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The Incredible Honeymoon

by E. Nesbit · English · Gutenberg #41354 · 389,900 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Incredible Honeymoon

Author: E. Nesbit


        
Release date: November 12, 2012 [eBook #41354]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INCREDIBLE HONEYMOON ***

[Illustration: [See page 118

They sat among the twisted tree roots, and ate and drank and were merry
like children on a holiday.]





THE INCREDIBLE HONEYMOON

BY E. NESBIT

AUTHOR OF "THE RED HOUSE" ETC.

[Illustration]

    HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
    NEW YORK AND LONDON




BOOKS BY E. NESBIT


    THE INCREDIBLE HONEYMOON Frontispiece. Post 8vo
    THE BOOK OF DRAGONS. Illustrated. 8vo
    THE RED HOUSE. Illustrated. Post 8vo
    THE ENCHANTED CASTLE Illustrated. Post 8vo
    THE WOULDBEGOODS. Illustrated. Post 8vo

    HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
    ESTABLISHED 1817


    THE INCREDIBLE HONEYMOON

    Copyright, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
    Printed in the United States of America
    Published October, 1916




THE INCREDIBLE HONEYMOON




I

THE BEGINNING


TO understand this story you will have to believe in the Greater
Gods--Love and Youth, for example, and Adventure and Coincidence; also
in the trusting heart of woman and the deceitful spirit of man. You will
have to reconcile yourself to the fact that though daily you go to
London by the nine-seven, returning by the five-fifteen, and have your
accustomed meals at eight, one, and half-past six, there are those who
take neither trains nor meals regularly. That, while nothing on earth
ever happens to you, there really are on earth people to whom things do
happen. Nor is the possibility of such happenings wholly a matter of the
independent income--the income for which you do not work. It is a matter
of the individual soul. I knew a man whose parents had placed him in
that paralyzing sort of situation which is symbolized by the regular
trains and the regular meals. It was quite a nice situation for some
people, a situation, too, in which one was certain to "get on." But the
man I knew had other dreams. He chucked his job, one fine Saturday
morning in May, went for a long walk, met a tinker and bought his
outfit--a wheel on wheels, a sort of barrow with a grindstone on it, and
a pot for putting fire in dangling underneath. This he wheeled
profitably through rural districts--so profitably that he was presently
able to buy a donkey and a cart, and to sell kettles as well as mend
them. He has since bought a gipsy tent; with these impediments--or
helps--he travels through the pleasant country. Things are always
happening to him. He has found a buried treasure; frustrated a burglary;
once he rescued a lady in distress; and another time he killed a man.
The background to these dramatic incidents is always the pleasant
background of quiet road, blossoming hedgerows and orchards, corn-fields
and meadows and lanes. He says this is the way to live. I will write
down his story some day, but this is not it. I only bring him in to
illustrate my point, which is that adventures do happen--to the
adventurous.

My friend the tinker has had, perhaps, more than his share of
adventures, but then his is the temperament that shoots, like a willing
needle, to the great magnet of melodrama. The temperamental needle of
Edward Basingstoke followed the magnet of romance. In a gayer, if less
comfortable, age he might have been a knight-errant, or, at least, the
sympathetic squire of a knight-errant. Had he been born in the days when
most people stayed at home and minded their own business he would have
insisted on going out and minding other people's. Living in the days of
aeroplanes, motors, telegraphy, and cinematographs, in a world noisy
with the nonsense of politics and the press, he told himself that the
ideal life was the life of the farmer who plowed and sowed and reaped,
tended his beasts and filled his barns, and went home from his clean,
quiet work to the open hearth whence the wood smoke curled up to heaven
like the smoke of an altar.

Destiny, in deep perversity, was making an engineer of him. He dreamed
his pastoral dreams in the deafening clangor of the shops at Crewe, but
not ten thousand hammers could beat out of his brain the faith that life
was really--little as one might suppose it, just looking at it from
Crewe--full of the most beautiful and delicate possibilities, and that,
somehow or other, people got from life what they chose to take. While he
was making up his mind what he should take, he went on learning his
trade. And Destiny seemed determined that he should learn nothing else.
What we call Destiny is really Chance--and so far from being immutable,
she is the veriest flirt and weathercock. She changed her mind about
Edward--or perhaps Death, who is stronger than she, insisted and
prevailed.

Just at the time when a faint dust was beginning to settle on his
dreams--the sort of dust that thickens and hardens into clay and you
grow cabbages in it--Death intervened to save him. It was his uncle who
died, and he left a will, and by that will certain property came to
Edward. When the news came he took a day to think of it, and he went to
the works as usual that afternoon and the next morning. But next day at
noon he laid down his tools and never took them up again. Instead he
took a ticket to Oxford, appeared at the rooms of his friend, whom he
surprised in slumber, and told his tale.

"And you're going to chuck the shop," said the friend, whose name was
Vernon Martingale, and his father a baronet.

"I have chucked the shop," said Edward. "I chucked it at Fate as you
might throw a stone at a dog. And that reminds me--I want a dog. Do you
know of a nice dog--intelligent, good manners, self-respecting, and
worthy?"

"Any particular breed?"

"Certainly not. These researches into family history are in the worst
possible taste. You don't love me for my pedigree. Why should I love my
dog for his?"

"I suppose you want some tea, anyhow," said Martingale.

So they had tea, and talked cricket.

"Any idea what you mean to do?" Martingale asked several times, and at
last Edward answered him.

"What I mean to do," he said, "is what I always meant to do. I mean to
be a farmer, and hunt, and shoot, and grow flowers. I think I shall
specialize on sunflowers. They're so satisfying."

"More than you are," said Vernon. "Mean to say you're going to buy a
farm and ruin yourself the moment you've got a few half-crowns to ruin
yourself with?"

"I am going to be a farmer," said Basingstoke, "but first I am going to
see life."

"Life? But you were always so. . . ."

"I mean _that_"--Edward indicated the sunshine outside--"not getting
drunk and being disreputable. I can't think why the deuce-dickens that
sort of beastliness is always called seeing life. As if life were all
gas, and wining, and electric light, and the things you don't talk about
before ladies. No, my boy, I'm going out into the unknown--not into the
night, because it happens to be afternoon--and I thought I'd just come
and clasp that hand and gaze once into those eyes before I set my foot
on the untrodden path of adventure. Farewell, Vernon of Martingale, good
knight and true! Who knows when we shall meet again?"

"_I_ don't, anyhow," said Vernon, "and that's why you're not going till
the day after to-morrow, and why I insist on knowing what you mean by
seeing life--and why you're going to stay till to-morrow, anyhow."

"Heaven forbid that I should criticize another man's tastes," Edward
sighed, "or deprive him of any innocent enjoyment. If you want me to
stay--well, I'll stay--till to-morrow. And as for what I mean by seeing
life--well, I should have thought even you would have understood that.
I'm going to get a stick, and a knapsack, and a dog, and a different
kind of hat, and some very large boots with nails, and a new suit, only
I shall wear it all night before I wear it all day. Oh, Vernon, can't
you guess my simple secret?"

"He calls a walking-tour seeing life!" Vernon pointed out. "And who's
going with you and where are you going? The Hartz Mountains?--the
Carpathians?--Margate?--Trouville? What?"

"The person who is going with me," said Edward, "is the dog whom we
haven't yet bought. Come along out and buy him. As to where I'm going, I
shall follow the most ancient of sign-posts--and I know that I can't go
wrong."

"You will follow--"

"My nose," Edward explained, kindly--

    "That indicator of the place to be,
     The Heaven-sent guide to beauty and to thee.

"Do you know, if you talk rot to the chaps at the works they try to
understand what you mean. Like Scotchmen, you know. They think they can
understand anything, no matter how shallow. Now I will say for you that
you know your limitations. Let's buy the dog, my son, and get a canoe."

They did. And the dog upset the canoe.




