Sir George complied, and, nodding to the servants, walked back to the
woman. As he reached her the carriage with its lights whirled away, and
left them in darkness.
Soane wondered if he were not a fool for his pains, and advanced a step
nearer to conviction when the woman with an impatient 'Come!' started
along the road; moving at a smart pace in the direction which the
chariot had taken, and betraying so little shyness or timidity as to
seem unconscious of his company. The neighbourhood of Oxford is low and
flat, and except where a few lights marked the outskirts of the city a
wall of darkness shut them in, permitting nothing to be seen that lay
more than a few paces away. A grey drift of clouds, luminous in
comparison with the gloom about them, moved slowly overhead, and out of
the night the raving of a farm-dog or the creaking of a dry bough came
to the ear with melancholy effect.
The fine gentleman of that day had no taste for the wild, the rugged, or
the lonely. He lived too near the times when those words spelled danger.
He found at Almack's his most romantic scene, at Ranelagh his terra
incognita, in the gardens of Versailles his ideal of the charming and
picturesque. Sir George, no exception to the rule, shivered as he looked
round. He began to experience a revulsion of spirits; and to consider
that, for a gentleman who owned Lord Chatham for a patron, and was even
now on his roundabout way to join that minister--for a gentleman whose
fortune, though crippled and impaired, was still tolerable, and who,
where it had suffered, might look with confidence to see it made good at
the public expense--or to what end patrons or ministers?--he began to
reflect, I say, that for such an one to exchange a peer's coach and good
company for a night trudge at a woman's heels was a folly, better
befitting a boy at school than a man of his years. Not that he had ever
been so wild as to contemplate anything serious; or from the first had
entertained the most remote intention of brawling in an unknown cause.
That was an extravagance beyond him; and he doubted if the girl really
had it in her mind. The only adventure he had proposed, when he left
the carriage, was one of gallantry; it was the only adventure then in
vogue. And for that, now the time was come, and the incognita and he
were as much alone as the most ardent lover could wish, he felt
singularly disinclined.