“Good heavens!” said the young man. “Look here, sir. I don’t know if you know the state of affairs. This lady and I wish to get married. You see what’s happened? Cart smashed. If you could give us a lift——”
He spoke very pleasantly and yet earnestly. Masson bore no grudge against him. As he hesitated, the squire’s daughter came from the hedge bank, where she had been sitting, into the light of his lamps.
“You will forgive me, won’t you?” she said winningly. “It was my only chance of getting away. I was frantic.” She looked very piteous and pretty in the light of the lamps. “You will, won’t you?” she repeated.
“Certainly,” said Masson; “there’s nothing to forgive. Pray get in. I ought to think myself lucky to have been the young man, if it was only for ten minutes.”
“Come, Dick—quick!” cried the squire’s daughter.
The young man let the horse go and climbed into the car.
“Just in time, I think,” he said, as Masson backed a little and slipped the car past the fallen trap to a loud chorus of “Stop, you rogue!”
“Good night, squire!” they all cried, as they went ahead through the thin, falling rain.
Later on, when Masson accepted an invitation to be best man at the wedding of Mr. Richard Castle with Miss Judith Trelawney, he realised that he had not come so badly out of that silver thaw. He felt magnanimous, in fact.
I am not a man naturally fond of adventure, but on the contrary have preserved from earliest youth an ambition to stay at home and watch from a sunny window-seat the orderly course of humanity along an orderly street.
Fortune, however, by depriving my parents of everything except myself, and myself of everything except a flute, made me a raggle-taggle wanderer, dependent for my livelihood on the charms of music.
Ignorant of luxury through the exigencies of a nomadic existence, I owned nevertheless a very fastidious taste which often led me to despise the miseries of my situation—so much so that I believe I would rather a thousand times depend on the hard ground than sacrifice my sensibility in the endurance of an uncongenial bedfellow.
So much by way of explaining the following adventure, which was actually produced by my inability to suffer a common hardship of the wanderer’s lot.