II

MAKING AN AEROPLANE


THE Five Bells was asleep; asleep, at least, was the face with which it
met the world. In the brick-floored kitchen, out of sight and hearing of
the road, the maid was singing as she sluiced the bricks with a white
mop; but if she and her mop had been state secrets, matters of life and
death, they could not have been more safely hidden from any chance
passer. In the bar the landlord was asleep behind the _Lewes Gazette and
South Coast Journal_. In the parlor the landlady was asleep behind a
screen of geraniums and campanulas. The ornamental clock on the
mantelpiece said, most untruly, ten minutes to eight. Really it was four
o'clock, the sleepiest hour in the day. The flies buzzed in the parlor
window; in the bar the wasps buzzed in the bottle that had seemed so
sweet a bourn to each as it drifted in from the out-of-door heat to the
cool darkness of the sanded bar.

On the broad, white door-step the old cat slept, his person nicely
adjusted to the sun and shade, his flanks in the sunshine and his head
in the shadow of the porch. The white blind of the window swelled out,
now and then, like a sail, because in this sort of weather one leaves
all doors and windows open. In the yard some one had drawn a bucket of
water--the brown oak and the brown iron of the bucket were still wet,
and still wet the trail it had made where it was carried to the old bath
that the chickens drank from. But the trail was drying quickly, and the
hens, having had their drink, had gone to sleep in the hollows they had
scooped for themselves in the dust of their inclosure. Some one had been
chopping wood, for a few chips lay round the block, in which the bill
was stuck by its sharp edge. The man who attended to the wood and water
was asleep, standing against the ladder that led from the stable to the
hay-loft--a convenient position, and, if you were wanted in a hurry, not
compromising, as lying down would be.

To right and left the road stretched, very white and shining, between
dusty hedgerows and scattered cottages whose drawn blinds looked like
the eyelids of sleepers. The whole village was asleep, it seemed--only a
boy and a dog were awake. The boy had not gone to school because he had
torn his every-day trousers on a nail in the stable. To wear his Sunday
trousers was, of course, out of the question. And to mend the every-day
trousers would take time. So Tommy was put to bed, nominally as a
punishment for not looking where he was going--a most unfair
implication, for the nail had attacked him in the rear. Children do not
go to sleep when they are put to bed as a punishment. They cry, if their
spirit has been broken by unkindness; if not, they lie and meditate
mischief. Tommy waited till the afternoon silence settled on the house,
and then very carefully and slowly crept down the stairs in his
nightshirt, dodged Gladys and the mop, and reached the larder. Here he
secured a flead-cake, a raisin-cake, and an apple, dodged Gladys again,
and reached the back door, where he stood looking out at the yard. It
would be silly to go back to bed. Mother would not be awake for a good
half-hour yet. There would be time to get to the stable, climb into the
loft, and eat his booty there. It would be safer, in one way, and in
another more adventurous.

He stooped till his head was below the kitchen window and crept by,
skirting the walls of the yard till he reached the stable door, and next
moment was safe in the half-darkness where the sunlight through the
cracks of the door made dusty shafts of radiance. The familiar smell of
hay and horses charmed him, as it always did. Ah, there was Robert,
asleep as usual. Well, even if Robert woke, he could be trusted not to
tell. Tommy climbed into the manger of one of the empty stalls, and just
as he got his knee on it some one behind pushed him with sudden and
incredible violence. He fell heavily, dropped his plunder, and found
himself involved in the enthusiastic embraces of a large, strange, white
dog, which in one breathless instant licked his face all over, trampled
on his stomach, made two mouthfuls of the flead-cake and the
raisin-cake, rolled the apple in the muck of the stable, snorted in a
sort of brutal ecstasy, and bolted heavily out into the sunshine.

It was too much. The sudden and brutal attack overcame all
considerations of prudence. Tommy forgot where he was, and why; the
dangers of his situation were nothing beside the outrage of this
unprovoked assault and theft. Robert was awakening slowly. If he had
been awake before he might have repulsed the enemy. Tommy opened his
mouth to howl, but the howl changed to a scream, for there was the dog
back again, snuffing loudly in the straw and fawning at Tommy as on an
old and valued friend.

"Charles!" a stern voice called from the yard, "come here, sir."

The dog wagged a muscular tail and grinned at Tommy, as though inviting
him to share the joke. The stable door was darkened by a form. Even in
the difficulties of repulsing the dog's attention without irritating it,
the child found time to be glad that the darkening form was that of a
stranger.

"Call him off, if he's your dog," Tommy urged, thickly, backing against
the manger.

"Might as well call him off, sir," Robert--now almost awake--conceded.

The stranger stepped forward, a snap clicked, and Charles, still widely
smiling, was straining at the end of a leathern thong.

"I hope he didn't frighten you," said the stranger.

"He bunted at me with his great head," said Tommy, with half a sob, "and
then he eat up what I'd got, and hooked it off again afore you could say
knife."

"What had you got?"

"Nothing," said Tommy, remembering caution, "at least--"

"The jingling of the guinea heals," said the stranger, incomprehensibly.
"Would sixpence be any comfort to you?"

Tommy's eyes answered, and the stranger held it out.

"Thank you, sir," said Tommy, and added, in close imitation of his
father's manner to thirsty travelers, "Going far to-day, sir?"

"I was thinking," said the stranger, "of putting up here."

"Then," said Tommy, with great presence of mind, "please don't say
anything to them about the dog eating--what he did eat--nor me being
here in my shirt, nor about Robert being asleep. If you'll go round to
the front, sir, you'll find the bar, and that'll give me a chance to
slip back to bed, sir, if you'd be so kind."

"I see," said the stranger, "you were sent to bed."

"In punishment like," said Tommy, "so you see I don't want to. . . ."

"Exactly. An unobserved retreat. I will draw the enemy's fire from the
front premises. Come, Charles."

Charles obeyed, only pausing to entangle the lead in the handle of a
shovel and to bring this down upon the feet of Robert, to upset a sieve
of chaff and run between his master's legs with a sudden violence which,
but for the support of the door-post, would have thrown him to the
ground.

"Nice-spoken young man," said Robert. "Now, young Tommy, you cut along
back where you belong. I'll be asking Gladys the time to keep her off
of the back door while you slips in, you young limb."

He strolled across to the window as Tommy's bare feet trod the
sun-warmed bricks to the back door. As the child crept up the stairs he
heard the stranger's voice in the bar.

"Sixpence," said Tommy, in ecstasy, "and him going to put up here." He
cuddled down into his bed well satisfied with the afternoon's adventure.
Adventures are, indeed, to the adventurous.

"If I'd 'a' bin a good boy and stayed in bed nothing wouldn't have
happened," was how he put it to himself.

Meanwhile the stranger, encumbered by the striving Charles, was "being
shown the rooms"--the bare, much-scrubbed bedroom, the all-too-full and
too-carpeted parlor.

"They are exactly what I want," he said, and so won the heart of his
hostess.

When Tommy, his trousers restored, came down to tea he was warned not to
go clamping about in his boots, because there was a gentleman in the
parlor. Tommy fingered the sixpence in his pocket and said nothing; his
mouth was, indeed, far too full for words.

That evening in the parched orchard behind the house Tommy came edging
shyly toward the stranger as he lounged under the trees smoking a fat
pipe.

"Hullo, young man!" was the greeting. "Come here and talk to me."

Tommy dumbly drew near.

"Got your trousers back, I see," said the stranger, genially.

Tommy admitted it with a grunt. The stranger nodded and took his pipe
out of his mouth.

"Ever see a pig?" he asked.

Tommy grunted again.

"I see you have. You speak their language awfully well." The stranger
uttered a sound which Tommy recognized and smiled to hear. "That's what
the pigs say," said the stranger. "Agreeable little boys who have
recovered their trousers say 'Yes' or 'No' when their friends ask them
questions. Don't they?"

"I dun'no'," said Tommy.

"Oh yes, you do. Because I've told you. Now what would you like to do?"

"I dun'no'."

"I can't tell you that you know, because I don't know myself. But I'll
put it to you like this: If you can make up your mind to talk the
language of agreeable little boys who have recovered their trousers, I
am disposed to endure your company and even to assist you in any play
you may have in hand. But I can't associate with a person who grunts at
me. If you want to grunt, go and grunt at some one who likes it. I
don't."

"I didn't go for to," Tommy urged.

"Handsomely admitted. I accept your apology. You don't know what you'd
like to do, I say. Well, is there anything you'd like to _have_? I'm
living the idle life, Tommy, and my hands are beginning to ache for want
of something to do. I want to make something. Ever make anything?"

