Having made fast the doors, Mr Bailey turned his reluctant thoughts towards bed. The night was far advanced, but he felt wakeful, alert, excited; very much in the mood for adventure. Indeed in his own estimation he was already enjoying an adventure. The lady’s eyes had looked kindly upon him when she wished him good night; and throughout that all too brief interview with the strange pair he had been aware of a brightness in the wine, a flame and a delight, more disturbing than anything the grape could yield. The idea of bed repelled him. To smother this young expectancy in a blanket of sleep was not to be thought of; and to lie awake, with Sarah sleeping at his side, was still less to his fancy. He remembered, with a sort of relief, that the table at which his guests had taken their meal had been left in disorder. Here was something to do: a task outside his province indeed, but nevertheless a legitimate reason for not going to bed, and one having the additional advantage that it would save his daughter trouble in the morning, to say nothing of his wife’s temper. It was true that if Sarah woke and found him not in bed she would be perplexed and by her perplexity irritated; for she regarded the unusual, even the trivial unusual, with suspicion and dislike, herself being a person of fixed unalterable habits, a clockwork woman. But Sarah would not wake: she was safe asleep until the appointed hour for rising, and then, prompt to the minute, she would sit up, swing her plump legs out of bed, and sit for five thoughtful seconds on its edge before remarking: ‘Time to be stirring, Bailey!’ In the beginning it had been ‘Mr Bailey’, but time works wonders, and in twenty years the girl who had sirred him, and without irony, at her first surrender, had become a matron bold and casual enough to address him familiarly and think nothing of it. She had learned to take him and his odd little ways for granted; and it was his misfortune, though not perhaps a great one, that he had never learned to do the same with her. At moments he caught a glimpse of the girl she had been, and then it was in his heart to weep for her. She was a good wife, honest and faithful and stupid. But her goodness was dull and her stupidity a devastation, and it was this stupidity alone—for the years had dealt gently with her buxom person—that prevented her being handsome. With one gleam of wit, one flash of fancy, she might have been a beautiful woman: she was capable of neither. Each partner to the other was both a nuisance and a comfort; above all, a habit. Bailey was constantly trying not to wish that he had never married his wife, and often he succeeded. Tonight, as he busied himself with his self-imposed scullery duties, he made no such endeavour. A good wife, but she was not the moon, and—here lay the sting—he had never for a moment imagined that she was.
There was still some wine left in the bottle provided by the affable and generous stranger. Mr Bailey, sighing reverently in the direction of the young lady’s bedroom, fetched a clean glass, filled it, and drank to her bright eyes. Even so there remained a little wine, and this last morsel came like a benediction and a triumph, crowned his spirit with fire, and fortified him for further eccentricities of behaviour. He went back to the public parlour, rekindled the fire on the hearth, and reseated himself on the settle. He invoked his Muse, fishing from his pocket a notebook and a stub of pencil the further to encourage her. This was the night of nights; this, pre-eminently, an occasion most auspicious for the wooing of sweet Poesy. A quiet night, a lovely woman, a man fallen from greatness—what a theme! As for the form of his verses, that troubled him not at alclass="underline" his fancy seldom ranged beyond the couplet, which he had so assiduously practised as a young man in emulation of his betters. And now the golden numbers came rolling into his mind:
These lines, to their author, seemed singularly delicate and expressive. He read them through several times, and they completed his intoxication. He was astonished by his facility in composition; nor paused to wonder whether in his sober morning senses he would think so highly of himself and his verses. But already he was conscious of a diminishing flow of inspiration: ‘her young Felicity’ did not altogether satisfy him. It had an extravagant air; it was over-fancifuclass="underline" and, moreover, was it not rather his own felicity, were she won, that should be celebrated? This she of whom he sung was a phantom lady, nameless and formless and perhaps too fair for mortal imagining; but he could not deny that she looked at him now with the eyes, and spoke with the alluring lips, of one in whose company he had recently drunk wine. Even Mrs Lavender was forgotten: pretty young Mrs Lavender for whom he cherished a discreet tenderness, which was rekindled every time he received string or soap or candles across the counter of her husband’s little shop in the High Street. The fair stranger reigned unchallenged in his thoughts. In rapt if somewhat muddled contemplation of his work, and with numerous alternative rhymes to ‘he’ ringing in his mind, he fell asleep where he sat. At first he was vaguely aware of being asleep, and a drowsy satisfaction at not being in bed, at being adventurously carousing with the Muses in the small hours of the morning, like the gallant fellow he was, pursued him across the borderland and lent its colour to the crowding images of dream. But presently he quite lost sight of the waking world; his dreams came closer, surrounding him, shutting him in; he went on a long and strange voyage and gathered the fruits of eternal orchards. And then it seemed as though he were back again in his inn parlour, and watching through half-closed eyes a man in a dark cloak and a three-cornered hat tiptoeing towards the street door. He saw this apparition stop, stare in his direction, and remain for a moment very rigid, as though taking stock of him; then turn with careful step, and, proceeding on his way, draw the bolt of the door, lift the latch, and step into the moonlight. A very vivid dream, thought Mr Bailey; for he seemed positively to feel the cold air stealing in upon him from the street. But the door closed, and he sank again into deep slumber, to be roused presently by a sharp metallic clatter from outside. I know that sound, said he, with deep satisfaction: that’s horses, that is. Not one horse, but two horses. Wedded by Folly to a prior Claim. He had some notion of getting out of his seat to investigate this matter; he remembered his dream and wondered if aught was amiss. But now the clatter of hooves was a diminishing music; it vanished, beautifully, into an enchanted distance, into a past epoch, a golden time, a land misty with promise of love and idleness and a school of one’s own and a book of verses bound in morocco with the name of Erasmus Bailey Esquire on the title-page. ‘Pretty! Very pretty!’ he said aloud. ‘Clacketty clacketty clacketty clacketty . . . and away we go.’ The sound of his own voice, the movement of his own tongue, wakened him fully. He rubbed his eyes and his head; he yawned prodigiously, shivered a little, and got up. Vaguely disturbed in mind, and with some idea of putting everything right, he made his way to the door, opened it, and looked out. No one there. He nodded sagaciously at the empty street, as if to say ‘What did I tell you?’ He wagged an admonitory forefinger at himself. ‘That noise, Erasmus,’ said he, ‘was my fine gentleman taking his leave without paying his reckoning. God save the King, and confusion to traitors!’ The night air refreshed him; he stood for some few minutes quietly relishing its sharp assault.