The Wayfarers

"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."

While Mrs. Blodgett flounced out to find the clerk, and the good parson in the height of his courtesy poured out the gooseberry-wine and served us with it, Cynthia and I fell to talking at the top of our voices about nothing at all, since we were certain that as soon as the parson got an opportunity he would furnish us with a criticism of Strabo's geographies, which, however damaging to that worthy ancient, would be even more so to us; or prove that it was a vulgar error to speak of Castor as the twin of Pollux; and proceed to demonstrate that Achilles was vulnerable in other places than his heel.

CHAPTER VIII

WE GET US TO CHURCH

By the time the parson had served us solemnly with our refection, I deemed it proper to give him some relation of our circumstances. I was emboldened to do so because his simple, honest character made him easy to talk to; it was also essential that he should be let some little way into the state of our affairs, since we had but the sum of twelvepence halfpenny with which to requite him for his services and to vail the clerk. And again I talked to him the more readily because while he was engaged with these matters, he was not so likely to revert to those that concerned us less.

He received the confessions of our bankrupt condition with a breadth of generosity that was truly noble in its magnitude.

"I am grieved that you should have thought fit to name that matter," says he. "What a world it is for pounds, shillings, and pence, to be sure! One cannot come into it, nor go out of it, nor even enter into a highly natural and commendable contract for its advantage, but what somebody has to be feed. And I blush to say that that somebody is generally some old rogue of a parson; but I hope, sir, you agree with Tully when he says – "

"Yes, sir," says I hastily, "I quite agree with Tully, I have ever been of Tully's opinion. And, sir, let me say that we are overcome with your generosity. But there is yet another matter that irks us; we have no ring by which we can be wed into matrimony."

"An even more trivial thing," says the parson, "the good Blodgett, honest widow that she is, shall lend you hers."

It was bravely resolved of the parson, but I dare swear we both shuddered at the same instant, when we conceived of the courage required to put it into practice. To think of us "vagrant beggars" summoning that redoubtable dragon to deliver up her marriage ring! It would be perilously like commanding an ogre to cut off his own head. I'll vow that Cynthia trembled a little; whilst she goes even farther and says I grew as pale as death.

"Do you think, sir," said Cynthia fearfully, "that good Mrs. Blodgett will be so kind?"

"She will be delighted, my dear madam," says the parson. "She will be delighted!"

We were still wrestling with our honest doubts on the score of Mrs. Blodgett's delight, when lo and behold! that formidable fair burst into the room, redder in the face than ever, for she was out of breath. She had seen the clerk, and he had gone that minute to open the door of the church. And she conveyed this piece of news in such a brisk and important tone as seemed a good deal out of keeping with her severity of character. She had an air of interest which we had certainly not expected her to betray in our humble affairs. And when the parson without a word of preface had the audacity to prefer his proposal in regard to the ring she bore on her finger, an audacity that caused us both to hold our breaths, since we were fully persuaded that Blodgett would at least break into a most violent diatribe against the impudence of some people, drawing an affecting parallel with the late departed saint whose relict she was, and how wild horses should not tear her and this venerable sanctified token of their marital harmony apart, to our surprise her reply was mercifully brief.

"Humph!" says she. Having glanced at us for a very embarrassing period, during which time a good deal of perplexity distorted her harsh features, says she: "Well, I never did! Is it a runaway?"

"You can take it at that," says I.

A very singular change was being wrought in this stern matron. Where is the female bosom that can resist a wedding, or a touch of the romantical? Not even that of the Spartan Blodgett. The more she pondered the matter in hand the less terrible she became. She began to ask a dozen questions of us in a greatly mollified voice. Nay, the tone she used to Cynthia might even be called indulgent.

"Well," says she, "seeing as how it is an emergency, you shall have my ring this once, but it goes against my conscience, I am sure. You are doing a very wicked thing, young woman. To think of a little chit like you running away to get married! I am sure I ought not to countenance it. Oh, what will your mother say?"

"I have not a mother," says Cynthia, putting her hands to her eyes, and smiling at me through her fingers.

This admission seemed considerably to ease the mind of Mrs. Blodgett, and forthwith she began wrestling with the wedding-ring on her fat finger. In the meantime her master was very fortunately engrossed in another matter, and we were therefore spared his comments.

It seemed that Blodgett had brought him that day's London Gazette, which had been left by the coach at the village alehouse. It was the newspaper that claimed the parson's attention while his housekeeper struggled with her wedding-ring. I vow it was as whimsical a sight as ever was seen to witness the good lady growing redder and redder in her face, and puffing, grunting, and twisting her countenance into the most fantastical shapes, while she freely "dratted the thing," and called down a murrain upon it. But strive as she might, the precious ring still clung faithfully to her finger. Presently Cynthia was fain to take a hand at hauling it off, but she fared not a whit better than Mrs. Blodgett. Whereon I was called on, and after several very natural and becoming protestations on my part as to my inability and so forth, even I was pressed into the service. I tugged and hauled away with what gravity I might, but never an inch would that wretched ring budge. In the height of this deadlock, I was seized with a brilliant expedient.

"One of the rings round the curtain-pole," says I. "Surely one of them will do most admirably well, and at least there will be no difficulty about getting it off, nor on neither."

Now when I proffered this suggestion Mrs. Cynthia blushed such a colour and looked so ill at ease, that I half began to doubt whether this idea was so fine after all. And indeed, Blodgett took me up warmly.

"Wedded in a curtain-ring indeed!" says she. "I'facks, that she never shall be. Who ever heard of such a thing! Has the man no decency! Rather than that, my dear, I will run to neighbour Hodge's and borrow hers. As she's a thin body it should slip off easy."

There and then the scandalized Blodgett was as good as her word. Favouring me with a glance of such scorn and contempt that a person more impressionable would have been rooted to the spot, she flounced out of the room all in a moment, and directly afterwards passed by the library window, running quite excitedly down the garden path. Surely a whole chapter of dissertation might be written on the metamorphosis of Mrs. Blodgett. From openly deriding Cynthia she had passed to an almost motherly tenderness towards her. She had become as concerned for her as though she had been her own daughter. She was no longer "wench," or "vagrant beggar," nay nor even "young woman," but just "my dear." And why was this? Do you think it was because she had suddenly lighted on some latent virtues in my little madam, some strain of moral loveliness, some unexpected beauty in her mind and heart? I am sure I crave the pardon of her ladyship, but it was devil a one of these things that had such a magic effect on Mrs. Blodgett. It was simply that she had run away to get married, and that this was her wedding morning. Oh, woman, woman! where is the daughter among you that can resist the blandishments of Hymen?