HOW BURROUGH HAD THE VISION.

Burrough was thirty-five, at which age most men have closed the romantic chapter of their lives. Most men also go forth as knight-errants to seek their adventures; Burrough had waited for his to come to him. He did not look his age. He was a handsome giant, slightly over six feet in height, and broad in proportion; his face was clean-shaven; his hair was fair; his eyes were blue. He was also clever—too clever for the work-a-day world. He had taken classical honours; only a second-class because his health broke down. For some years he managed to maintain himself by contributing essays and reviews to various periodicals, until the atmosphere of Fleet Street became too much for his lungs, and, on the advice of an eminent specialist, he removed to Dartmoor, where he built a tiny cottage beside a gorge, in a dreary solitude upon the moor near the village of Lew.

He became well and strong in the bracing air, but with the return of health came also the sense of his loneliness. His cottage was quite apart from the village. It was surrounded by great boulders of granite, heather, gorse, bracken and whortleberries. He could not afford a housekeeper. A woman came out from the village twice a week to put the place in order. For the rest he was alone. He mended his own clothes and prepared his own meals.

Being clever with his hands, Burrough had assisted in the building of his cottage. He had done all the painting and made a good deal of the furniture. The interior was really comfortable. The cottage was not beautiful externally; it was built of granite and roofed with corrugated iron. Creepers would not grow up it on account of the winds. Gorse and heather were thick beside the walls. The windows overlooked a gorge. In winter the water in this gorge would rise and roar so loudly as to make conversation difficult. Not much conversation took place in the cottage. Burrough had only his cat to argue with.

Within, the change was startling. To cross the threshold was literally to step from dreariness into comfort. One step led from the barren moor into a room of refinement: one second it was granite, bog, and heath; the next green curtains, shaded lamps, old books, and pictures. Burrough was proud of his little home. Every morning he swept and dusted it while he waited for the kettle to boil. He never allowed his fire to go out. It was easy to smother it with a couple of turves before going to bed, and these turves were always warm and glowing in the morning.

Burrough felt that a change had come over him as he walked back from the secret nook, with the hairpin in his pocket, and the measurement of the tiny footprint in his brain. A change had come over the weather too; black clouds were racing across the High Willhays range, and the rain began before the ugly tin roof of the cottage beside the gorge appeared beneath the tors. Burrough liked to feel the wind and rain. The storm suited his mood. How foolish he had been to try and banish the thoughts of love! He thought he had not needed it. He thought he could live and work without it. He had kept his inclinations subdued for years, but some force had been secretly at work undermining his resolution all the time. He had always been a shy man in the presence of women. He had envied the ease with which young fellows would address girls, while he would withdraw to a corner and look on, feeling somehow that such pleasures were not for him. He did not know how to address young women of his own class. He had nothing to offer them. He believed that a woman would not look at a man if he could not give her fine clothes, jewellery, a mansion, position in society, and as much money to spend as she wanted. That had always been his wrong-headed idea of love. It was what the world had taught him. Love was a thing to be bought easily, and won with difficulty.

Burrough neglected his work that evening. Outside the wind howled, and the water in the gorge roared. He sat in his easy-chair, smoking more than was good for him, worrying over his poverty, and thinking all the time of the golden hairpin in his pocket and the dainty footprint in the sand. His big black cat was seated on the rug, blinking at the flames, and purring a short stave whenever he felt the touch of his master’s foot.

“Advise me, King o’ the Cats,” said Burrough at length. He was accustomed thus to address his sole companion. “Don’t you think it’s folly and madness for a man to live alone? If there are more women than men in the world, surely there must be one for me. I’m in love at the present moment, King o’ the Cats, hopelessly in love, over head and ears in love, you blinking, purring, many-wived Solomon. No man has ever been more in love, though I don’t know who she is. Attend to me—rake, roué, blasé old bigamist! Why should I keep you in affluence and much matrimony, and myself in poverty and singleness of life? Tell me that, King o’ the Cats. I have as much right to my one wife as you to your dozen.”

Peter yawned, and made preparations for slumber.

“She wouldn’t come here though,” Burrough went on. “She wouldn’t come to the doll’s house, to my granite ark with its roof of tin. It would be coming down too low, King o’ the Cats. She couldn’t do it. Fancy her trailing silks and laces, and all the fluffy wonders women wear, across the bog, through the heather and gorse, and over the granite. She would have to array her sweet self in canvas, sackcloth, tarpaulins. She would not give up her world of fashion, and the world of shops, for miserable me. Turn hermit in the wilderness for a wretched man, a fool of a man, a beast of a penniless man. What a mad idea it is, old King Peter! No wonder you yawn. I make you tired. Sit up, my beauty, sit up in your majesty, and purr to me truly whether there be in this rolling sphere, between the poles thereof, maid or widow, not younger than twenty, nor yet older than thirty, who would take John Burrough by the hand, and say, ‘I will’? Is there one who would say, ‘I will come under your tin roof for better or for worse?’ ”

Peter scratched his right ear vigorously. Burrough went across the room, and returned to his chair with an armful of classics.

