The hounds caught sight of the fox, burst into one frantic shriek of joy—and then a sudden and ghastly stillness, as, mute and breathless, they toiled up the hillside, gaining on their victim at every stride. The patter of the horsehoofs and the rattle of rolling flints died away above. Lancelot looked up, startled at the silence; laughed aloud, he knew not why, and sat, regardless of his pawing and straining horse, still staring at the chapel and the graves.
On a sudden the chapel-door opened, and a figure, timidly yet loftily stepped out without observing him, and suddenly turning round, met him full, face to face, and stood fixed with surprise as completely as Lancelot himself.
That face and figure, and the spirit which spoke through them, entered his heart at once, never again to leave it. Her features were aquiline and grand, without a shade of harshness; her eyes shone out like twain lakes of still azure, beneath a broad marble cliff of polished forehead; her rich chestnut hair rippled downward round the towering neck. With her perfect masque and queenly figure, and earnest, upward gaze, she might have been the very model from which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherine—the ideal of the highest womanly genius, softened into self-forgetfulness by girlish devotion. She was simply, almost coarsely dressed; but a glance told him that she was a lady, by the courtesy of man as well as by the will of God.
They gazed one moment more at each other—but what is time to spirits? With them, as with their Father, ‘one day is as a thousand years.’ But that eye-wedlock was cut short the next instant by the decided interference of the horse, who, thoroughly disgusted at his master’s whole conduct, gave a significant shake of his head, and shamming frightened (as both women and horses will do when only cross), commenced a war-dance, which drove Argemone Lavington into the porch, and gave the bewildered Lancelot an excuse for dashing madly up the hill after his companions.
‘What a horrible ugly face!’ said Argemone to herself, ‘but so clever, and so unhappy!’
Blest pity! true mother of that graceless scamp, young Love, who is ashamed of his real pedigree, and swears to this day that he is the child of Venus!—the coxcomb!
* * * * *
[Here, for the sake of the reader, we omit, or rather postpone a long dissertation on the famous Erototheogonic chorus of Aristophanes’s Birds, with illustrations taken from all earth and heaven, from the Vedas and Proclus to Jacob Boëhmen and Saint Theresa.]
‘The dichotomy of Lancelot’s personality,’ as the Germans would call it, returned as he dashed on. His understanding was trying to ride, while his spirit was left behind with Argemone. Hence loose reins and a looser seat. He rolled about like a tipsy man, holding on, in fact, far more by his spurs than by his knees, to the utter infuriation of Shiver-the-timbers, who kicked and snorted over the down like one of Mephistopheles’s Demon-steeds. They had mounted the hill—the deer fled before them in terror—they neared the park palings. In the road beyond them the hounds were just killing their fox, struggling and growling in fierce groups for the red gobbets of fur, a panting, steaming ring of horses round them. Half a dozen voices hailed him as he came up.
‘Where have you been?’ ‘He’ll tumble off!’ ‘He’s had a fall!’ ‘No he hasn’t!’ ‘’Ware hounds, man alive!’ ‘He’ll break his neck!’
‘He has broken it, at last!’ shouted the colonel, as Shiver-the-timbers rushed at the high pales, out of breath, and blind with rage. Lancelot saw and heard nothing till he was awakened from his dream by the long heave of the huge brute’s shoulder, and the maddening sensation of sweeping through the air over the fence. He started, checked the curb, the horse threw up his head, fulfilling his name by driving his knees like a battering-ram against the pales—the top-bar bent like a withe, flew out into a hundred splinters, and man and horse rolled over headlong into the hard flint-road.
For one long sickening second Lancelot watched the blue sky between his own knees. Then a crash as if a shell had burst in his face—a horrible grind—a sheet of flame—and the blackness of night. Did you ever feel it, reader?
When he awoke, he found himself lying in bed, with Squire Lavington sitting by him. There was real sorrow in the old man’s face, ‘Come to himself!’ and a great joyful oath rolled out. ‘The boldest rider of them all! I wouldn’t have lost him for a dozen ready-made spick and span Colonel Bracebridges!’
‘Quite right, squire!’ answered a laughing voice from behind the curtain. ‘Smith has a clear two thousand a year, and I live by my wits!’
CHAPTER II: SPRING YEARNINGS
I heard a story the other day of our most earnest and genial humorist, who is just now proving himself also our most earnest and genial novelist. ‘I like your novel exceedingly,’ said a lady; ‘the characters are so natural—all but the baronet, and he surely is overdrawn: it is impossible to find such coarseness in his rank of life!’
The artist laughed. ‘And that character,’ said he, ‘is almost the only exact portrait in the whole book.’
So it is. People do not see the strange things which pass them every day. ‘The romance of real life’ is only one to the romantic spirit. And then they set up for critics, instead of pupils; as if the artist’s business was not just to see what they cannot see—to open their eyes to the harmonies and the discords, the miracles and the absurdities, which seem to them one uniform gray fog of commonplaces.
Then let the reader believe, that whatsoever is commonplace in my story is my own invention. Whatsoever may seem extravagant or startling is most likely to be historic fact, else I should not have dared to write it down, finding God’s actual dealings here much too wonderful to dare to invent many fresh ones for myself.
Lancelot, who had had a severe concussion of the brain and a broken leg, kept his bed for a few weeks, and his room for a few more. Colonel Bracebridge installed himself at the Priory, and nursed him with indefatigable good-humour and few thanks. He brought Lancelot his breakfast before hunting, described the run to him when he returned, read him to sleep, told him stories of grizzly bear and buffalo-hunts, made him laugh in spite of himself at extempore comic medleys, kept his tables covered with flowers from the conservatory, warmed his chocolate, and even his bed. Nothing came amiss to him, and he to nothing. Lancelot longed at first every hour to be rid of him, and eyed him about the room as a bulldog does the monkey who rides him. In his dreams he was Sinbad the Sailor, and Bracebridge the Old Man of the Sea; but he could not hold out against the colonel’s merry bustling kindliness, and the almost womanish tenderness of his nursing. The ice thawed rapidly; and one evening it split up altogether, when Bracebridge, who was sitting drawing by Lancelot’s sofa, instead of amusing himself with the ladies below, suddenly threw his pencil into the fire, and broke out, à propos de rien—
‘What a strange pair we are, Smith! I think you just the best fellow I ever met, and you hate me like poison—you can’t deny it.’
There was something in the colonel’s tone so utterly different from his usual courtly and measured speech, that Lancelot was taken completely by surprise, and stammered out—
‘I—I—I—no—no. I know I am very foolish—ungrateful. But I do hate you,’ he said, with a sudden impulse, ‘and I’ll tell you why.’
‘Give me your hand,’ quoth the colonel: ‘I like that. Now we shall see our way with each other, at least.’
‘Because,’ said Lancelot slowly, ‘because you are cleverer than I, readier than I, superior to me in every point.’
The colonel laughed, not quite merrily. Lancelot went on, holding down his shaggy brows.
‘I am a brute and an ass!—And yet I do not like to tell you so. For if I am an ass,