Having made fast the doors, Mr Bailey turned his reluctant thoughts towards bed. The night was far advanced, but he felt wakeful, alert, excited; very much in the mood for adventure. Indeed in his own estimation he was already enjoying an adventure. The lady’s eyes had looked kindly upon him when she wished him good night; and throughout that all too brief interview with the strange pair he had been aware of a brightness in the wine, a flame and a delight, more disturbing than anything the grape could yield. The idea of bed repelled him. To smother this young expectancy in a blanket of sleep was not to be thought of; and to lie awake, with Sarah sleeping at his side, was still less to his fancy. He remembered, with a sort of relief, that the table at which his guests had taken their meal had been left in disorder. Here was something to do: a task outside his province indeed, but nevertheless a legitimate reason for not going to bed, and one having the additional advantage that it would save his daughter trouble in the morning, to say nothing of his wife’s temper. It was true that if Sarah woke and found him not in bed she would be perplexed and by her perplexity irritated; for she regarded the unusual, even the trivial unusual, with suspicion and dislike, herself being a person of fixed unalterable habits, a clockwork woman. But Sarah would not wake: she was safe asleep until the appointed hour for rising, and then, prompt to the minute, she would sit up, swing her plump legs out of bed, and sit for five thoughtful seconds on its edge before remarking: ‘Time to be stirring, Bailey!’ In the beginning it had been ‘Mr Bailey’, but time works wonders, and in twenty years the girl who had sirred him, and without irony, at her first surrender, had become a matron bold and casual enough to address him familiarly and think nothing of it. She had learned to take him and his odd little ways for granted; and it was his misfortune, though not perhaps a great one, that he had never learned to do the same with her. At moments he caught a glimpse of the girl she had been, and then it was in his heart to weep for her. She was a good wife, honest and faithful and stupid. But her goodness was dull and her stupidity a devastation, and it was this stupidity alone—for the years had dealt gently with her buxom person—that prevented her being handsome. With one gleam of wit, one flash of fancy, she might have been a beautiful woman: she was capable of neither. Each partner to the other was both a nuisance and a comfort; above all, a habit. Bailey was constantly trying not to wish that he had never married his wife, and often he succeeded. Tonight, as he busied himself with his self-imposed scullery duties, he made no such endeavour. A good wife, but she was not the moon, and—here lay the sting—he had never for a moment imagined that she was.
There was still some wine left in the bottle provided by the affable and generous stranger. Mr Bailey, sighing reverently in the direction of the young lady’s bedroom, fetched a clean glass, filled it, and drank to her bright eyes. Even so there remained a little wine, and this last morsel came like a benediction and a triumph, crowned his spirit with fire, and fortified him for further eccentricities of behaviour. He went back to the public parlour, rekindled the fire on the hearth, and reseated himself on the settle. He invoked his Muse, fishing from his pocket a notebook and a stub of pencil the further to encourage her. This was the night of nights; this, pre-eminently, an occasion most auspicious for the wooing of sweet Poesy. A quiet night, a lovely woman, a man fallen from greatness—what a theme! As for the form of his verses, that troubled him not at all: his fancy seldom ranged beyond the couplet, which he had so assiduously practised as a young man in emulation of his betters. And now the golden numbers came rolling into his mind: