness, and she drank the flying scenery as an indication, a likeness,

an encouragement.

When her wild music of the blood had fallen to stillness with the stopped

wheels, she was in the musky, small, low room of the diamond

window-panes, at her companion's disposal for what he might deem the

best: he was her fate. But the more she leaned on a man of self-control,

the more she admired; and an admiration that may not speak itself to the

object present drops inward, stirs the founts; and if these are

repressed, the tenderness which is not allowed to weep will drown

self-pity, hardening the woman to summon scruples in relation to her

unworthiness. He might choose to forget, but the more she admired, the

less could her feminine conscience permit of an utter or of any

forgetfulness that she was not the girl Browny, whom he once

loved--perhaps loved now, under some illusion of his old passion for

her--does love now, ill-omened as he is in that! She read him by her

startled reading of her own heart, and she constrained her will to keep

from doing, saying, looking aught that would burden without gracing his

fortunes. For, as she felt, a look, a word, a touch would do the

mischief; she had no resistance behind her cold face, only the physical

scruple, which would become the moral unworthiness if in any way she

induced him to break his guard and blow hers to shreds. An honourable

conscience before the world has not the same certificate in love's pure

realm. They are different kingdoms. A girl may be of both; a married

woman, peering outside the narrow circle of her wedding-ring, should let

her eyelids fall and the unseen fires consume her.

Their common thought was now, Will the chariot follow?

What will he do if it comes? was an unformed question with Aminta.

He had formed and not answered it, holding himself, sincerely at the

moment, bound to her wishes. Near the end of Ashead main street she had

turned to him in her seat beside the driver, and conveyed silently, with

the dental play of her tongue and pouted lips, 'No title.'

Upon that sign, waxen to those lips, he had said to the driver, 'You took

your orders from Lady Charlotte?

And the reply, 'Her ladyship directed me sir, exonerated Lord Ormont so

far.

Weyburn remembered then a passage of one of her steady looks, wherein an

oracle was mute. He tried several of the diviner's shots to interpret it:

she was beyond his reach. She was in her blissful delirium of the flight,

and reproached him with giving her the little bit less to resent--she who

had no sense of resentment, except the claim on it to excuse.

Their landlady entered the room to lay the cloth for tea and eggs. She

made offer of bacon as well, homecured. She was a Hampshire woman, and

understood the rearing of pigs. Her husband had been a cricketer, and

played for his county. He didn't often beat Hampshire! They had a good

garden of vegetables, and grass-land enough for two cows. They made their

own bread, their own butter, but did not brew.

Weyburn pronounced for a plate of her home-cured. She had children, the

woman told him--two boys and a girl. Her husband wished for a girl. Her

eldest boy wished to be a sailor, and would walk miles to a pond to sail

bits of wood on it, though there had never been a sea-faring man in her

husband's family or her own. She agreed with the lady and gentleman that

it might be unwise to go contrary to the boy's bent. Going to school or

coming home, a trickle of water would stop him.

Aminta said to her companion in French, 'Have you money?'

She chased his blood. 'Some: sufficient. I think.' It stamped their

partnership.

'I have but a small amount. Aunt was our paymaster. We will buy the

little boy a boat to sail. You are pale.'

'I 've no notion of it.'

'Something happened it Ashead.'

'It would not have damaged my complexion.'

He counted his money. Aminta covertly handed him her purse. Their fingers

touched. The very minor circumstance of their landlady being in the room

dammed a flood.

Her money and his amounted to seventeen pounds. The sum-total was a

symbol of days that were a fiery wheel.

