And could there have been a prettier comedy? First we had had the husband apologizing for the wife, and now we had the wife apologizing for the husband. Lord knows whether she allowed us to be what we were or not, but she certainly entertained us to a royal breakfast. Two famished people never sat down to a finer meal in this world than the one we partook of. And when we left our honest but wonderfully ill-assorted host and hostess, about nine of the clock in the morning to continue on our way, we were most handsomely fortified in mind and body.

As we passed from the farmyard and struck into the fields the sun was showing handsomely, and the thrushes were singing their lusty notes. It was as fine a spring morning as the heart could desire. The virginal airs played on our faces; the birds called to one another from hedge to tree; the little lambs frisked among the white daisies in the meads, as hand-in-hand we took our way again. We still had no clear idea as to whither we were going. But we were mightily content wherever our way might lead. The sense we had of our liberty was a something we had never tasted before. Had we not cast off the trammels of the world? We could begin life again; and be whom we chose. We were a pair of unknown persons, moving among unknown people in unknown places. Every hour we passed in these solitudes of nature had something of the glamour of romance invested in it. For we did not know how our next meal would be come by, or what would be the next shelter for our weary heads when nightfall overtook us. But we cared not. We were in the crisp, free, open air, snuffing the sunshine, and trampling across a carpet of flowers over hill and dale, while the spring birds sang.

I think we were too desperately happy to talk much. Cynthia was radiant, and as light of foot and heart as the birds that called to us from the green hedges. The words of an appropriate ballad were on her lips:

When Strephon wooed his Chloe dear,
All in the springtime of the year.

And I took the infection of her spirits also, I was sensible, ere we had walked a mile, of a frank, jovial, devil-may-care lightheartedness, not so fresh and buoyant as my little one's perhaps, since I had lived a little longer, had therefore had the brightness of my youth more overlaid with the rust of the world, and had a greater weight of responsibility, more particularly for her, upon my shoulders. It was little I felt it, however. For suddenly as we walked in these sweet fields, an idea was born in my mind that banished everything except the thrill of joy it brought.

"My prettiness," says I, "we could not wish for a perfecter wedding morning."

"That we could not," says she, so promptly that it struck me she had been expecting some such suggestion from me. Her blushes were adorable, it is true, but I believe they were more a matter of instinct than the offspring of any particular commotion in her bosom.

"Wilt marry me, pretty one," says I, "at the first church we come to, that hath a snug parsonage sitting in honeysuckle beside it?"

"Ay, that I will," says she, cocking up her thin with an archness of invitation that was not to be denied.

I suppose it was that the adventures we had already had together had given us the most perfect understanding of one another. There was a feeling of proprietorship between us; and had not each given up everything in life for the other's sake?

"My dear," says I, feeling that a little sentiment would not come amiss this rare spring morning, "I hope you have realized what I have to offer you. I have but my blasted reputation, my destitute condition, my debts, my crimes, my prostituted name. This is all the estate that a very humble, constant heart is endowed with."

"They will serve," says Cynthia simply. "If you were the wickedest man in England, and by your own account you are not far removed from that state, it would be the same. It is not for what you be that I like you; it is for what I think you to be."

"If it comes to that," says I, "I don't suppose it is me at all you care for. It is not myself you are in love with, nor my virtues, nor my vices, nor my hair, my eyes, my clothes, my understanding, nor anything that is mine. You are at that romantical instant of your womanhood when you have fallen in love with the name of love. If instead of a man I were a tame white mouse, or a bob-tailed rabbit, or a bull-calf you would invest me with all the pretty fancies that are running in your head, so that the reflection in your mind would yet be the one that you most wished to see. But a truce to philosophy, let us to church."

Cynthia was so evidently of my mind in this last particular that she laughed, and resumed the singing of her ballad, as we strode out the brisker for our intercourse.

CHAPTER VII
AN INSTRUCTIVE CHAPTER; IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT IF A LITTLE LEARNING IS DANGEROUS, MUCH MAY BE CALAMITOUS

As we took our way through the grass of a most charming flower-coated country, there was a kind of rivalry between us as to who should be the first to spy a church. The honour of doing so had not fallen to either of us, when Cynthia suddenly darted from the path to pick some white violets out of a hedge.

