John Halifax, Gentleman Part 25

"You are incorrigible."

Yet, through all his fun, I detected a certain under-tone of seriousness, observable in him ever since my father's declaration of his intentions concerning him, had, so to speak, settled John's future career. He seemed aware of some crisis in his life, arrived or impending, which disturbed the generally even balance of his temperament.

"Nay, I'll be serious;" and pa.s.sing over the unfinished verse, with another or two following, he began afresh, in a new place, and in an altogether changed tone.

"'His certain life, that never can deceive him, Is full of thousand sweets and rich content; The smooth-leaved beeches in the field receive him With coolest shades till noon-tide's rage is spent; His life is neither tost on boisterous seas Of troublous worlds, nor lost in slothful ease.

Pleased and full blest he lives, when he his G.o.d can please.

'His bed of wool yields safe and quiet sleeps, While by his side his faithful spouse hath place; His little son into his bosom creeps, The lively image of his father's face; Never his humble house or state torment him, Less he could like, if less his G.o.d had sent him; And when he dies, green turfs with gra.s.sy tomb content him.'"

John ceased. He was a good reader--but I had never heard him read like this before. Ending, one missed it like the breaking of music, or like the inner voice of one's own heart talking when n.o.body is by.

"David," I said, after a pause, "what are you thinking about?"

He started, with his old quick blush--"Oh, nothing--No, that's not quite true. I was thinking that, so far as happiness goes, this 'shepherd's' is my ideal of a happy life--ay, down to the 'gra.s.sy tomb.'"

"Your fancy leaps at once to the gra.s.sy tomb; but the shepherd enjoyed a few intermediate stages of felicity before that."

"I was thinking of those likewise."

"Then you do intend some day to have a 'faithful spouse and a little son'?"

"I hope so--G.o.d willing."

It may seem strange, but this was the first time our conversation had ever wandered in a similar direction. Though he was twenty and I twenty-two--to us both--and I thank Heaven that we could both look up in the face of Heaven and say so!--to us both, the follies and wickednesses of youth were, if not equally unknown, equally and alike hateful. Many may doubt, or smile at the fact; but I state it now, in my old age, with honour and pride, that we two young men that day trembled on the subject of love as shyly, as reverently, as delicately, as any two young maidens of innocent sixteen.

After John's serious "G.o.d willing," there was a good long silence.

Afterwards, I said--

"Then you propose to marry?"

"Certainly! as soon as I can."

"Have you ever--" and, while speaking, I watched him narrowly, for a sudden possibility flashed across my mind--"Have you ever seen any one whom you would like for your wife?"

"No."

I was satisfied. John's single "No" was as conclusive as a score of a.s.severations.

We said no more; but after one of those pauses of conversation which were habitual to us--John used to say, that the true test of friends.h.i.+p was to be able to sit or walk together for a whole hour in perfect silence, without wearying of one another's company--we again began talking about Enderley.

I soon found, that in this plan, my part was simply acquiescence; my father and John had already arranged it all. I was to be in charge of the latter; nothing could induce Abel Fletcher to leave, even for a day, his house, his garden, and his tan-yard. We two young men were to set up for a month or two our bachelor establishment at Mrs. Tod's: John riding thrice a-week over to Norton Bury to bring news of me, and to fulfil his duties at the tan-yard. One could see plain enough--and very grateful to me was the sight--that whether or no Abel Fletcher acknowledged it, his right hand in all his business affairs was the lad John Halifax.

On a lovely August day we started for Enderley. It was about eight miles off, on a hilly, cross-country road. We lumbered slowly along in our post-chaise; I leaning back, enjoying the fresh air, the changing views, and chiefly to see how intensely John enjoyed them too.

He looked extremely well to-day--handsome, I was about to write; but John was never, even in his youth, "handsome." Nay, I have heard people call him "plain"; but that was not true. His face had that charm, perhaps the greatest, certainly the most lasting, either in women or men--of infinite variety. You were always finding out something--an expression strange as tender, or the track of a swift, brilliant thought, or an indication of feeling different from, perhaps deeper than, anything which appeared before. When you believed you had learnt it line by line it would startle you by a phase quite new, and beautiful as new. For it was not one of your impa.s.sive faces, whose owners count it pride to harden into a ma.s.s of stone those lineaments which nature made as the flesh and blood representation of the man's soul. True, it had its reticences, its sacred disguises, its n.o.ble powers of silence and self-control. It was a fair-written, open book; only, to read it clearly, you must come from its own country, and understand the same language.

For the rest, John was decidedly like the "David" whose name I still gave him now and then--"a goodly person;" tall, well-built, and strong.

"The glory of a young man is his strength;" and so I used often to think, when I looked at him. He always dressed with extreme simplicity; generally in grey, he was fond of grey; and in something of our Quaker fas.h.i.+on. On this day, I remember, I noticed an especial carefulness of attire, at his age neither unnatural nor unbecoming.

