CHAPTER VI.

THE TOWERS.

Jeanne Auvache thus continues: It all went beautifully, the landing. He had the wit, on appearing suddenly, to take upon his back the trunk of Miss Eve, which he bore over the pier to the little station, and in the dimness must have seemed to the sailors a porter, and to the porters a sailor. He did not see anyone in the light of the station, save a stationmaster in his uniform, and I praised Heaven that the train was a special one which carried none save our party. As she moved, he ran from the outer dark to the door of the compartment in which I stood beckoning him, and skipped in beautifully, so that we two went quite alone. Ah, but he trembled—all the way, so that one could see his jaws chattering anon. When I kept on saying to him, “But why do you so shiver?” he confessed to me that he felt fear. “But fear of what specially?” I asked, and when I pressed him he replied, “of Man and of my father.” I compassionated, but could scarce comprehend him, and I felt myself abashed and banished from contact with his soul, for though we were side by side, yet he was alone, and I was alone. I could only console myself with the thought that I had to do with an _ingénu_—a beautiful fault soon enough to be cured. But such an _ingénu_! one dropped down from the moon, as it looked to me. His curiosity about the train! for, to begin with, it was his terrors and tremblings that were uppermost, and then it was his curiosity struggling with them. His eyes were wide with an amazement which at first I took to be the natural amazement of a rustic suddenly plunged into the thick of the wonders of civilisation, until I learned that his amazement was not at the speed, but at the slowness, with which the train was creeping! This caused me to laugh within myself! “Why, we must be flying at fifty miles an hour,” I said to him: “how much more do you wish?” But he did not appear to pay much heed to my statements, and continued to rush about the compartment, touching this and that, now springing up to peer into the lamp, now darting down to lie and pry under the seats, gazing into the make of the window, tapping the woodwork with his fingers, all with so eager a zeal, my God! with the omnipresence of a monkey imprisoned in a crib, and trembling all the time with excitement, as I could see. What most of all amazed him was the size of the train! Why, he wished to know, was this particular train so miserable a thing, seeing that its largeness could be vastly increased with only a paltry increase of the motive force. “But are not all trains of the same size?” I said to him: “they are of a certain size, that is all; one does not know why they are so, and this is no smaller than the others.” But after starting and staring at me, in a moment, as if he regarded me as an ignoramus that did not know what I was saying, he told me with disdain that most trains were raging palaces, though this one, for some sage motive that he did not understand, was not so.

I began then to recognise that he must have lived wholly buried away from actualities amid those islands of the sea, for his ignorance of life could scarce be greater, since he harbours the most laughably large notions of the glory and achievements of beings: and I was glad within myself at this, and resolved that he should be kept like that up to the day following my marriage with him. But even as I was thinking this within myself, what was my astonishment when he informed me that I am a Frenchwoman, and spoke thenceforth to me in very passable French of Bordeaux! So that here is a rustic with a difference.

When we had arrived at Thring we found that, though the sun had not yet risen up, the night had now been replaced by daylight, and the birds were loud at their works in the silence of the world. I had by that time told him by what way to make to the brink of the river, and where to await my coming to him there under the ruin: so some moments before the train stopped he leapt from the door on the off side, and hied off over the metals. A moment more and laughter was sounding on the platform, and I looked out to see Miss Eve alighted, calling out to her father, while she fingered her now withered violets of Parma, that getting home in the dawn was like dying to earth and a getting to heaven, and immediately her father was to be seen stepping down out of his compartment, on his arm Miss Ruth, and the rest of the party trooping out after. Anne and I, having then assisted to carry the rugs to the carriages outside, set out together in the mail-phaeton for The Towers some minutes later than the others: and we found a gaiety in returning once again after so much of London and the sea, for everything is good in its turn, but a curse upon too much of any one condition of being. So down the mountain through the townlet to the river we drove in a procession, and up the mountain beyond, no one yet to be met on the roads, but one constable, and the day slowly working about us toward its birth.

After our arrival at The Towers, having first perfumed Miss Eve’s bath with the infusion of frangipane and ambergris, and then got her hair prepared while she perused an accumulation of her correspondence, I put her to bed, she impressing it upon me that I, too, must take a nap. I had other thoughts than napping, tired as I was! all my nerves tingling at the whispered word within me that love was now again by God’s goodness about to be mine in this dog’s world. The moment, therefore, that I was free, I was down and away, tapping my face with powder, taking from the larder and housemaid’s pantry a parcel of bread, meat, and preserves, and down by the river found him seated in a cavern of the cliffs, searching into the interior of wild plants which he had slit with a knife. He was still visibly atremble with excitement, but did not rise when I came to him, continuing to gaze into the make of the plants, having recognised my coming step, as I think. But on a sudden he started upright with something of a laugh, and made the remark, gazing upward at the sky and around at the girdle of mountains, that it was a world worthy of “Man” to circulate in. “It is more imposing than those islands of the sea, is it not?” said I to him, and he replied, “Yes,” for that those are mostly of bog and boulders, with hags in between, but that these parts are made of stones with strange names, so many millions of ages old; only he wished to know what creatures could live in those sheds over the river, and looked dumfounded when I informed him that they are the ordinary houses of a country townlet! But he scarce seems to believe my statements. The windows, he remarked, can only be opened half-way at the most to take in the fresh air, and when I gave him to know that all English windows are of this sort, though French windows fully open, this caused him to fall into so extraordinary a marvelling, that one had to laugh! For one kind must be ideally the better, he said, so why do we find the British tied to one kind, and the French married to another? But this I was unable to make plain to him, and he remained in his surprise.

I now went into the question of our wedding, telling him how everything could be fixed up in some days, how I found myself possessed of two hundred pounds funded out of my earnings, which amount would serve nicely for our small _ménage_, till he should have found his niche in the world; and I engaged myself to see to everything as to getting the licence from the surrogate, as I desired him meanwhile to hide in the church-steeple near St. Peter, whither twice a day I would fetch him a meal: for I did not wish him to see the world at all as yet, and so, working on his awes as to his father, I warned him that he would certainly be caught, if he but once looked forth of his hiding; though, _after_ our marriage, I said, he could safely range out anywhere, since the laws would not allow his father to take him out of his spouse’s arms.

As to this he bent his head; but as to bringing him meals, he made the observation that that was not worth the trouble, inasmuch as he frequently exercised himself in abstaining from eating for a week at a time, and he asked if he might not remain in the cave where he was, in order that he might peep at the people passing over the opposite rivershore: to which, as I could see no reason against it, I gave my consent, and even agreed that he should come to meet me in the east shrubbery of The Towers that evening about nine. So, having given him to observe the zig-zag running down round the mountain’s brow from The Towers, I ran from him.