"Why," says she, in the delight of finding them, "we will make ourselves a posy apiece to carry with us to church, as it is our wedding morning. Oh, look at the marsh-marigolds at the side of the brook there!"

She gave me the violets to hold, with some injunction as to the correct manner of holding them, for my handling of them was much too crude to please her, and ran away again to fetch the pretty yellow flowers. All sorts of things she gathered for our nosegays, lady-smocks all silver white from the meadow, and daisies pied and violets blue, cowslips and even a blue-bell. Nothing would content her but that we should make them up into posies there and then; which we did, and bound them round with grasses. But hardly had we finished this pastoral employment and continued on our way, when we became the victims of a singular diversion. We passed out of one meadow over a stile into another of a similar kind. But in the second a few cows were browsing. To these we paid no heed, but walked jauntily enough through the pasture, apprehending no danger; but by the time we had come perhaps to the middle of the field we were startled by a commotion behind us. Turning round to discover whence it arose, we were horrified to find what the source of it was. A young bull with its head grounded and its tail in the air was charging down upon us. A single exclamation and a frightened instant of hesitation in which to take our bearings, and evolve a mode of escape, was all we had time for. The bull was coming so furiously that it was almost upon us, yet we were stranded full in the middle of the field, with no chance whatever of taking refuge in flight. But happily my eye lit on a tree, a sturdy young sapling a yard or two off. Thither I pushed the terrified Cynthia, and literally lifted her into one of the lower branches, whilst she, with an admirable conception of the case and how to act in it, scrambled with a mighty rending of her garments into the boughs above. I clambered after her madly, not a second too soon. The vigorous snorting young bull crashed his horns against the tree with great force. He was so near to my leg that I instinctively felt it to be gashed wide open; whilst such a mighty shake did its impact give to our place of refuge that it was indeed a mercy we were not both of us thrown on to the ground to be gored and trampled on. But despite our fright we were able to cling to the branches; and when at last I was able to get a glimpse of my leg, I found to my relief that I had been the victim of my imagination.

The bellowing beast made divers onslaughts against the bark of the tree, whilst we very fearfully hurried up higher and higher, dreading at each stroke of our enemy to feel ourselves flying through the air. Providentially, however, by clinging with rare tenacity to our vantage place we were able to maintain ourselves in the security of the highest branches of all. And presently our adversary having wreaked a good deal of his fury on the offending tree, desisted from an occupation that brought him so little profit, and having walked off a yard or two, proceeded to regard us morosely. He seemed prepared to stay in that employment too for an indefinite period. But feeling our position, snug as it was and safe for the time being, to be yet highly precarious, since the very boughs on which we sat swayed and cracked and creaked in a truly alarming fashion, I determined to play a coup, ere any melancholy thing should happen which would put it out of my power to play one.

Divesting myself with much difficulty of my cloak, although Cynthia rather audaciously, considering her own position at the time, lent me a hand, I committed that garment to her charge, and proceeded to select the most favourable moment for a speedy flight to the nearest hedge. Keeping perfectly motionless in our unhappy posture, we presently contrived to lull the unsuspecting bull into a state of quiescence which I am sure he would have been the first to admit, had he but known, the circumstances hardly warranted. For suddenly taking an advantage of his sleeping vigilance, I made a leap off the tree as far as possible from the spot on which he stood watching. It was then a case of run devil, run baker. I'm sure no poor devil ever ran more fleetly than I did then; whilst I am equally sure that there never was a baker in this world that ran more swiftly than that roaring, rampageous bullock. Luckily for my precious bones I had a fair good start of the fellow, and the distance to the hedge was less than a hundred yards. Had it been otherwise this history had never been written else, for not for a moment do I think Cynthia would ever have troubled to write it; nor between ourselves, do I think she would ever have been capable of doing so, even had her ambition jumped in that direction. Running pell-mell, my heart beating holes in my ribs, and the clear tones of Mrs. Cynthia issuing from the topmost branches of the tree in words of lusty encouragement such as: "Bravo, lad, bravo! Mightily done!" I panted to the hedge with the bull ever at my heels, and had just the strength to take a second leap at the green brambles, and half jump, half scramble through their tenacious barriers, and so into the neighbouring field, while the bull, foiled for the second time, raged and vented his disappointment from the other side.