"I made a rabbit-hutch, onst," Tommy owned, "but the door warn't
straight on her hinges. And I tried a kite--but it stuck to me and come
to bits afore ever it was dry."

"Look here," said the stranger, sitting up, "what about a kite? I could
make you a kite as big as a house or a fire-balloon. Would you like
that?"

Tommy began a grunt, pretended that it had been a cough, and turned that
into, "Yes, please, sir."

"We must restrain Charles," said the stranger, turning to the large
white dog, who sat with feet firmly planted, smiling a wide, pink smile,
"or this kite will certainly stick to _him_ and come to pieces afore
_it's_ dry. Where's the shop?"

"Down street," said Tommy. "I could pop down street in a minute for the
paper and things."

"Sure you'd rather have a kite than anything else?"

Tommy hesitated, and then said of course he'd rather have a hairyplane,
but he supposed the stranger couldn't.

To which the stranger startlingly replied, "Oh, couldn't I, my boy!
Father got a horse and trap?" he went on. And from that moment the most
wonderful four days of Tommy's life moved forward majestically without
pause or let.

To drive into Eastbourne with the gentleman--rather slow the old horse
was, but it was the best trap--to hold the reins outside important and
unusual shops, including the Eastbourne Motor-Car Company and the
telegraph-office at the station; to be taken to dinner at a fine hotel
with flowers in all the windows, and real waiters dressed exactly like
the gentlemen who sang at the school concert, white ties and all--or
just like the butler at Mr. Ferney's who had the training-stables--and
such things to eat as Tommy "never did."

The horse and trap were put up at Mr. Pettigrew's Livery and Bait
Stables, in itself an act of unheard-of daring and extravagance. And
after dinner the stranger got a motor-car--a real private one--none of
your red flags and mustn't ride on the front seat, where, in fact, he
and the stranger did, with great dash and daring, actually ride. And
they went to Pevensy and Hurstmonceau and Hastings, and the stranger
told Tommy stories about the places, so that history was never quite
itself again to Tommy. Then back to Eastbourne, to call again at the
unusual shops, as well as at one of the more usual character, where the
stranger bought toffee and buns and cake and peppermint creams; to get a
parcel from the station, and so home round the feet of the downs in the
pleasant-colored evening, with the dust white on the hedges, and the
furze in flower, and the skylarks singing "fit to bu'st theirselves," as
Tommy pointed out when the stranger called his attention to the little,
dark, singing specks against the clear sky, the old white horse going at
a spanking pace. No one would have believed he had it in him, compared
to what he was in the morning; and drawing up very short and sharp in
front of the porch--no driving into the yard and just calling for
Robert--and father himself coming out to take the reins. Oh, that was a
day!

To the stranger, also, whose name, it will surprise you little to learn,
was Edward Basingstoke, the home-coming was not without charm. The day
before he had been welcomed as a guest; now he was welcomed as a friend,
one who had taken Tommy for an outing and spent money on him like
water. Any one could see that from the parcels the child had his arms
full of.

Robert in the stable, hearing the return, and heartened by the
unmistakable attitude of the family, loosened Charles from the taut
chain at whose end he had choked all day, and sent him flying like a
large white bullet into the bar, where his master was standing. Charles
knocked over a table and three glasses, trod on the edge of a spittoon
and upset it, and the landlord said it didn't matter! Could any
reception have been more warmly welcoming?

It charmed Edward so much that he said, "When Tommy's face is washed,
might he have tea with me to finish up the day?"

And this, too, happened. And after tea, when Charles had been partially
calmed by five whole buns, eaten in five eager mouthfuls, they undid the
parcels, and Tommy reveled in the tools and metals, the wood, the
canvas, the dozen other things he knew neither the names nor the uses
of. And when it was time to say good night and they had said it, Tommy
wanted to say something else. He stood by the parlor door, shuffling his
boots and looking with blue, adoring eyes at the stranger.

"I say," he said.

"Well, what _do_ you say?"

"I say," was still all that Tommy said.

"Yes, I hear you do. But what?"

"I'm right-down glad you come here to stay, instead of going on to
Wilmington, like what you might have," was the most Tommy could do. Then
he added, after a fierce, brief struggle between affection and shyness:
"I do take it very kind, sir--and the peppermints, and all. Good night,
sir."

It was the happiest day Edward had spent since he left Crewe.

And next day they began to make the aeroplane. I do not know how toy
aeroplanes are made. There may be a hundred ways of making them. If
there are, Mr. Basingstoke knew at least one of these ways, and it was
quite a good way, too. The village carpenter and the village blacksmith
each was visited--I know that--and a good deal of the work was done at
the carpenter's bench. And at the end of the third day the toy was
ready.

"We'll fly it in the morning," said Mr. Basingstoke. "Are you glad it's
done? Sure you wouldn't have liked a kite better?"

"Not by long chalks," was Tommy's fervent answer.

The little aeroplane sat on the little stand the carpenter had made for
it, shiny with varnish, white with canvas, glittering in all its metal
mysteries.

"Jiminy!" said Tommy, awe-stricken at his own good fortune, "I didn't
know anybody could be so clever as what you are."

Edward Basingstoke, as he went to bed, wondered whether, after all, he
could spend his money to any better purpose than going about the country
making aeroplanes to please little boys.




III

EDEN


WHEN you have made an aeroplane, the next thing is to make it fly. And
however agreeable an admiring audience may be while one is fiddling with
definite and concrete objects of wood, canvas, and metal, one is apt,
for the flight itself--the great flight, the flight by which the
aeroplane shall stand or fall--to desire solitude.

That was why Edward drew the yellow blind up and the dimity curtain
aside and turned his bed round, so that the sun at its first rising
should strike through his dreams and awaken him. The sun did exactly
what it was expected to do, and Edward awoke saying "Bother" before he
remembered that "Bother" was not at all what he meant. Then he got up
and splashed gently, so as not to break the audible sleep of the people
in the next room, stole down the creaking, twisted stairs in his
tennis-shoes, soft-footed as a cat, drew the bolts of the back door, and
slipped out, closing the door noiselessly behind him. He was careful to
draw the bolt into its place again by means of a bit of fishing-line.
You can do this quite easily with an old door that does not fit very
closely--if you are careful to mark with chalk on the outside of the
door, as Edward did, the exact place where the bolt is. Having thus
secured the door against passing tramps or burglars, he went out across
the highroad, soft with thick, white dust, where the dew lay on hedge
and grassy border, and the sun made diamonds of the dew. Charles,
choking himself in the stable, grew faint with distance.

Beyond the village was a meadow suited to his needs. It was bordered on
one side by a high red-brick wall, above whose moss-grown coping the
rounded shapes of trees leaned. A wood edged it on two other sides, and
in the front was a road.

Here he made his preparations, wound up his machine, and, after one or
two false starts, got it going. He meant to fly it like a kite, and to
this end he had tied one end of a ball of fine twine to the middle of
its body. Now he raised it above his head and launched it. The little
creature rose like a bird; the ball of string leaped and jumped between
his feet, as he paid out the line; the whirring wings hung poised a
second, at the level of the tree-tops, and then, caught by the wind,
sailed straight toward the red wall, burrowed into the trees, and
stopped. He ran toward the wall, winding up the string, and stood below,
looking up. He could not see the winged loose thing. He tweaked the
string and his tweak was met with uncompromising resistance. The
aeroplane had stuck in a chestnut-tree, and hung there, buzzing.

Edward measured the wall with his eye. It was an old wall, of soft red
brick, from which the mortar had fallen away. In its crannies moss grew,
and ragged-robin and ground-ivy hung their delicate veil in the angles
of its buttresses--little ferns and wall-flowers run to seed marked its
courses, the yellow snapdragon which English children call toad-flax
flaunted its pure sulphur-colored plumes from the ledge below the
coping. An architect would have said that the wall wanted pointing; a
builder would have pointed it--an artist would have painted it. To an
engineer in grief for a lost toy the wall presented itself as an
obstacle to be climbed. He climbed it.

