Jimmy Quixote: A Novel

CHAPTER IV

THE ELOPING PERSONS

That was a night against which a black mark had afterwards to be set in the memory of Paul Nannock. It had seemed such a simple thing, and so inevitable – that promise to which he had been forced, and which would have meant, with anyone else, a mere matter of an idle stroll and a little easy talk. But with this man the children stood first; and ever in the front rank of them stood Moira, child of the woman he had loved. The absurdity of regarding the little expedition with Honora Jackman seriously occurred to him more than once, and yet he shrank from it; and the fact that the sensitive child who was so near to his heart had stamped it with her disapproval meant much to Paul. It was a desertion on his part, and she had answered it by a desertion of her own. Paul sat up later than usual, in the hope that she might after all come creeping down to his room; but she never appeared.

He stole upstairs at last, miserably enough, and listened at the door of her room. All was silent, and he told himself that she had forgotten, and had fallen asleep. Had he known that she lay in her bed, wide-awake, fighting out jealously the bitter problem in her mind, it would have been a matter of his hurrying in in the darkness, and taking her in his arms, and promising I know not what. But he did not know that, and he went upstairs to his own room.

In a new bravery induced by the darkness he determined that on the morrow he would invent an excuse, and would get out of the engagement with Honora; in a more sober and reflective moment he knew that he would do no such thing; the affair must be gone through with, and he must contrive in some fashion to make his peace with Moira afterwards.

The relations between the child and the man were so curious and so subtle, that no real explanation of anything that troubled them could ever be made between them. Their sympathy one with the other was so great, that it had long ago become a mutual business of give-and-take; the sensitive little creature had come to learn long since that no words were necessary, and that the mere taking of her into Old Paul's arms in silence meant much, and atoned for much, and explained everything. Gentle as she was, she resented bitterly and fiercely any interference with the man; he was all her world, and she must stand first with him, or her world crumbled into dust. And Paul had long ago come to understand that, and to understand that he must be watchful. The thought of it troubled him now; the impossibility of explaining to Moira that this was a mere act of politeness to Honora Jackman struck him with a sense of comical dismay.

He slept badly, and rose early; he was glad to get out into the air and into his garden before anyone was stirring; there was every promise of a perfect long summer day before him. Well, he would be done with Honora Jackman in a matter of an hour or so; the rest of the day was his own. Yet how he longed even to be rid of the responsibility of that hour or so!

He went back into the house and into his room, and set about preparing for himself a cup of coffee. He very often did that in the early morning, before anyone was about. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was not quite six. He was bending over the little spirit stove, when he suddenly drew himself upright and listened; for there was a sound of little feet upon the stair.

The sound drew nearer, while he listened a little guiltily. Then the door was pushed open, and Moira came in; and for a moment the man and the child looked deep into each other's souls.

"Hullo, Moira!" said Paul at last. "You're up early."

She did not reply; she walked across to him, and put up her face for a kiss. He did not dare even to whisper a question as to the previous night; he was casting about in his mind for the best thing to say under these tragic circumstances. The pride of the child forbade that she should even breathe the name of her rival; so that each waited and wondered what was best to be said. Had the simple Paul but known, however, Moira had already made up her mind what to do with him; had been thinking it out during the night.

Paul was sipping his coffee, and furtively glancing at the child, when he saw that she was about to speak. She was leaning against him, and his arm encircled her; almost he could feel her thin young body quiver with the eagerness of the question, although she spoke quietly enough.

"Old Paul – what do you do when you love anybody?"

"Do?" Paul set down his cup, and twisted the child about, the better to look into her eyes. "Oh, you just – just love 'em," he replied feebly.

"Oh!" The child lowered her eyes, and seemed to be pondering deeply. Finally she spoke, tracing a vein on the back of the man's hand with one finger as she said the words, and looking down at that finger. "Patience says that sometimes, when you're in that state, you elope."

"Patience seems to know a lot about it," said Paul. "Look here, old lady – what are you driving at? We're quite alone, you know – and I'll never breathe a word about it."

"Patience says that sometimes there's somebody in the way – 'somebody who stands between,' was what she said; and in that case you steal out quietly, and you rush away, and you never get caught. At least, that is, in the best eloping cases," she added, thoughtfully.

"And you only do that when somebody stands between?" whispered Paul. "Somebody, for instance, who is a little bit in the way?"

She did not look up at him; she only nodded quickly. As he looked at her, he saw a bright drop fall on his hand, but he was too wise to say anything; he went on in an unaltered tone:

"Someone, for instance, who would take – shall we say me, for argument? – away for a time; that is, of course, if they could. But, dear" – he drew her a little closer to him – "I don't really want to go."

"But of course there are things you must do, unless somebody else is brave enough to help you," she whispered. "That's why it seemed to me on such a day, that we might, if we were very quiet about it, elope!" She raised her eyes for the first time, and the eyes were laughing. "It isn't a serious business, Old Paul; and we could be back in time for supper."