Meanwhile little Cynthia, with a delightful intrepidity, also took advantage of our enemy. While Mr. Bull continued to thrust his head at the hedge in his mighty rage, and roared forth his threats, high-couraged little Cynthia, if you please, very simply and dexterously dropped down my cloak out of the tree, neatly dropped down after it, and then with the most gallant coolness gathered herself up again, the cloak too, and even stayed to recover our late discarded posies, which the bull had evidently thought too mean to be worthy of his regard. With these articles tucked away in one hand, she gathered her skirts in the other, and away scudded her dainty ankles through the grass to the opposite fence. All this time the bull, foiled and nonplussed as he was, continued to fume and rush at the fence that kept him from me, but never for an instant did he guess that Cynthia was in the act of cheating him too.

Convinced by this that my little one had made good her escape, I could not restrain my joy. I began to jump and clap my hands, and bellow out hearty encouragements and applause to her across the field. This behaviour so surprised the bull, that he whisked angrily round to discover the cause of it. He beheld Cynthia in the very height of her rapid victorious transit. Away he dashed, head down, in pursuit of her, but she was much too well advanced in her flight to have any fear of him whatever. By the time he had come level with the tree, Cynthia was calmly climbing into security over the stile; and when the outwitted animal rushed up and thrust his nose over it, she tauntingly, if a trifle vain-gloriously, shook the cloak and the posies at him. Never, I think, did I see an act more neatly or more bravely performed.

When we came presently together again in the middle of an adjoining field, a sort of half-way house from where the bull had respectively left us, we were both in high feather and mightily pleased with ourselves and one another.

"I declare," says I, "that hunting the fox becomes a tame and foolish sport by comparison. In all my amusements, from cards to cudgel-playing, I was never furnished, I'll swear, with so entertaining an episode. Besides, I am vastly proud of your conduct this morning, my prettiness. Come, let us waste not a moment; I am dying to get married at once."

The deep crimson in Cynthia's cheeks, that her late eminent exertions had induced, lent her even more of an adorable appearance than even I had ever observed in her. And when she tossed me my cloak, and gravely gave one of the posies into my hands, I think I never saw the eyes of a woman beam with such mirth and high spirits. Flushed and breathless as we were, no two human persons could possibly have been happier. Already our haphazard, vagrant life had proved the antidote of that weariness of the world, that fatigue of mind and body, the chains of polite life had induced. Already we had come to take a fraternal pride, as it were, in one another. We no longer had to apprehend how we should get through the day without perishing of weariness, but rather how to pass it without perishing of hunger and violence. And we were revealing such unexpected qualities to ourselves and each other in overcoming these calamities that we were falling in love anew with our own heroic attributes, and were already prepared to vow to one another that we were a monstrous well-assorted pair. Indeed, the foolish bull had given us such a fine conceit of ourselves, that on the score of the hour of high-wrought happiness he brought us, he must, I am sure, be allowed after all to be our friend.

A good deal of walking through the blossoming fields brought us at last on to a good broad highway, and a little later having climbed up a hill, we saw from the top of it the thing we were seeking. A village nestled below, and very properly the tallest roof among the collection that clustered there together, and by far the most imposing object of them all, was a sweet little country church, grey with age, surrounded by a low stone wall whose crannies were filled with moss. Approaching it we were overjoyed to find that a pretty little parsonage stood beside it, which in every particular matched the quaint and venerable appearance of the church itself. But no sooner had we come to the latticed gate of the parson's house than our pleasure fled suddenly away. We had been bold enough in the contemplation of the deed, and had even been disposed to treat it airily. Yet when our fingers fell on the parson's latch, we were suddenly confronted with its magnitude. We were going to be married!