Honour and blest adventure might travel together two days or three, he

thought. If the chariot did not pass:--Lord Ormont had willed it. A man

could not be said to swerve in his duty when acting to fulfil the

master's orders, and Mrs. Pagnell was proved a hoodwinked duenna, and

Morsfield was in the air. The breathing Aminta had now a common purse

with her first lover. For three days or more they were, it would seem, to

journey together, alone together: the prosecution of his duty imposed it

on him. Sooth to say, Weyburn knew that a spice of passion added to a

bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess; but he fancied an absolute

reliance on Aminta's dignity, and his respect for her was another

barrier. He begged the landlady's acceptance of two shillings for her

boy's purchase of a boat, advising her to have him taught early to swim.

Both he and Aminta had a feeling that they could be helpful in some

little things on the road if the chariot did not pass.

Justification began to speak loudly against the stopping of the chariot

if it did pass. The fact that sweet wishes come second, and not so

loudly, assured him they were quite secondary; for the lover sunk to

sophist may be self-beguiled by the arts which render him the potent

beguiler.

'We are safe here,' he said, and thrilled her with the 'we' behind the

curtaining leaded window-panes.

'What is it you propose?' Her voice was lower than she intended. To that

she ascribed his vivid flush. It kindled the deeper of her dark hue.

He mentioned her want of luggage, and the purchase of a kit.

She said, 'Have we the means?'

'We can adjust the means to the ends.'

'We must be sparing of expenses.'

'Will you walk part of the way?'

'I should like it.'

'We shall be longer on the journey.'

'We shall not find it tiresome, I hope.'

'We can say so, if we do.'

'We are not strangers.'

The recurrence of the 'we' had an effect of wedding: it was fatalistic,

it would come; but, in truth, there was pleasure in it, and the pleasure

was close to consciousness of some guilt when vowing itself innocent.

And, no, they were not strangers; hardly a word could they utter without

cutting memory to the quick; their present breath was out of the far

past.

Love told them both that they were trembling into one another's arms, not

voluntarily, against the will with each of them; they knew it would be

for life; and Aminta's shamed reserves were matched to make an obstacle

by his consideration for her good name and her station, for his own claim

to honest citizenship also.

Weyburn acted on his instinct at sight of the postillion and the chariot;

he flung the window wide and shouted. Then he said, 'It is decided,' and

he felt the rightness of the decision, like a man who has given a

condemned limb to the surgeon.

Aminta was passive as a water-weed in the sway of the tide. Hearing it to

be decided, she was relieved. What her secret heart desired, she kept

secret, almost a secret from herself. He was not to leave her; so she had

her permitted wish, she had her companion plus her exclamatory aunt, who

was a protection, and she had learnt her need of the smallest protection.

'I can scarcely believe I see you, my dear, dear child!' Mrs. Pagnell

cried, upon entering the small inn parlour; and so genuine was her

satisfaction that for a time she paid no heed to the stuffiness of the

room, the meanness of the place, the unfitness of such a hostelry to

entertain ladies--the Countess of Ormont!

'Eat here?' Mrs. Pagnell asked, observing the preparations for the meal.

Her pride quailed, her stomach abjured appetite. But she forbore from

asking how it was that the Countess of Ormont had come to the place.

At a symptom of her intention to indulge in disgust; Aminta brought up

Mr. Morsfield by name; whereupon Mrs. Pagnell showed she had reflected on

her conduct in relation to the gentleman, and with the fear of the earl

if she were questioned.

Home-made bread and butter, fresh eggs and sparkling fat of bacon invited

her to satisfy her hunger. Aminta let her sniff at the teapot unpunished;

the tea had a rustic aroma of ground-ivy, reminding Weyburn of his

mother's curiosity to know the object of an old man's plucking of

hedgeside leaves in the environs of Bruges one day, and the simple reply

to her French, 'Tea for the English.' A hint of an anecdote interested

and enriched the stores of Mrs. Pagnell, so she capped it and partook of

the infusion ruefully.

'But the bread is really good,' she said, 'and we are unlikely to be seen

leaving the place by any person of importance.'

'Unless Mr. Morsfield should be advised to return this way,' said Aminta.

