The Highwayman | Page 2

As you know, he could
walk at a round pace with them--a preposterous, vulgar thing. There
was nothing in him to give this poverty a romantical air. To be sure, he
had admirable legs, but the rest was neither good nor bad. He was of
the middle size and a wholesome complexion. You would look at him
long and see nothing rare enough to be worth looking at. If you looked
longer yet you might begin to be surprised: his so ordinary face was
extraordinary in its lack of expression.
The man who owned it must be either very dull of heart and mind, or
self-contained and of self-control beyond the common. But whatever
the heart might be, no one ever took the eyes for the eyes of a fool.
They were keen, alert, perpetually on guard. There is a letter extant--it
was indeed a dear friend who wrote it--which mocks at Harry for his
"curst stand-and-deliver stare." But it is a queer thing that most men
had to know Harry Boyce a long time before they remarked that his
eyes were not quite of the same colour. The common English
grey-green-blue was in both of them, but one had a bluer glint than the
other. The oddity, when it was discovered, seemed to make the
challenge of the eyes more defiant and more baffling, as though they

gleamed from the shadow of a mask.
Not that anyone cared yet whether he wore a mask or his soul in that
placid, ordinary face. Who should care a pinch of snuff for "a scholar
just from his college broke loose" with a penny farthing in his pocket,
who had to pioneer young gentlemen through their Horace and their
Tully for his bed and board? When you meet him, Harry Boyce was
happy in having caught for his pupil a young fellow who had not
merely money but brains, and so sublime a condescension that Harry
was not sent away from table with the parson when the puddings came.
Mr. Geoffrey Waverton was pleased to have a value for him, and
defended him from his natural duty of being gentleman usher to Lady
Waverton. So, Mr. Waverton having taken horse, Harry was free to go
walking.
It was late in a wet autumn, and all the clay of Middlesex slippery as
butter and, withal, affectionate as warm glue. Harry kept to the
highway. Though its miles of mud and water were, on the surface, even
worse than the too green meadows or the gleaming brown furrows of
plough land, a careful man could count upon its letting him go no
further than knee deep. When he came to Whetstone, Harry's feet were
brown, shapeless, weighty masses, but he had not lost either shoe, and
he was still in hopes of reaching Barnet and a pint of small beer before
it was time to struggle back. At the worst a dry throat and wet legs were
a cheap price for escaping the voice of Lady Waverton, who, in the
afternoons, read the romances of Mlle. de Scudéry aloud.
He could see the tufts of smoke above Barnet and its church on the
hill-top. He was winding down to the bottom of the valley from which
that hill rises, when eloquence arrested him. He may at other times
have heard profanity as copious, but never profanity so vehement or at
such speed. The orator was a woman.
Harry stood to listen with critical admiration. Madame mixed the ugly
and the pleasant rarely; she made a charming grotesque. Her mind was
very far from nice and provided her with amazing images; but she had a
pretty, womanly voice, and hard though she drove it, it would not break
to one ugly note. Disgusting epithets, mean threats, poured out in

mellow music. Harry splashed on round the corner. He was eager to see
her.
In the morass at the cross-lanes by the green, a coach was stuck--a
coach of splendour. It was a huge thing as big as a room, half glass,
half gold and garter blue, and it swayed luxuriously on its great springs.
Six horses heaved at it in vain with great splashing and squelching, and
a whole company of servants, some mounted, some afoot, struggled
with them.
The profane woman had half her body and two gesticulating arms out
of the coach window. She was plainly neither a drab nor in liquor.
Harry halted out of range of the splashes to examine and enjoy her. She
had been comely, and still could hold a man's eye with her curves of
neck and bosom. The piquant features must have been adorable before
they sharpened and her cheeks faded and the lines came. Her abundant
hair must once have been gold, and was not yet altogether grey.