Now although I had started from town not twelve hours before as cynical and desperate a character as any to be found, the humane influences that had been brought to bear upon me, even in that short period, had not been without their effect. I began to see things in their true relation once again, and even to be sensible of feelings I had so long outlived that I almost forgot that I had ever known them. For instance, the emotion of timidity that overtook me at the parson's gate, I could have sworn I had never met with before in my life. The uncomfortable sense of the bashful business to follow caused me to falter with my hand still at the latch, and to parley with Cynthia.

"I think you had better go first, my prettiness," says I seductively, "I don't doubt that you will make a better hand of it than I, and you will have a better knowledge of how to talk to the parson. I am so devilish unused to talking to parsons, d'ye see."

"Oh, yes, I quite see that," says Cynthia significantly, "and I also see that you are afraid."

"I dare say you might have shot wider of the truth," says I. "It is the first time I have been called on to smell this kind of powder, and burn me! if ever I want to be called on again."

"I hope you won't be," says Cynthia.

She herself, I must confess, was as cool as a cucumber. Her colour was a little high perhaps, and the animation in her eyes was, I think, more than usually fine. But take her altogether, she seemed to have all the calmness and assurance of an old campaigner, whilst I was wincing and starting like a raw recruit. They say that all women are alike in this. They go to church as complacently as they go to Ranelagh, and take as keen an enjoyment from the reading of the marriage service as they do in the performance of the Italian dancers at the theatre in Covent Garden. And it is said again that never a man of us all, whatever his years, disposition and ideas, comes to this ceremony but what he is beset with those same qualms that fastened upon me so unexpectedly at the parson's gate.

When we walked up the pretty garden and came to the door of the parson's house, it was Cynthia who unhesitatingly knocked upon it. But the operation had to be repeated ere it was replied to. And when at last the door was drawn back from within we were confronted by a stout, red-faced woman in a gown of printed calico. Her sleeves were rolled up above the elbow, her cap and apron were awry, and there was a look of industrious ill-temper about her that contributed nothing to our encouragement. She stuck her hands on her hips, filled the whole of the doorway with her defiant presence, very like the dragon in the fable that barred the way to the princess in the enchanted palace, and surveyed us in a grimly critical fashion from top to toe.

"Is the parson at home?" says the audacious Cynthia.

"He be!" says the woman in a loud, harsh voice.

"We wish to see him then, if you please," says Cynthia.

"What might your business be?" says the woman, looking us all over with a really disconcerting keenness.

"I think we must explain that to the parson himself," says Cynthia.

"Then I think you will not then," says the woman, mighty uncivilly. "I've formed my own opinion of you. You shall not see the master, not if I know it. He's got such a character for softness of heart all about the countryside that you vagrant beggars come for miles to get what you can out of him. It's mortal lucky he's got me to look after him, or he would have given away the shirt off his back this many a year ago."

It was impossible to deny that the good woman's estimate of our station and business was shrewd enough. We were certainly a pair of vagrants, if ever there was a pair in the world, and were certainly come to get something of the parson that we had no means of requiting him for. And I am sure neither of us, singly or together, would have stood a chance of melting that adamantine bosom, since everything we said seemed more clearly to reveal our humble not to say destitute condition; indeed we had come to the point where this clergyman's uncompromising guardian was about to bang the door in our faces, when the parson himself made a very welcome intervention.

He came shuffling along the path from some remote part of the vicarage garden, in a pair of old down-trodden carpet slippers, wearing over an old-fashioned wig a beaver grotesquely battered and green with age. His cassock hung in tatters at his heels, and he made about as unkempt and disreputable a figure of a clergyman as it was possible to conceive. Besides, he was a very small and insignificant rat of a fellow, and had a strange odd way of peering through his horn spectacles. But the moment he began to speak such a pleasant twinkle of courtesy came into his ugly countenance – by itself it was plain to the point of ugliness, although to this day Cynthia will never allow it to be so – and his voice was so wondrous musical, that straightway we forgot that he had such a singular appearance, and fell in love with him.