Her aunt proposed for a second cup. She was a manageable woman; the same

scourge had its instant wholesome effect on her when she snubbed the

secretary.

So she complimented his trencherman's knife, of which the remarkably fine

edge was proof enough that he had come heart-whole out of the trial of an

hour or so's intimate companionship with a beautiful woman, who had never

been loved, never could be loved by man, as poor Mr. Morsfield loved her!

He had sworn to having fasted three whole days and nights after his first

sight of Aminta. Once, he said, her eyes pierced him so that he dreamed

of a dagger in his bosom, and woke himself plucking at it. That was love,

as a born gentleman connected with a baronetcy and richer than many lords

took the dreadful passion. A secretary would have no conception of such

devoted extravagance. At the most he might have attempted to insinuate a

few absurd, sheepish soft nothings, and the Countess of Ormont would know

right well how to shrivel him with one of her looks. No lady of the land

could convey so much either way, to attract or to repel, as Aminta,

Countess of Ormont! And the man, the only man, insensible to her charm or

her scorn, was her own wedded lord and husband. Old, to be sure, and

haughty, his pride might not allow him to overlook poor Mr. Morsfield's

unintentional offence. But the presence of the countess's aunt was a

reply to any charge he might seek to establish. Unhappily, the case is

one between men on their touchiest point, when women are pushed aside,

and justice and religion as well. We might be living in a heathen land,

for aught that morality has to say.

Mrs. Pagnell fussed about being seen on her emergence from the Jolly

Cricketers. Aminta sent Weyburn to spy for the possible reappearance of

Mr. Morsfield. He reported a horseman; a butcher-boy clattered by. Aminta

took the landlady's hand, under her aunt's astonished gaze, and said: 'I

shall not forget your house and your attention to us.' She spoke with a

shake of her voice. The landlady curtseyed and smiled, curtseyed and

almost whimpered. The house was a poor one, she begged to say; they

didn't often have such guests, but whoever came to it they did their best

to give good food and drink.

Hearing from Weyburn that the chariot was bound to go through Winchester,

she spoke of a brother, a baker there, the last surviving member of her

family and, after some talk, Weyburn offered to deliver a message of

health and greeting at the baker's shop. There was a waving of hands,

much nodding and curtseying, as the postillion resumed his

demi-volts--all to the stupefaction of Mrs. Pagnell; but she dared not

speak, she had Morsfield on the mouth. Nor could she deny the excellent

quality of the bread and butter, and milk, too, at the sign of the Jolly

Cricketers. She admitted, moreover, that the food and service of the

little inn belonged in their unpretentious honesty to the, kind we call

old English: the dear old simple country English of the brotherly

interchange in sight of heaven--good stuff for good money, a matter with

a blessing on it.

'But,' said she, 'my dear Aminta, I do not and I cannot understand looks

of grateful affection at a small innkeeper's wife paid, and I don't doubt

handsomely paid, for her entertainment of you.'

'I feel it,' said Aminta; tears rushed to her eyelids, overflowing, and

her features were steady.

'Ah, poor dear! that I do understand,' her aunt observed. 'Any little

kindness moves you to-day; and well it may.'

'Yes, aunty,' said Aminta, and in relation to the cause of her tears she

was the less candid of the two.

So far did she carry her thanks for a kindness as to glance back through

her dropping tears at the sign-board of the Jolly Cricketers; where two

brave batsmen cross for the second of a certain three runs, if only the

fellow wheeling legs, face up after the ball in the clouds, does but miss

his catch: a grand suspensory moment of the game, admirably chosen by the

artist to arrest the wayfarer and promote speculation. For will he let

her slip through his fingers when she comes down? or will he have her

fast and tight? And in the former case, the bats are tearing their legs

off for just number nought. And in the latter, there 's a wicket down,

and what you may call a widower walking it bat on shoulder, parted from

his mate for that mortal innings, and likely to get more chaff than

consolation when he joins the booth.