He thrust the string into his jacket pocket, and presently set hand and
foot to the hold that the worn wall afforded. In half a minute he was
astride the coping; next moment he had swung by his hands and let
himself go on the wall's other side. It was a longer drop than he
expected; it jarred him a little, and his hat tumbled off. As he picked
this up he noticed that the wall on the inside had been newly pointed.
The trees were a good thirty feet from the wall. There would be no
getting back by the way he had come. He must find a gate. Meantime the
little aeroplane's buzzing had grown faint and ceased. But the twine led
him to the tree, as the silken clue led Queen Eleanor to the tower of
Fair Rosamond. The next thing was to climb the tree and bring down the
truant toy.

The park spread smooth and green before him--the green smoothness that
comes only to English grass growing where grass has been these many
years. Quiet trees dotted the smooth greenness--thickening about the
house, whose many chimneys, red and twisted, rose smokeless above the
clustered green. Nothing moved in all the park, where the sun drank the
dew; birds stirred and twittered in the branches--that was all. The
little aeroplane had stopped its buzzing. Edward was moved to thank Fate
that he had not brought Charles. Also he was glad that this trespass of
his had happened so early. He would get down the aeroplane and quietly
go out by the lodge gate. Even if locked, it would be climbable.

The chestnut-tree, however, had to be climbed first. It was easy
enough, though the leaves baffled him a little, so that it was some time
before he saw the desired gleam of metal and canvas among the dappled
foliage. Also, it was not quite easy to get the thing down without
injuring it, and one had to go slowly.

He lowered it, at last, by its string to the ground from the lowest
branch, then moved along a little, hung by his hands, and dropped.

He picked up the toy and turned to go. "Oh!" he said, without meaning
to. And, "I beg your pardon," without quite knowing what for.

Because, as he turned he came face to face with a vision, the last one
would have expected to see in an English park at early day. A girl in a
Burmese coat, red as poppies, with gold-embroidered hem a foot deep. Her
dress was white. Her eyes were dark, her face palely bright, and behind
her dark head a golden-green Japanese umbrella made a great ridged halo.

"I beg your pardon," said Edward again, and understood that it was
because he was, after all, trespassing.

"I should think you did," said the vision, crossly. "What on earth do
you mean by it? How did you get in?"

Edward, standing a little awkwardly with the aeroplane in his hands,
looked toward the wall.

"I came over after this," he said. "I'm very sorry. I was flying the
thing and it stuck in the tree. If you'll tell me the way to the lodge,
I'll--I hope I didn't scare you."

"I couldn't think what it was," she answered, a little less crossly. "I
saw the tree tossing about as if--as if it had gone mad."

"And you thought of dryads and hastened to the spot. And it was only an
idiot and his aeroplane. I say--I _am_ sorry--"

"You can't help not being a dryad," she said, and now she smiled, and
her smile transformed her face as sunlight does a landscape. "What I
really thought you were was a tramp. Only tramps never climb trees. I
couldn't think how you got in here, though. Tramps never climb walls.
They get in sometimes through the oak fence beyond the plantations."

"It was very intrepid of you to face a tramp," he said.

"Oh, I love tramps," she said; "they're always quite nice to you if you
don't bully them or patronize them. There were two jolly ones last week,
and I talked to them, and they made tea out in the road, you know, and
gave me a cup over the fence. It _was_ nasty." She shuddered a little.
"But I liked it awfully, all the same," she added. "I wish I were a
tramp."

"It's not a bad life," said he.

"It's _the_ life," she said, enthusiastically. "No ties, no
responsibilities--no nasty furniture and hateful ornaments--you just go
where you like and do what you like; and when you don't like where you
are, you go somewhere else; and when you don't like what you're doing,
you needn't go on doing it."

"Those are very irresponsible sentiments--for a lady."

"I know. That's why I think it's so dull being a woman. Men can do
whatever they want to."

"Only if they haven't their living to earn," said Edward, not quite so
much to himself as he would have liked.

There was a little pause, and then, still less himself, he blundered
into, "I say, it is jolly of you to talk to me like this."

She froze at once. "I forgot," she said, "that we had not been
introduced. Thank you for reminding me."

Edward's better self was now wholly lost, and what was left of him could
find nothing better to answer than, "Oh, I say!"

"What I ought to have said," she went on, her face a mask of cold
politeness, "is that you can't possibly get out by the lodge. There are
fierce dogs. And the lodge-keepers are worse than the dogs. If you will
follow me--at a distance, for fear I should begin to talk to you
again--I'll show you where the gardener's ladder is, and you can put it
up against the wall and get out that way."

"Couldn't I get out where the tramps get in?" he asked, humbly. "I don't
like to trouble you."

"Not from here. We should have to pass close by the house."

The "we" gave him courage. "I say--do forgive me," he said.

"There's nothing to forgive," said she.

"Oh, but do," he said, "if you'd only see it! It was just because it was
so wonderful and splendid to have met you like this . . . and to have
you talk to me as you do to the other tramps."

"You're not a tramp," she said, "and I ought not to have forgotten it."

"But I am," said he, "it's just what I really and truly am."

"Come and get the ladder," said she, and moved toward the wall.

"Not unless you forgive me. I won't," he added, plucking up a little
spirit, "be indebted for ladders to people who won't forgive a man
because he speaks the truth clumsily."

"Come," she said, looking back over her shoulder.

"No," he said, obstinately, not moving. "Not unless you forgive me."

"It can't possibly matter to you whether I forgive you or not," she
turned to say it. And as she spoke there came to Edward quite suddenly
and quite unmistakably the knowledge that it did matter. Sometimes
glimpses do thus suddenly and strangely come to us--and that by some
magic inner light that is not reason we know things that by the light of
reason we could never know.

"Look here," he said. "I'll go after that ladder in a minute. But first
I've got something to say to you. Don't be angry, because I've got to
say it. Do you know that just now--just before I said that stupid thing
that offended you--you were talking to me as though you'd known me all
your life?"

"You needn't rub it in," she said.

"Do you know why that is? It's because you _are_ going to know me all
your life. I'm perfectly certain of it. Somehow or other, it's true.
We're going to be friends. I sha'n't need to say again how jolly it is
of you to talk to me. We shall take all that as a matter of course.
People aren't pitchforked into meetings like this for nothing. I'm glad
I said that. I'm glad you were angry with me for saying it. If you
hadn't I might just have gone away and not known till I got
outside--and then it would have been a deuce and all of a business to
get hold of you again. But now I know. And you know, too. When shall I
see you again? Never mind about forgiving me. Just tell me when I shall
see you again. And then I'll go."

"You must be mad," was all she could find to say. She had furled her
sunshade and was smoothing its bamboo ribs with pink fingers.

"You'll be able to find out whether I'm mad, you know, when you see me
again. As a matter of fact--which seems maddest, when you meet some one
you want to talk to, to go away without talking or to insist on talk and
more talk? And you can't say you didn't want to talk to me, because you
know you did. Look here, meet me to-morrow morning again--will you?"

"Certainly not."

"You'll be sorry if you don't. We're like two travelers who have
collected all sorts of wonderful things in foreign countries. We long to
show each other our collections--all the things we've thought and
dreamed. If we'd been what you call introduced, perhaps we shouldn't
have found this out. But as it is, we know it."

"Speak for yourself," she said.

"Thank you," he said, seriously. "I will. Will you sit down for ten
minutes? This tree-root was made for you to sit down on for ten
minutes, and I will speak for myself."

"I can't," she said, and her voice--there was hurry in it, and
indecision, but the ice had gone. "You must come at once for that
ladder. It's getting more dangerous every moment. If any one saw you
here there'd be an awful row."

"For you?"

"Yes, for me. Come on."

He followed her along the wall under the chestnuts. There was no more
spoken words till they came to the ladder.

Then, "Right," he said. "Thank you. Good-by." And set the ladder against
the wall.

"Good-by," said she. "I'll hand the aeroplane up to you?"

"Stand clear," he said, half-way up the ladder. "I'll give it a sideways
tip from the top--it'll fall into its place. It's too heavy for you to
lift. Good-by."

He had reached the top of the wall. She stood below, looking up at him.

"There won't be any row now?"

"No. It's quite safe."

"Then have you nothing to say?"

"Nothing. Yes, I have. I will come to-morrow. You'll misunderstand
everything if I don't."

"Thank you," he said.

She came up the ladder, two steps, then handed him his toy. Then the
ladder fell with a soft thud among the moss and earth and dead leaves;
his head showed a moment above the wall, then vanished.

He went thoughtfully through the dewy grass, along the road, and back to
his inn.