"A very good morning to you," says he. "I hope you are drinking in this golden morning that God hath sent us. Hey, what a thing it is to be a human being!"

As he came up and observed Cynthia more closely, he, bowed with a wonderful grave dignity, and took off his hat with a flourish that became him most inimitably well. Such courtesy from an appearance so discourteous never was seen.

"La, master, what be you at?" says the woman, highly scandalized by so polite a demeanour. "Do you not see these are an arrant pair of vagrant beggars? I must get you more artful spectacles if you will stay so close at your book-reading."

"Peace, my good Blodgett," says the parson. "Do you think I do not know breeding when I see it? It is a rare possession that nothing can disguise. There is sensibility here, in this fair countenance, and pride and candour, and the features are almost highly classical in their outline. A little too full in the lips perhaps, yes, I think a little too full, or this would have been the countenance of Minerva with the animation of Diana in it. I must remind you again, my good Blodgett, that appearances are apt to deceive; non semper ea sunt quæ videntur, as the excellent Phædrus has so wisely said. You will do me the honour, I hope, my dear young lady, of entering my house and partaking of a glass of my gooseberry-wine and of eating a piece of Banbury cake. And you, sir, also, I hope and trust; although in your case the credentials you bear in your countenance are nothing like so noteworthy. But as Plautus very pertinently asks, non soles respicere te, to look at oneself ere one abuses another, the less said the sooner we shall mend it, tulum silentii præmium. Come this way, I beg you."

During this peroration poor Blodgett wrung her hands and shook her head, and kept repeating some such mystical phrase as:

"He is off at the top again! He is off at the top again!"

However, this strange old parson, all unconscious of the distress of mind he was occasioning his handmaid or housekeeper, or whatever she might call herself, flowed on and on in his extraordinary monologue, and led us indoors into a spacious room full of a remarkable disorder of books, which doubtless composed his library. Books open and shut, piled up and overlaid, were on the table, and under the table, on the chairs, and on the floor. Any square inch of space wherein a book might insinuate itself, there was a book to be found. Dusty, black-letter, grimy Aldine, foxed Elzevir, any folio, quarto, or octavo, providing it was old enough and dirty enough, was assembled there. Those that lay open seemed to be annotated and scored under, and embellished with marginal notes in a delicate minute handwriting, on every page. And among all these tomes there was never a one that was in a new dress, or done in a reasonable easy print, nor one written by a reasonably modern author. To observe the Paradise Lost, with the imprint of Jacob Tonson upon it, was to be startled with that sense of gratified surprise that one would experience at unexpectedly meeting with a personal friend in a foreign country.

The parson was an odd match to his books. His conversation was as musty, learned and interminable as themselves. He talked of all topics but those that could have been of the least interest to anybody. He never thought to ask who we were, or what business had brought us thither, but having lured us into his library, he very vigorously began to engage us with matters at least a thousand years old. We were very polite at first, and nodded our heads in deep interest at the mention of the first Punic war, and kept saying, "Ah, to be sure!" and inserting "yes" and "oh yes" whenever we found half a chance to get in so much in the middle of some animadversions he thought fit to make on the behaviour of the Carthaginians generally. But when proceeding to move with an air of great mystery and consequence to topics of the most inconsequent character, and presently to prove to us that in his opinion the battle of Cannæ, or it may have been Marathon, or the siege of Troy for aught we knew or cared, was not so important and decisive an affair as the historians of these times had represented, our observance of a polite interest showed signs of giving out.

We might shuffle, however, and shift our stations, and cough, and take our weight off our right leg and lean it on our left, but it never made one bit of difference to this terrible monologue. The old parson, with his eyes half closed and his hands spread forth, poured out the finest prose in his mellifluous voice, with every period rounded to such a perfection that had he been a historian and his speech a printed page the world could never have sufficiently admired his attainments. And every emphasis and quantity seemed so indubitably exact in the classical tongues he so freely quoted, as must have made him the envy of pedagogues and the paragon among them all. And all this time we were striving to maintain our well-bred interest as best we might, and inwardly cursed Rome and Greece and the whole race of poets, historians and soldiers that ever sprang from them.