“What do the poets say? Leave your ear alone, King o’ the Cats. I will make it smart and tingle before I have done. Goddess of the golden hairpin, goddess of the small brown shoe, what do the wise men say of you? ‘Not any man shall escape, not even the gods. Love, thou triumphest even over gold.’ No, no, Sophocles. It won’t do. Every man has his price, and even Cupid is corruptible. A millionaire will buy up the boy’s whole stock. ‘Take away the pleasures of love from life, and there is nothing left but to die.’ That’s the opinion of Marcus Aurelius, most excellent ear-scratcher. I observe you wink sympathetically. ‘A woman is a great evil,’ says Euripides. ‘Faithless is the female race.’ Out upon you, swarthy Greek. What do the gallant Romans say? ‘Love and wisdom are incompatible.’ Do you hear that, King o’ the Cats? We must give up our wise ways. ‘Love is full of bitterness,’ declares Plautus, and Terence quite agrees with him; but Plautus is man and brother enough to admit there is honey with the gall. Ovid states that the disease is incurable, the which I doubt. It is easily conveyed. True! It may be communicated by a hairpin, for instance. Now let me try the Sortes Virgilianæ. ‘Love conquers all things, and we must yield to love.’ That is the conclusion of the whole matter.”

Burrough pushed the books from his knee, and sat frowning at the fire.

“Eh, my pussy,” he said sadly, stroking his favourite’s head. “We are a pair of puir fules. Watch me go forth to-morrow to my sunny hollow beyond the bog. You shall see me with my hose ungartered, my bonnet unbanded, my sleeve unbuttoned, my shoe untied, and everything about me demonstrating a careless desolation. That might have been all very well in the days of chivalry, eh, Chat Noir? In this present unpoetic age I should be dubbed a male slut, even if I could unbutton my sleeve or unband my bonnet.”

Burrough indulged in a good deal of such vicious rhetoric before going to bed. The next morning it was raining. He went down to the secret nook beside the river, although he could not have expected to find anything of surpassing interest. The ferns were drooping, the river had risen, the blooms of the rowan and rose-bays looked draggled and tawdry; they were like the artificial flowers on some Italian altar. There was an odour of mud in the wind. Burrough climbed back to the moorland track, and took the way which led into the village.

The vicar was standing at his garden door. The vicarage was nothing more than a long cottage thatched with rushes. Mr. Yeoland was an old man, weak, childish, and entirely incapable of performing his slight duties. He clung somehow to life and office, the former a burden because of his weakness, the latter a sinecure since all the villagers went to chapel. The old man lived alone with a housekeeper, who scolded him, and sometimes pushed him about roughly when she was the worse for liquor. The old man spent most of his time in the house sitting in a state of lethargy. Two or three times a day he would shuffle to his garden door, which was overshadowed by a large sycamore, and ogle the girls as they passed.

Mr. Yeoland was not alone. A girl stood beneath the sycamore talking to him. She was of medium height, neither slender nor plump. She had gathered up her skirts boldly, possibly on account of the mud, possibly because a pretty ankle was not made to be hidden. A tiny tan shoe nestled in the mud, and above was the brown silk stocking of Burrough’s fancy. It fulfilled its purpose in a shapely manner, until it disappeared, melted away into, or became blended with, a summer cloud of diaphanous wonders. Her back was towards Burrough, but he could see that her hair was dark brown, and that it was studded with little gleaming points like fireflies. She wore a white tam-o’-shanter. Secured to it on the left side was a jewelled butterfly with wings outspread.

Burrough came to a stand beside the wall opposite, where he could both see and hear. The Vicar did not appear to notice him. The old man was chuckling in his senile way, delighted at having caught the young lady as she passed. His speech was affected. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, and every word was accompanied by a grimace.

“Go along with you,” Burrough heard him say with a sly chuckle.

The young lady laughed. It was not a particularly pleasing laugh, Burrough thought. Yet he was singularly anxious to hear it again. He saw her put up a bare hand to brush the hair back from her forehead.

“I’ll pull it,” said the amorous old man, putting out his trembling hand. “I will. I’ll pull it.”