Tommy met him by the horse-trough. "You been flying it?" he asked,
breathlessly.

"Yes. She went like a bird."

"How far did she go?" Tommy asked.

"I don't quite know," said Edward, quite truly, "how far she went. I
shall know better to-morrow."




IV

THE SOUTH DOWNS


THE day was long. Though the aeroplane flew to admiration, though Tommy
adored him and all his works, though the skylarks sang, and the downs
were drenched in sunshine, Edward Basingstoke admitted to himself,
before half its length was known to him, that the day was long.

He climbed the cliff above Cuckmere and sat in the sunshine there, where
the gulls flashed white wings and screamed like babies; he watched the
tide, milk-white with the fallen chalk of England's edge, come sousing
in over the brown, seaweed-covered rocks; he felt the crisp warmth of
the dry turf under his hand, and smelt the sweet smell of the thyme and
the furze and the sea, and it was all good. But it was long. And, for
the first time in his life, being alone was lonely.

And for the second time since the day when Charles, bounding at him from
among the clean straw of an Oxford stable, had bounded into his
affections, he had left that strenuous dog behind.

He got out his road map and spread it in the sun--with stones at the
corners to cheat the wind that, on those Downs, never sleeps--and tried
to believe that he was planning his itinerary, and even to pretend to
himself that he should start to-morrow and walk to Lewes. But instead
his eyes followed the map's indication of the road to that meadow where
the red wall was, and presently he found that he was no longer looking
at the map, but at the book of memory, and most at the pictures painted
there only that morning. Already it seemed a very long time ago.

"I am afraid," said Mr. Basingstoke, alone at the cliff's edge, "that
this time it really is _it_. It's different from what I thought. It's
confoundedly unsettling."

Like all healthy young men, he had always desired and intended to fall
in love; he had even courted the experience, and honestly tried to lose
his heart, but with a singular lack of success. In the girls he had met
he had found gaiety, good looks, and a certain vague and general
attractiveness--the common attribute of youth and girlhood--but nothing
that even began to transfigure the world as his poets taught him that
love should transfigure it. The little, trivial emotions which he had
found in pressing hands and gazing into eyes had never lured him further
than the gaze and the hand-clasp. Yet he had thought himself to be in
love more than once.

"Or perhaps this isn't the real thing, either," he tried to reassure
himself. "How could it be?"

Then he explained to himself, as he had often explained to Vernon, that
love at first sight was impossible. Love, he had held and proclaimed,
was not the result of the mere attraction exercised by beauty--it was
the response of mind to mind, the admiration of character and
qualities--the satisfaction of one's nature by the mental and moral
attributes of the beloved. That was not exactly how he had put it, but
that was what he had meant. And now--he had seen a girl once, for ten
minutes, and already he could think of nothing else. Even if he thought
of something else he could perceive the thought of her behind those
other thoughts, waiting, alluring, and sure of itself, to fill his mind
the moment he let it in.

"Idiot," he said at last, got up from the turf, and pocketed the map,
"to-morrow she'll be quite ordinary and just like any other girl. You go
for a long walk, young-fellow-my-lad, and think out a water-mill for
Tommy."

This had, indeed, been more than half promised. Mr. Basingstoke was one
of those persons whom their friends call thorough; their enemies say
that they carry everything too far. If he did a thing at all, he liked
to do it thoroughly. If he wrote a duty-letter to an aunt, he wrote a
long one, and made it amusing. As often as not he would illustrate it
with little pictures. If he gave a shilling to a beggar he would
immediately add tobacco and agreeable conversation. One of his first
acts, on coming into his inheritance, had been to pension his old nurse,
who was poor and a widow with far too many children--too many, because
she was a widow and poor and had to go out to work instead of looking
after her family, as she wanted to do. Any one else would have written
and told her she was to have two pounds a week as long as she lived.
Edward sent her a large box of hot-house flowers--her birthday happening
to occur at about that date--the most expensive and beautiful flowers he
could find, anonymously. Then he sent her a fat hamper bursting with
excellent things to eat and drink--and a box of toys and clothes for the
children. The lady who "served" him with the clothes was amused at his
choice--but approved it. And in the end he told his solicitors--smiling
to himself at the novel possession--to write and tell the woman that an
old employer had secured her an annuity. Later he went down to see her,
to find her incredibly happy and prosperous, and to hear the wonderful
and mysterious tale. So now, in the case of Tommy, most people would
have thought an aeroplane and a motor-ride as much as any little boy
could expect. But Mr. Basingstoke liked to give people much more than
they could expect. It was not enough to give them enough. He liked to
give a feast.

That evening after tea, Tommy breathing hard on the back of his neck, he
sketched the water-wheel with the highest degree of precision and a
superfluous wealth of detail. But the thought was with him through it
all.

Next morning he went to the trysting-place, through the fresh, sweet
morning. He climbed the wall, sat down on the log, and waited. He waited
an hour, and she did not come. It says a good deal for his tenacity of
purpose that when he went home he began at once on the water-wheel.

In the afternoon he took Charles out for a walk. Charles chased and
killed a hen, and was butted by a goat, before they reached the end of
the street; knocked a leg of mutton off the block at the butcher's in
the next village; bit the rural police to the very undershirt, and also
to the tune of ten compensating shillings; and was run over by a
bicycle, which twisted its pedal in the consequent fall, and grazed its
rider's hands and trousers knees. After each adventure Charles was
firmly punished, but, though chastised, he was not chastened, and when
they met a dog-cart coming slowly down a hill he was quite ready to run
in front of it, barking and leaping at the horse's nose. The horse,
which appeared to Charles's master to be a thoroughbred, shied. There
was a whirl of dust and hoofs and brown flank, a cry from the
driver--another cry, a fierce bark from Charles, ending in a howl of
agony--the next instant the horse had bolted and Edward was left in the
dusty road, Charles writhing in the dust, and the dog-cart almost out of
sight.

"Charles, old man--Charles, lie still, can't you? Let me see if you're
hurt."

He stooped, and as he stooped Charles did lie still.

His master lifted the heavy, muscular body that had been so full of life
and energy. It lay limp and lifeless, head and hind-quarters drooping
over his arm like a wet shawl.

Basingstoke sat down on the roadside with the dog across his knees. For
him the light of life was out. Men do not cry, of course, as women do
when their dogs die, but he could not see very clearly. Presently he
found himself face to face with that question, always so disconcerting,
even to criminals--what to do with the body. He was miles from his inn,
and Charles was no light weight. He could not leave the dog in the road.
His friend must have decent burial. There was nothing for it but to
wait till some cart should come by and then to ask for a lift.

So he sat there, thinking such thoughts as men do think in adversity.
After a calamity, when the first excitement of horror dies down, one
always says, "How different everything was yesterday!" and Mr.
Basingstoke said what we all say. Yesterday Charles was alive and well,
and his master had not taken him out because he wanted to be at leisure
to think--he realized that now--about the girl whom he was to have met
to-day. And he had not met the girl. And Charles was dead.

"I wish I hadn't left you at home yesterday, old boy," said Mr.
Basingstoke.

And then came the sound of hoofs, and he prepared to stop the vehicle,
whatever it was, and beg for a lift for himself and what he carried. But
when the wheels came near and he saw that it was the very cart that had
run over Charles he sat down again and kept his eyes on the ground. It
wasn't their fault, of course, but still. . . .

The cart stopped and some one was saying: "I hope the dog isn't much
hurt." A hard, cold voice it was.

Edward got out his hand from under Charles to take his hat off, and
said: "My dog is dead."

"I am extremely sorry, but it was the dog's fault," said the voice,
aggressively.

"Yes," said Edward.

"There's nothing to be done," said the voice. "It was nearly a nasty
accident for us."

"I apologize for my dog's conduct," said Edward, formally.

And then came another voice, "But, Aunt Loo, can't we _do_ anything?"

Of course you will have known all along whose voice that would be.
Edward was less discerning. He had been far too much occupied with
Charles and the horse to do more than realize that the two people in the
cart were women--and now when he heard again the voice that had talked
to him yesterday in the freshness of the morning, the shock sent his
blood surging. He looked up--face, neck, ears were burning. Men do not
blush, but if they did you would have said that Mr. Basingstoke blushed
in that hour.

