Little Greek that he was, he worshipped the athlete, and opined that all women without exception—all English women especially—must see with the same eyes as himself.
He had once been vain and weak enough to believe in Trilby’s love (with a Taffy standing by—a careless, unsusceptible Taffy, who was like unto the gods of Olympus!)—and Trilby had given him up at a word, a hint—for all his frantic clinging.
She would not have given up Taffy, pour si peu, had Taffy but lifted a little finger! It is always “just whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad!” with the likes of Taffy … but Taffy hadn’t even whistled! Yet still he kept thinking of Alice—and he felt he couldn’t think of her well enough till he went out for a stroll by himself on a sheep-trimmed down. So he took his pipe and his Darwin, and out he strolled into the early sunshine—up the green Red Lane, past the pretty church, Alice’s father’s church—and there, at the gate, patiently waiting for his mistress, sat Alice’s dog—an old friend of his, whose welcome was a very warm one.
Little Billee thought of Thackeray’s lovely poem in Pendennis:
“She comes—she’s here—she’s past!
May heaven go with her! …”
Then he and the dog went on together to a little bench on the edge of the cliff—within sight of Alice’s bedroom window. It was called “the Honeymooners’ Bench.”
“That look—that look—that look! Ah—but Trilby had looked like that, too! And there are many Taffys in Devon!”
He sat himself down and smoked and gazed at the sea below, which the sun (still in the east) had not yet filled with glare and robbed of the lovely sapphire-blue, shot with purple and dark green, that comes over it now and again of a morning on that most beautiful coast.
There was a fresh breeze from the west, and the long, slow billows broke into creamier foam than ever, which reflected itself as a tender white gleam in the blue concavities of their shining shoreward curves as they came rolling in. The sky was all of turquoise but for the smoke of a distant steamer—a long thin horizontal streak of dun—and there were little brown or white sails here and there, dotting; and the stately ships went on. …
Little Billee tried hard to feel all this beauty with his heart as well as his brain—as he had so often done when a boy—and cursed his insensibility out loud for at least the thousand and first time.
Why couldn’t these waves of air and water be turned into equivalent waves of sound, that he might feel them through the only channel that reached his emotions! That one joy was still left to him—but, alas! alas! he was only a painter of pictures—and not a maker of music!
He recited “Break, break, break,” to Alice’s dog, who loved him, and looked up into his face with sapient, affectionate eyes—and whose name, like that of so many dogs in fiction and so few in fact, was simply Tray. For Little Billee was much given to monologues out loud, and profuse quotations from his favorite bards.
Everybody quoted that particular poem either mentally or aloud when they sat on that particular bench—except a few old-fashioned people, who still said,
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!”
or people of the very highest culture, who only quoted the nascent (and crescent) Robert Browning; or people of no culture at all, who simply held their tongues—and only felt the more!
Tray listened silently.
“Ah, Tray, the best thing but one to do with the sea is to paint it. The next best thing to that is to bathe in it. The best of all is to lie asleep at the bottom. How would you like that?
“And on thy ribs the limpet sticks,
And in thy heart the scrawl shall play. …”
Tray’s tail became as a wagging point of interrogation, and he turned his head first on one side and then on the other—his eyes fixed on Little Billee’s, his face irresistible in its genial doggy wistfulness.
“Tray, what a singularly good listener you are—and therefore what singularly good manners you’ve got! I suppose all dogs have!” said Little Billee; and then, in a very tender voice, he exclaimed,
“Alice, Alice, Alice!”
And Tray uttered a soft, cooing, nasal croon in his head register, though he was a baritone dog by nature, with portentous, warlike chest-notes of the jingo order.
“Tray, your mistress is a parson’s daughter, and therefore twice as much of a mystery as any other woman in this puzzling world!
“Tray, if my heart weren’t stopped with wax, like the ears of the companions of Ulysses when they rowed past the sirens—you’ve heard of Ulysses, Tray? he loved a dog—if my heart weren’t stopped with wax, I should be deeply in love with your mistress; perhaps she would marry me if I asked her—there’s no accounting for tastes!—and I know enough of myself to know that I should make her a good husband—that I should make her happy—and I should make two other women happy besides.
“As for myself personally, Tray, it doesn’t very much matter. One good woman would do as well as another, if she’s equally good-looking. You doubt it? Wait till you get a pimple inside your bump of—your bump of—wherever you keep your fondnesses, Tray.
“For that’s what’s the matter with me—a pimple—just a little clot of blood at the root of a nerve, and no bigger than a pin’s point!
“That’s a small thing to cause such a lot of wretchedness, and wreck a fellow’s life, isn’t it? Oh, curse it, curse it, curse it—every day and all day long!
“And just as small a thing will take it away, I’m told!
“Ah! grains of sand are small things—and so are diamonds! But diamond or grain of sand, only Alice has
