"Mr. Ripple," Charles replied, "I think you are making a fool of yourself."
The Great little Man clutched the arms of his wide-winged chair and gasped. It was certainly twenty years since any one had dared to address him with such a want of reverence.
"You wrap yourself in paint and sattin," continued Charles. "You strut about as if you were indeed the king of a puppet show. But don't forget, Mr. Ripple, that when the puppets perform, when they make miniature love and die small deaths, the publick regards them, not the wire-puller above. The world, your world, will forget you, Mr. Ripple, when it still remembers the inconsiderable passions of your dolls."
"It does not matter, sir," the Beau interrupted in a voice tremulous with well-bred anger. "It does not matter what the world thinks of me, so long as my puppets comport themselves with taste and discretion."
"You fool," shouted Charles, "the wires are twisted."
It is improbable that any one had ever shouted in this tall white room before, and the lustres shivered at the unwonted sound, while a diminutive Dresden shepherdess, fragile as a sea-shell, lost her head, which rolled into the grate with a tinkle of dismay.
"Leave my house," said the Beau.
"Ay! and you dislike to be told that your show will presently appear ludicrous."
"Leave my house."
"Good G----! Ripple. I know I have been to blame; I know my story seems to you absurd; but, by Heaven! I swear those cursed lines were never writ by me, and since Vernon wrote them, why, z----ds, man! Can't you see his intention?"
"Leave my house."
"Very well, sir, your obedient servant."
With a very grand bow, Mr. Lovely took his leave of the Great little Man.
When he was gone, the Beau stooped to pick up the head of the diminutive Dresden shepherdess.
"Tut-tut, I doubt the join will be plainly visible," he murmured to himself.
_Chapter the Twenty-seventh_
TIME FOR REFLECTION
Mr. Lovely left the Great House enraged with the owner, with Society and, to say truth, with his own heroick self.
I do not think he was very wildly in love with Miss Courteen, but I do believe he was sincerely vexed with himself for letting her fall into Vernon's power. For a moment he seriously pondered the wisdom of warning her mother of the lengths to which the affair had gone, but upon reflection shrank from a step which would savour, in the eyes of the world, of ill-bred intrusion. After all, the girl was nothing to him, and her reputation--plague on her reputation! I trust you observe the unheroick aftermath of heroick Burgundy. Such bathos of indifference would have sounded strange in the days preceding this forenoon.
Just then my lady Bunbutter went by in her capacious chair and Charles prepared to make an elaborate bow, but her ladyship merely stared at him in cold disdain, and he was forced to buckle his shoe to save his countenance.
"So everybody knows," said Charles to himself, "Well! I shall always regard Curtain Wells with affection and remember it with regret."
He walked down the Colonnade where Miss Morton lived and, as he passed the house, thought with half a smile of Valentine Day. It seemed a century ago--that merry morning. Soon he was in the fields, where the hedges were splashed with the silver of blackthorn in profuse bloom.
He crossed a winding path, begun and ended with a notched and scrabbled kissing-gate, and, passing through a small plantation where the daffodils grew tall, went up a rounded hillside along whose clear-cut horizon great fleecy clouds moved solemnly. He stopped for a moment to glance back at Curtain Wells with the March sun spangling the rain-wet roofs before he dipped with a sigh into one of those serene valleys that are only found in England--valleys whose slopes are often darkened by the long shadows of sheep and cattle, whose hollows are bright with moist grass and in summer fragrant with spearmint and creamy meadowsweet.
He took the devious course of a narrow stream and knew the grave delights of rural meditation; yet somehow the image of Phyllida danced before him all the time and whenever he paused, the wind far away over the hillside had a melancholy and foreboding sound.
He met an elderly gentleman--a parson by the colour of his cloth--who was poking some decayed herbage with a long cane. The elderly gentleman looked up as Charles went by, gave him a 'very good morning,' and said he believed he had seen an adder enter the herbage.
"Indeed," said Charles, who thought the information given demanded an attitude of respectful surprize.
"But nothing amazes me after that wonderful February. When I tell you that half an hour ago I saw an Orange Tip butterfly, you will understand that nothing amazes me."