He looked up. Holding the reins was a hard, angular woman of fifty, the
sort that plays golf and billiards and is perfectly competent with
horses. Beside her sat the girl, and under her white hat the crimson of
her face matched his own. The distress he felt at this unpropitious
coincidence deepened his color. Hers deepened, too.

"You can't do anything, thank you," he said, just a moment too late. For
his pause had given the aunt time to look from one to the other.

"Oh!" she said, shortly.

The girl spoke, also just too late.

"At least, let us take the poor, dear dog home for you," she said.

"By all means," said the aunt, with an air of finality. "Where shall we
leave it?"

"I am at the Five Bells, in Jevington," said Edward, and was thankful to
feel his ears a shade less fiery.

"I see," said the aunt, with hideous significance. "Put it in at the
back, will you?"

She spoke as though Charles were a purchase she had just made and Mr.
Basingstoke the shopman.

He would have liked to refuse, but how dear of her to suggest it. "Thank
you," he said, and came through the dust to the back of the cart.

Almost before he had replaced the second pin the cart moved, and he was
left alone in the white road.

The way home was long and dismal--its only incident the finding of a
little white handkerchief in the dust about a mile from the scene of the
tragedy. It was softly scented. Of course it might be Aunt Loo's
handkerchief, but he preferred to think that it was Hers. He shook the
dust from it and put it in his pocket. As he came down the village
street he remembered how, only yesterday, he had heard, just here by the
saddler's, that strangled, choking bark which betokened Charles's
recognition of his master's approach. Well, there would be no such
barking welcome for him now.

Some other dog was choking and barking, though, and in that very stable
where Charles had choked and barked. And Charles's body would have been
put in the stable, no doubt. He would go round and see. He went round,
opened the stable door, and next moment was struck full in the chest by
what seemed to be a heavy missive hurled with tremendous force. It was
Charles, who had leaped from the end of his chain to greet his
master--Charles, alive and almost idiotic in his transports of uncouth
affection. Edward felt the dog all over--to see if any bones were
broken. Charles never winced. There was not a cut or a bruise on him!
The two sat on the straw embracing for quite a long time.

"Yes, sir, seems quite himself, don't he?" said Robert. "Miss Davenant
she brought him. Told me to tell you the dog come to himself quite
sudden on the cart. Must have fainted, young miss said, and when he come
to it was all she could do to hold him down. He seems to have come to
quite sudden and all wild-like among their legs in the bottom of the
cart till miss dragged him out--nearly upset the old lady right out of
the cart, coming up sudden under her knees. Awful nasty she was about
it. Said the dog must have been shamming. Thank you, sir. I'll drink
your health and the dog's."

"Shamming, indeed!" said Edward to himself, and resented the cruel and
silly aspersion. Yet, stay, was it really quite impossible that Charles,
fearing that the same punishment might visit this last exploit as had
followed his earlier outrages, had really shammed, to disarm a doting
master? Edward put away the thought. It was impossible.

The main thing was that Charles was alive. But, after all, _was_ that
the main thing? Now that the dog was alive it suddenly ceased to be. The
main thing was that he had not seen her that morning and that he must,
somehow, see her again.

Somehow. But how? This gave him food for thought.

He went into his parlor and sat down--to think. But, try as he could,
there seemed no way. Of course he could go next morning--of course he
would go next morning--and every morning for a week. But if she hadn't
come to-day, why should she come to-morrow or the next day, or the day
after that?

Or the handkerchief. Wouldn't it be natural that he should call to
return it and to thank them for taking care of the lifeless Charles, and
apologize for that thoughtless animal's inconvenient and sudden change
of attitude? Yes, that would have been natural if the girl had not
blushed and if he had not turned scarlet.

He took out the handkerchief and spread it on the table--what silly
little things girls' handkerchiefs were! Then he looked at it more
closely. Then he took it to the window, stretched it tightly, and looked
more closely than ever. Yes, there was something on it, something
intended--not just the marks of the road. There were letters--pencil
letters an inch or more long, very rough and straggling, but quite
unmistakable--_Ce soir 12 heures._ At least, it might be 13, but, then,
she wasn't an Italian.

The light of life blazed up, and the world suddenly became beautiful
again. She had not forgotten--she had wished to come to meet
him--something had prevented her coming in the morning. But to-night she
would come. Twelve o'clock! A strange hour to choose. Bah! who was he to
cavil at the hour she chose to set? How sweet and soft the handkerchief
was!




V

LA MANCHE


THE bolts of the back door did not creak at all when, at twenty minutes
to twelve, Edward Basingstoke let himself out. Tommy always saw to the
bolts, for his own purposes, with a feather and a little salad oil.

The night was sweet and dark under the trees and in among the houses. In
the village no lamp gleamed at any window. Beyond the village, the
starshine and dew lent a gray shimmer to field and hedge, and the road
lay before him like a pale ribbon. He crossed the meadow, climbed the
wall, and dropped. The earth sounded dully under his feet, and twigs
crackled as he moved. There was no other sound. She was not there. He
dared not light a match to see his watch's face by. Perhaps he was
early. Well, he could wait. He waited. He waited and waited and waited.
He listened till his ears were full of the soft rustlings and movements
which go to make up the silence of country night. He strained his eyes
to see some movement in the gray park dotted with black trees. But all
was still. It was very dark under the trees. And through all his
listening he thought, thought. Did it do to trust to impulses--to
instincts? Did it do, rather, to disregard them? A gipsy woman had said
to him once, "Your first thoughts are straight--give yourself time to
think twice and you'll think wrong." What he had felt that morning while
he waited, vainly, for her to come had taught him that, fool as he might
be for his pains, the feeling that possessed him was more like the love
poets talked of than he would have believed any feeling of his could be.
And, after all, love at first sight _was_ possible--was it not the theme
of half the romances in the world? He felt that at this, their second
meeting, he must know whether he meant to advance or to retreat. Always
when he had trusted his impulse his choice had been a wise one. But was
a choice necessary now? His instincts told him that it was. This
midnight meeting--planned by her and not by him--it was a meeting for
"good-by." No girl would make an assignation at that hour just to tell a
man that she intended to meet him again the next day. So he must know
whether he meant to permit himself to be said good-by to. And he knew
that he did not.

The day had been long, but it seemed to him that already the night had
been longer than the day. Could he have mistaken the hour? No, it was
certainly twelve--or thirteen. Then his heart leaped up. If it _had_
been thirteen, that meant one o'clock. Perhaps it was not one yet. But
he felt that he knew it to be at least three. Yet if it were three there
would be the diffused faint illumination of dawn growing, growing. And
there was no light at all but the changeless light of the stars. Again
and again he thought he saw her, thought he heard her. And again and
again only silence and solitude came to meet his thoughts.

When at last she did come he saw her very far off, and heard the rustle
of her dress even before he saw her.

He would not go to meet her across the starlit space; that would be very
dangerous. He stood where he was till she came into the shadow. Then he
went toward her and said:

"At last!"

She drew a long breath. "Oh, I was so afraid you wouldn't come!"

"I was here at twelve," he said.

"So you got the handkerchief. I put thirteen because I thought if I put
one--it was so difficult to write--and, of course, I couldn't look at it
to see if it was readable. I wrote it under the driving-rug. Oh,
suppose you hadn't got it!"

"I can't suppose it. What should I have done if I hadn't?"

"Oh," she said, "don't! Please don't. I thought you'd understand it was
serious. I shouldn't have asked you to come in the middle of the night
to talk nonsense as if we were at a dance."

"What's serious?" he said.

She said, "Everything," and her voice trembled.

He took her arm, and felt that she herself was trembling.

"Come and sit down," he said, comfortably, as one might speak to a child
in trouble. "Come and sit down and tell me all about it."

They sat down on the log, and he pulled the dark cloak she wore more
closely round her.

"Now," he said, "what's happened? Why didn't you come this morning?"

"I stayed too long the first time," she answered, "and met Aunt Loo as I
went in. She asked me where I'd been. I said I'd been out to swim in the
lake. That was quite true. That _was_ why I had gone out. I've often
done it. But, of course, my hair wasn't wet. She didn't say anything.
But this morning when I came down she was sitting in the hall, waiting
for me. She asked me if I was going bathing again, and I said, No, I
was going to walk in the park. So she said, 'Charming idea. I'll come,
too.'"