His mind was filled with a vast deal of knowledge of a recondite sort. It could have been of no possible service to anybody, least of all to himself. Yet he moved lightly and easily from one antediluvian topic to others more antediluvian still. He was armed with a great array of theories of no moment at all, and a matchless sheaf of facts that proved and disproved and proved them over again. How weary we became! How we fidgeted and looked at one another in our despair, for he grew more minute as he proceeded, and called up, extempore, authority upon authority to show that Lais was a woman of virtue, and that Virgil did not write his own works. He split straws with Aristotle, and picked holes in his Ethics. He said that Cicero was a windbag, and that Plato was a dunce. He said that Herodotus was loose in his facts, and no more worthy of credence than Plutarch, and that Plutarch was not a whit better than Herodotus neither. He said that Homer was the biggest impostor in history. He had nothing to do with the Iliad, whilst as for the Odyssey, he had long come at the truth that it was by a female hand, most probably one of the Hesperides, though to be sure he had not quite satisfied himself as to which, just as the plays of the poet Shakespeare would one day be allowed to be the handiwork of Lord Bacon, the eminent lawyer and philosopher; and again, as the world, purblind as it was, would one day discover that Mr. Fielding's so-called novel of Joseph Andrews had sprung from the fertile brain of Mr. Colley Gibber. Indeed I was so fearful lest he should take steps to disprove my grandfather's claims to have produced his celebrated Commentary on the Analects of Confucius, that I became quite desperate, and determined to put a stop to the unceasing current of his talk, even at the risk of making a hole in my good manners. Having reached a point in his discourse wherein he showed that Cæsar did not cross the Rubicon, I slapped my hand on the table with a vigour that knocked down half-a-score of tomes and startled everything and everybody but the speaker himself; and, says I, at the top of my heartiest voice:

"I quite agree with you there, sir; I do indeed."

"I presume, sir," says the parson, "you know the authorities there are against us, and what adversaries of weight, Cæsar himself, Suetonius, and Plutarch, to name only three, that we have to face."

"I care not if there are three thousand," says I valiantly, "in this matter I am entirely of your mind."

The parson, whose simplicity was as great as his learning, grasped my hand with the utmost fervour.

"My dear sir," says he, "I can never sufficiently extol your spirit. It is excellently said, sir, excellently said. Would that there were more persons like you in the world. I can but offer you some gooseberry-wine and a piece of Banbury cake, but I am sure you are very welcome. I do declare that Blodgett has forgotten them; I will go and see about them myself."

At last in the very height of our sufferings we obtained in this truly unexpected, not to say whimsical fashion, a brief instant of relief. It was plain that this learned wight was possessed of a mind of the most singular simplicity and inconsequence. Everything that was told him he took for gospel. He had the faith of a child. Everything that had the least interest for himself he felt that all men were languishing to hear of. With him evidently to think was to act; he was the slave of his own whims; no sooner did he mention a thing than he went straightway and performed it.

The prospects of being united in the bonds of wedlock by so extraordinary a gentleman were indeed remote; but armed with the knowledge of his character we had already gained, we concluded that if we beat about the bush at all, he would be quite content for his own part to detain us a "month of Sundays" in his library, while he unfolded his facts and propounded his theories. On his own initiative he would not be in the least likely to surrender a single moment to our affairs. We must be bold and decisive, and grapple firmly with him.

Therefore when the good parson returned, preceding the umbrageous Blodgett, who bore the Banbury cakes and the gooseberry-wine on a tray, before he had the chance to open his mouth to take up his discourse, says I, in a truly dramatic manner:

"If it pleases you, sir, we are here, this lady and I, to ask you to marry us."

"Marry you," says he, without a moment's reflection. "I shall be delighted. Blodgett, have the goodness to set down the tray on the top of the De Imitatione there and go and find the clerk, and tell him to open the church. And tut, tut! my good woman, how often must I beseech you not to dust my books with your sacrilegious apron."