“You will not,” said the young lady, rather coldly Burrough thought, as she stepped back from the uninviting caress.

“If I was forty years younger,” mumbled the Vicar out of the corner of his mouth, “I’d take off my white tie, and we’d go on the spree.”

“Are you so sure I would come with you?” said she.

A gust of wind passed through the sycamore and brought down a shower of big drops. The young lady moved and cried, “What have you in the garden—anything? May I go in and pick some flowers for my room?”

“Nothing but weeds,” mumbled the Vicar. “The garden’s like me—rough and ready.”

“But I can see some syringa,” said she, raising herself on tip-toe.

“There are snakes in that long grass,” the Vicar warned her, as she was about to enter.

“I’m not afraid of them. I like them,” came the answer.

“Afraid of mice?” he chuckled.

“Love them,” she declared.

“And men?” he went on.

“Silly apes,” she laughed.

They went into the garden. Burrough crossed the road, whipped the tape-measure from his pocket, and measured the tiny imprint in the mud.

“It is she,” he murmured.

He waited about beside the wall. From time to time he heard a merry laugh, and the mumbling of old Yeoland, who was probably trying to steal a kiss among the syringa. Burrough could not believe she would permit that dirty and unpleasant old man to approach her. While he waited the rain ceased and a flash of sunlight pierced the clouds. It struck upon the garden, and he heard the exclamation, “The sun! I must go.”

A moment later the girl stood in the doorway, and Burrough saw her face at last.

She was like a bride with orange-blossoms. She held a quantity of syringa covered with pearly rain-drops. The rain was in her dark-brown hair too, and upon her face, and it was sprinkled upon her tam-o’-shanter where the jewelled butterfly quivered in the sunshine. She was not pretty. She had not a single good feature. Her skin was brown. Her nose was not straight. It was a maddening face. No one who fell in love with that face could ever love another.

When she saw Burrough she swished round, and said to the Vicar, who was hobbling amorously in her wake, “Thanks very much for the syringa, but I don’t know what I shall do with it now I’ve got it. The scent is too heady for a room.”

“Have it beside your bed. Then you’ll dream of me,” the old man muttered.

“I should wake with a headache, and pitch it out of the window.”

“As Gerard did,” said Burrough as the Vicar appeared, addressing himself to the old man. “Good morning, Mr. Yeoland.”

“Good morning,” said the Vicar, somewhat gruffly, as he did not like to have such little affairs interrupted.

“Good morning,” murmured the young lady. “As Mr. Yeoland does not introduce me. As a matter of fact I’ve never been introduced to him. One doesn’t stand upon ceremony much in a mountain village.”

Her eyes said plainly enough, “You spoke to me first.” Which was true.

“Gerard. Who’s he?” mumbled the Vicar.

“The sixteenth-century herbalist,” Burrough replied.

“Bookworm, pedant, scholar, idiot,” was what he thought the girl’s eyes were saying to him then.

“I must go and take my auntie for a stroll,” was what her tongue said, as she moved away a step, shaking the rain from her dainty skirts. “She’s like a butterfly. Comes out when the sun shines. Goes in when it doesn’t. It sounds giddy.”

“Go along! Naughty girl!” chuckled the Vicar.

“I see you are out in all weathers,” Burrough ventured, yet without looking at her.

“Morning, noon, and night,” she laughed. “Up with the lark, out all day, and in with the—what are the things that fly about at night, Mr. Yeoland?”

“Bats,” croaked the Vicar.

“Beast!” she cried.

“Owls,” he chuckled, his face distorted with mirth.

“My eyes are not big and round, and I do not shriek at nights.”

“I think you mean moths,” Burrough said nervously.

“Moths. Yes, the stupid things fly into our lamp and roast themselves. Auntie says, ‘poor dears,’ and tries to rescue them. I say, let the idiots grill if it gives them such enjoyment. They ought to have the sense to keep in the dark. Directly they come into the light they lose their heads.”

“And their lives,” Burrough added.

“But I like the beetles,” the girl rattled on. “They are such jolly old boys. I believe they are always on the spree, and they never know what they’re doing. Last night I was out and I heard one coming—boom! He came crack upon my nose, nearly splitting it, and it’s crooked enough already, then he fell on the road, and cussed. Presently a lot of clockwork or something went whirr inside him. He got up, fell back again, said he was all right, then tried again. He got off that time, boomed hard for a dozen yards, then charged a wall—bang! I left him lying on his back in the road, kicking and swearing. Really he wanted someone to look after him.”

“Like me,” mumbled the Vicar.

“I must run,” said the girl. “Good-bye.”

She nodded, laughed, and was off at full speed.