"And what did you say?"

"I said, 'Do,' of course. But it was awful. I was so afraid of her
seeing you."

"Suppose she _had_ chosen to walk that way."

"Yes, of course I thought of that. So _I_ led the way and walked
straight toward you. Then she thought whoever I was going to meet must
be the other way. So she insisted on going the other way. I knew she
would."

"That was subtle of you."

"No; it's only that she's stupid. It wouldn't have taken any one else
in."

"So she was baffled."

"Yes, but she has instincts, though she's so stupid. She knew there was
something up. And then when we met you--oh, I _am_ so glad the dog's all
right--when we met you I knew she thought you'd something to do with my
being out so early in the morning, and then you blushed."

"If I did," he said, "I wasn't the only one."

"Oh, I know," she said, "but I don't suppose I should have if you
hadn't. Though unjust suspicions like that are enough to make anybody
blush. Yes, they were unjust because you had nothing to do with my going
out the first time--why, I didn't even know there _was_ a you. And now
all the fat's in the fire, and she's taking me to Ireland or Scotland
to-morrow--she won't say which. And I couldn't bear to go and have you
think I'd made an appointment and not kept it. It's so unbusiness-like
to break appointments," she said.

"Does she suppose, then, that we--that I am--that you have--that I
should--?"

"I don't know what she supposes. At least I do. But it's too silly. Now
I've explained everything. Good-by. I'm glad you found the
handkerchief--and I'm _awfully_ glad about Charles."

"I didn't know you knew his name."

"The stableman said it when the dog ran between his knees and nearly
knocked him down. It's a darling dog--but isn't it strong! Good-by!" She
held out her hand. "Good-by," she said, again.

"No," said he, and held the hand.

There was a little pause.

"Say good-by," she said. "Indeed I must go."

"Why?" he asked, releasing the hand.

"I've said everything there was to say--I mean, what I came to say."

"There's a very great deal that you haven't told me. I don't understand.
Who does your aunt think I am?"

"I would rather not tell you; you'd only laugh."

"But please tell me. I shouldn't."

A troubled silence answered him.

"Look here," he said, "I know there's a lot you haven't told me. Do tell
me, and let me help you, if I can. You're worried and unhappy. I can
hear it in your voice. Tell me. Things look different when you've put
them into words. First of all, tell me who your aunt thought I was."

She sat down again with the air of definite decision. "Very well," she
said, "if you will have it, she thought you were the piano-tuner. Why
don't you laugh?"

"I'm not amused yet," he said. "What piano-tuner? And why should he--why
should you--"

"The piano-tuner is a fence," she said, "and she thinks you're it."

"I don't understand a word you're saying."

"I don't care," she said, desperately. "I'll tell you the whole silly
story and you can laugh, if you like. I shan't be offended. Last autumn
father brought a man to lunch, quite a nice man--sensible, middle-aged,
very well off--and next day he told me the man had proposed for me, and
I'd better take him. He'd accepted for me."

"Good heavens!" said Edward, "I thought it was only in the _Family
Herald_ that such fathers existed."

"Laugh as much as you like," said she; "it's true, for all that. You
see, I'd refused several before that. It's rather important for me to
marry well--my father's not rich, and--"

"I see. Well?"

"Well, I wasn't going to. And when it came to this luncheon man I told
you about there was a scene, and my father said was there any one else,
and I said no; but he went on so frightfully and wouldn't believe me. So
at last I told him."

"Told him what?"

"That there was some one."

"Yes?" His voice was only more gentle for the sudden sharp stab of
disappointment which told him what hope it was that he had nursed.

"And then, of course, I wouldn't say who it was. And he sent for my
aunts. Aunt Enid's worse than Aunt Loo. And they bothered and bothered.
And at last I said it was the piano-tuner. I don't know how I could
have. Father turned him off, of course, poor wretch, and they brought me
down here to come to my senses. Aunt Loo never saw the miserable
piano-tuner, and she thinks you're him. So now you know. And that's why
they're taking me away from here. They think the piano-tuner is pursuing
me. I believe Aunt Loo thinks you trained the dog to bark at horses so
as to get a chance to speak to me."

"Do you care much for your father?" he asked, "or for any of them?"

"It's a horrid thing to say," she answered, "but I don't. The only one I
care for's Aunt Alice--she's an invalid and a darling. Father thinks
about nothing but bridge and races, and Aunt Loo's all golf and horses,
and Aunt Enid's a social reformer. I hate them all. And I've never been
anywhere or seen anything. I'm not allowed to write to any one. And they
don't have any one here at all, and I'm not to see a single soul till
I've come to my senses, as they call it. And that's why I was so glad to
talk to you yesterday."

"I see," he said, very kindly. "Now what can I do for you? Where's the
other man? Can't I post a letter to him or something? Why doesn't he
come and rescue you?"

"What other man?" she asked.

"The man you're fond of. The man whose name you wouldn't tell them."

"Oh," she said, lightly, and just as though it didn't matter. "There
isn't any other man."

"There isn't?" he echoed, joyously.

"No, of course not. I just made him up--and then I called him the
piano-tuner."

"Then," he said, "forgive me for asking, but I must be quite sure--you
don't care for any man at all?"

"Of course I don't," she answered, resentfully, "I shouldn't go about
caring about any one who didn't care for me--and if any one cared for me
and I cared for him, of course we should run away with each other at
once."

"I see," said Mr. Basingstoke, slowly and distinctly. "Then if there
isn't any one else I suggest that you run away with me."

It was fully half a minute before she spoke. Then she said: "I don't
blame you. I deserve it for asking you to meet me and coming out like
this. But I thought you were different."

"Deserve what?"

"To be insulted and humiliated. To be made a jest of."

"It seems to me that my offer is no more insulting or humiliating than
any of your other offers. I like you very much. I think you like me. And
I believe we should suit each other very well. Don't be angry. I'm
perfectly serious. Don't speak for a minute. Listen. I've just come into
some money, and I'm going about the country, seeing places and people.
I'm just a tramp, as I told you. Come and be a tramp, too. We'll go
anywhere you like. We'll take the map and you shall put your finger on
any place you think you'd like to see, and we'll go straight off to it,
by rail or motor, or in a cart, or a caravan, if you'd like it.
Caravans must be charming. To go wherever you like, stop when you
like--go on when you like. Come with me. I don't believe you'd ever
regret it. And I know I never should."

"I believe you're serious," she said, half incredulously.

"Of course I am. It's a way out of all your troubles."

"I couldn't," she said, earnestly, "marry any one I wasn't very fond of.
And one can't be fond of a person one's only seen twice."

"Can't you?" he said, a little sadly.

"No," she answered. "I think it's very fine of you to offer me
this--just to get me out of a bother. And I'm sorry I thought you were
being horrid. I'll tell you something. I've always thought that even if
I cared very much for some one I should be almost afraid to marry him
unless I knew him very, very well. Girls do make such frightful
mistakes. You ought to see a man every day for a year, and then,
perhaps, you'd know if you could really bear to live with him all your
life."

Instead of answering her directly, he said: "You would love the life in
the caravan. Think of the camp--making a fire of sticks and cooking your
supper under the stars, and the great moonlit nights, and sleeping in
pine woods and waking in the dawn and curling yourself up in your
blanket and going to sleep again till I shouted out that the fire was
alight and breakfast nearly ready."

"I wish I could come with you without having to be married."

"Come, then," he said. "Come on any terms. I'll take you as a sister if
I'm not to take you as a wife."

"Do you mean it? Really?" she said. "Oh, why shouldn't I? I believe you
would take me--and I should be perfectly free then. I've got a little
money of my own that my godmother left me. I was twenty-one the other
day. I don't get it, of course. My father says it costs that to keep me.
But if I were to run away he would have to give it to me, wouldn't he?
And then I could pay you back what you spent on me. Oh, I wish I could.
Will you really take me?"

But he had had time to think. "No," he said, "on reflection, I don't
think I will."

But she did not hear him, for as he spoke she spoke, too. "Hush!" she
said. "Look -- look there."

Across the park, near the house, lights were moving.

"They're looking for me," she gasped. "They've found out that I'm away.
Oh, what shall I do? Aunt Loo will never be decent to me again. What
_shall_ I do?"

