The Highwayman | Page 3

"You filthy slug," said she. "Samuel! Stand to it, I say. Damme, I'll
have a whip about that loose belly of yours! Now pull, you swine, pull.
Odso, flog the black horse. You, devil broil your bones, lay on to him.
What now? Od rot you, Antony, you'll see no money this month, you--"
She became unprintable. As she took breath again, she saw Harry
Boyce calmly contemplative. "You dog, who bade you stand and gape?
Go, give a hand there, I say."
Harry touched his hat. "By your leave, ma'am, I am too busy admiring
you."
"William, put that rogue into the ditch," said she.
All this while a man in the coach had been writing, calmly intent upon
his tablets as though there was not a sound or a rage within a mile. He
now stood up, and, while his lady was still execrating through one door
of the coach, he opened the other and came out. Two of the servants,
obedient to the lady's oaths, were approaching Harry, who waited them
with calm and a swinging stick. The man waved his hand at them and
they turned tail. But he had no further interest in Harry. He stood to

watch the struggles of his horses and his men. He was of some height,
and, though past middle age, bore himself with singular grace and
vigour. He had still a rarely handsome face--too handsome, by far, for
Harry's taste. The features were of an impossible, absurd perfection.
There was something superhuman or fatuous, at least something vastly
irritating, in his assured calm, his air of blandly confident supremacy.
He walked on to the leaders and, with a gesture and a word, set the
whole team pulling at an angle. Meanwhile the lady had earnestly
continued her abusive orders, but none of the servants now professed to
heed her. Dragging the horses on, or labouring hand and shoulder at the
wheels, they were now effective, and they watched the man's eye as
though it were an inspiration. Wondering why he did, Harry, too, put
his weight on a wheel. The horses found a footing in the mire, the
coach was dragged on to the higher, firmer ground beyond.
My lady subsided. The man came back to the coach and touched his hat
to Harry. "I'm obliged for your help, sir," he said, and climbed in. They
drove away towards London.
As the servants swung to their saddles, "Who's your obscene lady?"
said Harry.
"What, don't you know him, bumpkin?"
"She will never be him. Her shape is all provocative she."
This humble wit was not remarked. His ignorance occupied them, "Oh
Lud, not to know the Old Corporal!"
One of Harry's eyebrows went up. "That the Old Corporal? Faith, I am
sorry for him."
He received a handful of mud in his face. With a cry of "Rot your
impudence," they splashed off.
While he wiped the mud out of his eyes, Harry felt a very comfortable
self-satisfaction. It was agreeable to pity His Grace of Marlborough.

For the Duke of Marlborough was still the greatest man in Europe, the
greatest man in the world--credibly the greatest man that ever lived. A
pleasant fool, to marry such a wife and to keep her.
Harry Boyce at no time in his life had much admiration for human
eminence. In this, his hungry youth, he was set upon despising rank and
power, great fame and pure virtue, as no more than the luck of fools.
He would always atone by finding sympathy and excuses for any
rogue's roguery. Highly fortified in this faith by the exhibition of
Marlborough's matrimonial happiness, he trudged back.
The delay over the coach had left him no time for small ale at Barnet.
Mr. Waverton, though amiably pleased to deliver Harry from
attendance on his mother, required constant attendance on himself. He
would be, in his superb way, disagreeable if Harry were not in waiting
when he was wanted to take a hand at ombre. Harry liked Mr.
Waverton well enough, as well as he liked anybody, but found him in
the part of offended majesty intolerable. So there was some hard
walking back to Whetstone. On the way his temper was not sweetened
by two horsemen at the gallop who gave him a shower-bath of mud.
As he came through the village, behold another coach labouring up to
the high road from Totteridge lane. This had but four horses, no array
of outriders, no gilt splendours. It was a sober, old-fashioned thing, and
it rumbled on at a sober gait. "Some city ma'am," Harry sneered at it,
"much the same shape as her horses."
But half an hour after he saw it again. Where the road was dark through
a thicket it had come to a stand.