His well-fitting coat and long-flapped vest, garnished with the snowiest of lawn frills and ruffles; his knee-breeches, black silk hose, and shoes adorned with the largest and brightest of steel buckles, made up a costume, which, quaint as it would now appear, still is, to my mind, the most suitable and graceful that a young man can wear. I never see any young men now who come at all near the picture which still remains in my mind's eye of John Halifax as he looked that day.

Once, with the natural sensitiveness of youth, especially of youth that has struggled up through so many opposing circ.u.mstances as his had done, he noticed my glance.

"Anything amiss about me, Phineas? You see I am not much used to holidays and holiday clothes."

"I have nothing to say against either you or your clothes," replied I, smiling.

"That's all right; I beg to state, it is entirely in honour of you and of Enderley that I have slipped off my tan-yard husk, and put on the gentleman."

"You couldn't do that, John. You couldn't put on what you were born with."

He laughed--but I think he was pleased.

We had now come into a hilly region. John leaped out and gained the top of the steep road long before the post-chaise did. I watched him standing, balancing in his hands the riding-whip which had replaced the everlasting rose-switch, or willow-wand, of his boyhood. His figure was outlined sharply against the sky, his head thrown backward a little, as he gazed, evidently with the keenest zest, on the breezy flat before him. His hair--a little darker than it used to be, but of the true Saxon colour still, and curly as ever--was blown about by the wind, under his broad hat. His whole appearance was full of life, health, energy, and enjoyment.

I thought any father might have been proud of such a son, any sister of such a brother, any young girl of such a lover. Ay, that last tie, the only one of the three that was possible to him--I wondered how long it would be before times changed, and I ceased to be the only one who was proud of him.

We drove on a little further, and came to the chief landmark of the high moorland--a quaint hostelry, called the "Bear." Bruin swung aloft pole in hand, brown and fierce, on an old-fas.h.i.+oned sign, as he and his progenitors had probably swung for two centuries or more.

"Is this Enderley?" I asked.

"Not quite, but near it. You never saw the sea? Well, from this point I can show you something very like it. Do you see that gleaming bit in the landscape far away? That's water--that's our very own Severn, swelled to an estuary. But you must imagine the estuary--you can only get that tiny peep of water, glittering like a great diamond that some young t.i.taness has flung out of her necklace down among the hills."

"David, you are actually growing poetical."

"Am I? Well, I do feel rather strange to-day--crazy like; a high wind always sends me half crazy with delight. Did you ever feel such a breeze? And there's something so gloriously free in this high level common--as flat as if my t.i.taness had found a little Mont Blanc, and amused herself with patting it down like a dough-cake."

"A very culinary G.o.ddess."

"Yes! but a G.o.ddess after all. And her dough-cake, her mushroom, her flattened Mont Blanc, is very fine. What a broad green sweep--nothing but sky and common, common and sky. This is Enderley Flat. We shall come to its edge soon, where it drops abruptly into such a pretty valley. There, look down--that's the church. We are on a level with the top of its tower. Take care, my lad,"--to the post-boy, who was crossing with difficulty the literally "pathless waste."--"Don't lurch us into the quarry-pits, or topple us at once down the slope, where we shall roll over and over--facilis descensus Averni--and lodge in Mrs.

Tod's garden hedge."

"Mrs. Tod would feel flattered if she knew Latin. You don't look upon our future habitation as a sort of Avernus?"

John laughed merrily. "No, as I told you before, I like Enderley Hill.

I can't tell why, but I like it. It seems as if I had known the place before. I feel as if we were going to have great happiness here."

And as he spoke, his unwonted buoyancy softened into a quietness of manner more befitting that word "happiness." Strange word! hardly in my vocabulary. Yet, when he uttered it, I seemed to understand it and to be content.

We wound a little way down the slope, and came in front of Rose Cottage. It was well named. I never in my life had seen such a bush of bloom. They hung in cl.u.s.ters--those roses--a dozen in a group; pressing their pinky cheeks together in a ma.s.s of family fragrance, pus.h.i.+ng in at the parlour window, climbing up even to the very attic.

There was a yellow jasmine over the porch at one front door, and a woodbine at the other; the cottage had two entrances, each distinct.

But the general impression it gave, both as to sight and scent, was of roses--nothing but roses.

"How are you, Mrs. Tod?" as a comely, middle-aged body appeared at the right-hand doorway, dressed sprucely in one of those things Jael called a "coat and jacket," likewise a red calamanco petticoat tucked up at the pocket-holes.

"I be pretty fair, sir--be you the same? The children ha' not forgotten you--you see, Mr. Halifax."

"So much the better!" and he patted two or three little white heads, and tossed the youngest high up in the air. It looked very strange to see John with a child in his arms.