"It is a serious business," he replied. "It's a desperate business. We might be pursued by that – that other person."

"There's not a moment to be lost, Old Paul," she cried, slipping out of his embrace, and dancing light-footed and light-hearted round the room. "Come at once!"

"Eloping persons generally have a carriage, and they drive at top speed," suggested Old Paul. "We must do the thing properly, you know."

"There is the Ancient One," replied Moira instantly.

"To be sure; I never thought of the Ancient One," he replied.

Now the Ancient One was an aged and somewhat dejected donkey, who had been bought out of sheer charity by Old Paul under distressing circumstances. Originally the Ancient One had been attached to a cart owned by a gipsy; and Paul had come upon the gipsy belabouring the animal unmercifully upon a country-road. Moira had been with him; she remembered to this hour all that had happened on that wonderful and exciting occasion.

Old Paul had first of all taken off his coat, and folded it neatly, and laid it on the bank; and then a moment later he and the gipsy were "all arms and legs," as Moira expressed it afterwards, "about the road."

It had ended in the gipsy being discovered, as they say in the plays, seated with a swollen face on the opposite bank, and bewailing his hard lot; while Old Paul stood over him, and asked what he wanted for the Ancient One. (They christened him the Ancient One afterwards, because Paul said that donkeys never died, and that this one ought to have died years before.)

Paul had paid certain bright sovereigns for the Ancient One, and had led him home in triumph, with Moira poised upon his back. After that an old chaise had been discovered, hidden away in the stable of an inn; and that had been a mere matter of seventeen shillings; and this was the equipage in which these eloping persons were to start.

But first, of course, there were preparations. You cannot elope without careful consideration; and it was more than possible that they might be hungry before the day was out and they crept home to supper. Going hand in hand and on tip-toe guiltily, they stole from the larder bread and cheese and a bottle of milk; moreover, Paul made an uncouth sandwich or two in a desperate hurry. When all this had been tied up in a cloth, they went out of the house in search of the Ancient One and the chaise.

By all the rules of the great game it was necessary, as Old Paul carefully explained in a whisper, that he should be waiting in the carriage in a lane, until the lady could escape and join him. Therefore, the better to keep up that fiction, Moira hid in the bushes until three shrill whistles sounded from outside the garden; then she crept out to meet her lover; and Old Paul (the dog must have been through this before, to understand it so well!) received her, hat in hand – a difficult process, because he had to hold the Ancient One with the other hand, and the Ancient One was kicking; but Moira, radiantly happy, got into the chaise, and sat bright-eyed and demure; then Old Paul climbed in beside her, and after a preliminary tussle with the Ancient One, started him on his journey.

Properly speaking, the Ancient One should have gone at top speed, with dust flying and the chaise rocking perilously. But there was no top speed about that animal; instead, he crawled along in a zig-zag fashion, just as tempting grass lured him at either side of the road; while Old Paul sat, leaning forward, with the reins hanging loose in his hands, the while he talked to Moira. For they were going out into the big world, these two, if only for a day; and it was a wonderful place to each innocent pair of eyes, unexplored and beautiful. Somewhere or other, when the Ancient One should have condescended to drag them to the spot, they were to have breakfast, and to discuss the plans for the day.

In that, again, Old Paul showed his absolute genius; you might have imagined that he would have stopped in some secluded spot, and have opened that precious cloth which contained the provisions he had so artfully prepared; but not a bit of it; he had other ideas than that for such an occasion. Presently, if you please, the Ancient One was turned unresisting into an old stable yard attached to an equally old inn; there to dream in a little while of the Elysian Fields, amid a generous bounty of hay. By that time a wondering landlady had conducted Old Paul and the child to a room upstairs, where in the mere twinkling of an eye a cloth was spread upon the table, and a round-faced, open-eyed young female had bounced in and out with knives and forks and cups and plates. For by that time the Ancient One had been examined, and the very chaise appraised; and the story was abroad of this wonderful young man who had come suddenly as it were into the deserted place, and had mysteriously ordered breakfast.

The landlady herself waited upon them; hovered about them, indeed, with hands upraised, and with stifled exclamations of wonder and delight. It was difficult to get rid of her; she came in on the mere pretext of picking up a crumb from the floor; there was no delicacy about her. When, however, it had at last dawned upon her that her presence was an outrage, the two settled down to their meal; and the dark eyes looked into the blue ones contentedly and happily; and the blue ones smiled back; for even Moira knew that this was the proper thing to do on an elopement.

They grew quite confidential over that meal – more confidential, in fact, than they had ever been. It was as though they had been lifted out of their ordinary world, and set down in an enchanted one somewhere else; the ordinary conditions of life had slipped past them; and could be lightly forgotten. Old Paul told her something of the days when he had been a boy, something of his life in a time that seemed now far off, lying back in the shadows. And Moira learned, to her surprise, that in that time Patience had been with him, and had even then, as it seemed to his remembrance, been quite old.