Charles left the Elderly Gentleman still investigating the decayed herbage reputed to contain an adder, and found himself envying a mind that could invest a day with such easy fame. He had seen an Orange Tip butterfly. Had he met grey-eyed Athene, or beheld the roses and doves of Cytherea, the day would scarcely have held a more splendid memory.
He envied the Elderly Gentleman. To be sure, with a Stoick complacency, he had announced that nothing strange in the natural order could startle him after that wonderful February, but his tone of triumphant excitement foretold an entry in his diary that very night, perhaps was the prelude to a paragraph in the _Gentleman's Magazine_.
He began to imagine the Elderly Gentleman sipping his Port before the Rectory fire, on his knees an open Concordance whose pages were illuminated by dancing butterflies, precocious heralds of the scented spring. He heard the dignified butler told of his reverend master's lucky discovery, heard him asked to hand down the calf-bound diary of such and such a faded year, heard the Elderly Gentleman's chuckle when he found, as he suspected, that the date in his own experience was unprecedented and finally heard him order a bottle of the Port in bin twelve, the first-fruits of the Assiento Agreement.
Charles fell to comparing himself to the Elderly Gentleman, greatly to his own disadvantage.
Certainly the image of Phyllida danced before him in the water meadows, eluded him at every turn and twist of the little stream, and beckoned him along this secluded valley; but his own heart did not beat with the proper amount of answering fervour.
Six weeks ago when he saw her first, all swansdown and blushes, he had been duly elated. She had occupied much of his meditations ever since, but he had no sensation of triumph, no delight in the great fact of her existence. Perhaps that was because she belonged to the world. The butterfly had belonged, as a phenomenon, to the Elderly Gentleman alone. To the rest of mankind it was a legend. The discovery would be recorded in print, but the discovery itself would flutter in secret pale wings powdered with vivid gold, and this March morning would remain a permanent fact in that Elderly Gentleman's heart. He would suffer no disillusion. If others saw that butterfly, why, then, he would enjoy the discussion of it, whether in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ beneath a learned pseudonym or over two or three glasses of Port, with details long drawn out to protract the delicious memory.
The ink is faded on the pages of those calf-bound diaries, the Latin epitaph on the Elderly Gentleman's tombstone is now nearly illegible, but since he went down to Elysium alert and heedful of the changing seasons, I believe that his spirit still listens on summer eves to the blackbirds in his beloved orchard and observes with interest and curiosity each separate harebell that blossoms above his mortal remains.
Charles went on his way with much the same thoughts about the Elderly Gentleman as I have set down for my own, and continued to envy his gift of youth.
Presently he met Margery of Baverstock Farm.
Let me remind you, she was the wench to whom Mr. Anthony Clare had paid light court back in the winter. Charles reproved him for his behaviour and apparently his friend had given up his addresses, for the milkmaid looked happy and blooming and seemed not at all displeased to giggle over a hazel wand at Mr. Charles Lovely.
"Good morning, Margery."
"Oh, good morning, zur," said Margery.
"No longer with Farmer Hogbin?"
"I be with Farmer Hogbin's brother Jahn to High Corner Farm."
"And happy?"
"Oh, 'ess, proud and happy."
"Seen Mr. Clare lately?"
Margery blushed expansively.
"Oh! naw! I an't seen him since Baverstock Barn. I be courting."
"Eh, indeed," said Charles, "and who is the shepherd?"
"Wully Pearce."
"And you'll be married soon?"
"Come barley harvest--'ess."
"I will dance at your wedding, Margery."
"We shaant have daancing, because Wully says it leads to what oughtn't to happen."
Charles made a wry face.
"Going to wed a Puritan, eh?"
"Nay," said the buxom maid. "He's carter to Farmer Jahn Hogbin."
"Then, surely, he will let you have a merry junketing at the bride-ale."
"Naw, indeed an' he wawnt, because his sister Molly when they were thrawing the stocking last year fell on her back, and Wully's fam'ly is a proud and proper fam'ly and Wully says we mun be married wi' no such nonsense."