"I was a little chap, and I remember that we were all very poor, Moira," he said across the table. "But always Patience was there; she looked after my mother a lot, when my mother seemed only to be a young girl. Then heaps and heaps of riches came to me, too late for the young girl who was my mother, but still I had Patience with me; which accounts, you see," he added whimsically, "for her being there now, and understanding me so well. If sometimes you think she's hard and stern, dear, you've only got to remember that I've given her a lot of trouble in my time, and made her anxious about me. I've taken a deal of watching, Moira."

"You have, Old Paul," she retorted, with a remembrance of her rescue of him that day. "You might have been quite destroyed if we hadn't looked after you carefully," she added, with her elbows on the table and her chin propped in her palms.

"Do you know," he said, looking across at her gratefully, "although I wouldn't mention it to a soul, I shall never know quite how to thank you for to-day. This elopement of ours has quite put matters straight; I should never have thought of it myself at all."

"Patience says that it takes a woman to manage things," retorted Moira wisely.

They found the Ancient One less inclined to move than ever after his feasting; indeed, Moira declared that it was a little difficult to fit him in between the shafts. But they got him started, and went away on another unknown expedition, with the whole inn to watch them, including the landlady and the bouncing female who had brought in the knives and forks and plates. At the last moment the Ancient One decided that he would return to the hay, and it became necessary for Old Paul to lead him out into the high road, and for the landlady and the bouncing one to push the chaise behind; while Moira, in a high state of dignity, sat in the chaise, and strove hard not to laugh. For Old Paul saying pretty things to the donkey while he led him was certainly funny.

Paul had been thoughtful in regard to the home-coming, and the landlady had received secret orders, so that by the time the long bright day was ending, and the shadows were lengthening across the roads and fields, they came, in some unaccountable fashion, by a circuitous route back to the inn again; there to find the landlady, apparently moved to astonishment at their re-appearance, and yet with a sumptuous meal on the way. Moira was handed over to the care of the motherly woman and the bouncing maid, while Paul smoked a pipe, and lounged in a deep window seat, and looked out over the darkening fields. And presently the child came down, radiant and hungry, with her attendant slaves hovering about her. The man and the child ate their meal in the dusk of the room, with only their eyes for lights – the one for the other.

"It's been the most wonderful elopement possible," said Moira, with a deep sigh of contentment. "I'm sure that even the Ancient One will remember it to his dying day – that is, if he ever dies at all."

"I wouldn't have missed it for the world," said Paul.

A little jealous feeling crept in, even in the midst of Moira's happiness; she stole round the table, and got an arm about his neck, and whispered:

"Have you thought about her at all, Old Paul?"

"Once – but not seriously," he whispered. "But I don't like you to say that, dear," he added.

"That's because you don't understand," she breathed, with her lips against his cheek. "I should have died if I had thought of you in the woods with her; I could not have borne it. Promise me, Old Paul – promise me truly?"

"What, little maid?" he whispered.

"Promise me that never in all your life will you elope with anybody but me. Let me know that no one else will be taken away by you like this. Let this be my own – my very own elopement."

And Old Paul most solemnly promised.

They drove home under a kindly moon and stars; and by that time Moira was nearly asleep. Jogging along through the country lanes, Old Paul as he held the reins and kept an arm about the child, dreamed dreams. Dreamed, perhaps, that this might have been the woman who had died; that in such a fashion he might have travelled through an impossible world of moonshine and of starshine with her, and been impossibly happy. Almost he came to think that by the love of the child he had won back to the love of the mother; that the disaster that had touched his life was a thing to be forgotten – something long since atoned for, alike in death and by the gift of this baby. The love his young manhood had known for the mother seemed to be swallowed up in this purer, finer love for the child; he came back, at the end of his perfect day, secure in that love at least.

By the time the sleepy Ancient One stopped at the gate in the wall Moira was awake again; she suffered herself to be lifted from the chaise, and so to face the commonplace world again. She stood, swaying a little with sleep, in the warm dusk; she became dimly conscious that someone was surveying her through a bright eyeglass. That was the crowning moment of her triumph, and she did not need to say anything in explanation.

"I was taking a stroll," sounded the high voice of Honora Jackman. "Where have you been hiding all day, you two?"

Old Paul felt the warm fingers of the child tighten about his hand; he knew what answer he must give. "Well, as a matter of fact," he replied blandly, "Moira and I have been away all day – on a little excursion." The fingers tightened still more, and he plunged desperately into the full truth. "We – we eloped together early this morning; and it has been a wonderful day."

That was enough; impelled by the stern hand of Moira he was swept past Honora Jackman, and was drawn towards the house, leading the Ancient One. It was the hour of Moira's triumph, and she would not have abated one jot of it. The shrill little laugh the woman gave was the final beautiful note of it.

Only Anthony Ditchburn seemed to have suffered. He came querulously to Paul that night – looking in with a scared face, and with glances over his shoulder, as though in fear of pursuit.