"Come with me," he said, strongly. "I'll take care of you. Come."

He took her hand. "I swear by God," he said, "that everything shall be
as you choose. Only come now--come away from these people. You're
twenty-one. You're your own mistress. Let me help you to get free from
all this stuffy, stupid tyranny."

"You won't make me marry you?" she asked.

"I can't make you do anything," he said. "But if you're coming, it must
be now."

"Come, then," she said, making for the ladder.




VI

CROW'S NEST


HE had brought a ball of string in his pocket, this time, and he was
glad to know he could lower the ladder by it--for the thud of a falling
ladder would sound far in the night stillness. From the top of the wall
he held the ladder while she mounted.

"Sit here a moment," he said, "while I get rid of the ladder." He
lowered it gently, drew the string up, leaped to the ground outside the
wall, and held up his hands to her.

"Jump," he whispered. "I'll catch you."

But even as he spoke she had turned and was hanging by her hands. He let
her do it her own way. She dropped expertly, landing with a little
rebound. He was glad he had not tried to catch her. It would have been a
poor beginning to their comradeship if he had, at the very outset, shown
doubts of her competence to do anything she set out to do.

They stood under the wall very near together.

"What are you going to do?" she said.

"I must get a car and take you away. Are you afraid to be left alone for
a couple of hours?"

"I--I don't think so," she said. "But where? Did you notice the lights
as you got over the wall?"

"Yes; they were still near the house."

The two were walking side by side along the road now.

"If you were any ordinary girl I should be afraid to leave you to think
things over--for fear you should think you'd been rash or silly or
something--and worry yourself about all sorts of nonsense, and perhaps
end in bolting back to your hutch before I could come back to you. But
since it's you--let's cut across the downs here--we'll keep close to the
edge of the wood."

Their feet now trod the soft grass.

"How sensible of you to wear a dark cloak," he said.

"Yes," she said, "a really romantic young lady in distress would have
come in white muslin and blue ribbons, wouldn't she?"

He glowed to the courage that let her jest at such a moment.

"Where am I to wait?" she asked.

"There's an old farm-house not far away," he said. "If you don't mind
waiting there. Could you?"

"Who lives there?"

"Nobody. I happen to have the key. I was looking at it yesterday. It's
not furnished, but I noticed some straw and packing-cases. I could rig
you up some sort of lounge, but don't do it if you're afraid. If you're
afraid to be left to yourself we'll walk together to Eastbourne. But if
we do we're much more likely to be caught."

"I'm not in the least afraid. Why should I be?" she said, and they
toiled up the hill among the furze bushes in the still starlight.

"What they'll do," she said, presently, "when they're sure I'm not in
the park, is to go down to your inn and see if you're there."

"Yes," he said, "I'm counting on that. That's why I said two or three
hours. You see, I must be there when they do come, and the minute
they're gone I'll go for the motor. Look here--I've got some chocolate
that I got for a kiddy to-day; luckily, I forgot to give it to him; and
here are some matches, only don't strike them if you can help it. Now,
stick to it."

They went on in silence; half-way up the hill he took her arm to help
her. Then, over the crest of the hill, in a hollow of the downs there
was the dark-spread blot of house and farm buildings. They went down
the road. Nothing stirred--only as they neared the farm-yard a horse in
the stable rattled his halter against the manger and they heard his
hoofs moving on the cobbled floor of his stall. They stood listening.
No, all was still.

"Give me your hand," he said, and led her round to the side of the
house. The key grated a little as he turned it in the lock. He threw
back the door.

"This is the kitchen," he said. "Stand just inside and I'll make a nest
for you. I know exactly where to lay my hands on the straw."

There was rustling in the darkness and a sound of boards grating on
bricks. She stood at the door and waited.

"Ready," he said.

"They'll find me," she said. "We shall never get away."

"Trust me for that," said he.

"I must have been mad to come," he heard through the darkness.

"We're all mad once in our lives," he said, cheerfully. "Now roll
yourself in your cloak. Give me your hands--so." He led her to the straw
nest he had made, and lowered her to it.

"Do you wish you hadn't come?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said.

"I hope to Heaven I haven't misjudged you," he said, with the first
trace of anxiety she had yet heard in his voice. "If you should be the
kind of girl who's afraid of the dark--"

The straw rustled as she curled herself more comfortably in her nest.

"I'm not afraid," she said.

"Look here," said he, "here's my match-box, but don't strike a light
among the straw. The door into the house is locked and the key's on this
side of the door. Can you come to the back door and lock it after me,
and then find your way back to your nest?"

"Yes," she said, and felt her way past the big copper to the door.

"Sure you're not frightened?"

"Quite," said she.

"Then I'll go," said he, and went.

She locked the door and crept back to the straw. He waited till its
crackling told him that she had found her way back to her couch. Then he
started for Jevington.

And as he went he told himself that she was right. She had been mad to
come, and he had been mad to let her come. But there was no going back
now.

There was no looking back, even. From the brow of the hill the road was
down-hill all the way, and he ran, his rubber shoes patting almost
noiselessly in the dust. At his inn the bolt yielded to his
knife-point's pressure, the well-oiled lock let him in without a murmur,
the stairs hardly creaked more than stairs can creak in their dark
solitudes when we lie awake and listen to them and wonder. . . . The
night was as silent as a thought, and when at last the silence was
shattered by the clatter of hoofs and the jangle of harness, Mr.
Basingstoke's head turned a little on his pillow, not restlessly.

He heard the clanging bell echo in the flagged passage; heard through
the plaster walls the heavy awakening of his host, the scrape of a
match, the hasty, blundering toilet; heard the big bar dropped from the
front door; voices--the groom's voice, the host's voice, the aunt's
voice.

Then heavy steps on the stairs and a knock at his door.

"Very sorry to disturb you, sir," came the muffled tones through the
door, almost cringingly apologetic, "but could you get up, sir, just for
a minute? Miss Davenant from the Hall wants a word with you--about your
dawg, sir, as I understand. If you could oblige, sir--very inconvenient,
I know, sir, but the Hall is very highly thought of in the village,
sir."

"What on earth--?" said Mr. Basingstoke, very loudly, and got out of
bed. "I'll dress and come down," he said.

He did dress, to the accompaniment of voices below--replaced, that is,
the collar, tie, and boots he had taken off--and then he began to pack,
his mind busy with the phrases in which he would explain that a house in
which these nocturnal disturbances occurred was not fit for the
sojourning of. . . . No, hang it all, that would not be fair to the
landlord--he must find some other tale.

When he had kept the lady waiting as long as he thought a man might have
kept her who had really a toilet to make, he went slowly down. Voices
sounded in the parlor, and a slab of light from its door lay across the
sanded passage.

He went in; the landlord went out, closing the door almost too
discreetly.

Mr. Basingstoke and the aunt looked at each other. She was very upright
and wore brown gloves and a brown, boat-shaped hat with an aggressive
quill.

"You _are_ here, then?" she said.

"Where else, madam?" said Mr. Basingstoke.

"I should like you," said the aunt, deliberately, "to be somewhere else
within the next hour. I will make it worth your while."

"Thank you," Edward murmured.

"I think I ought to tell you," said she, "that I saw through that
business of the dog. He was well trained, I admit. But I can't have my
niece annoyed in this way."

"The lady must certainly not be annoyed," said Edward, with feeling.

"I came to-night to see if you were here. . . ."

"It is an unusual hour for a call," said Edward, "but I am
proportionally honored."

"--to see if you were here, and, if you were, to tell you that my niece
is not."

Edward cast a puzzled eye around the crowded parlor. "No," he said.
"No."

"I mean," Miss Davenant went on, "that my niece has left this
neighborhood and will not return while you are here; so you are wasting
your time and trouble."

"_I_ see," said Edward, helpfully.

"You will gain nothing by this attitude," said Miss Davenant. "If you
will consent to leave Jevington to-night I will give you twenty pounds."

"Twenty pounds!" he repeated, softly.

"Yes, twenty pounds, on condition that you promise not to molest this
defenseless girl."

"Put up your money, madam," said Edward Basingstoke, with a noble
gesture copied from the best theatrical models, "and dry your eyes.
Never shall it be said that Edward Basingstoke was deaf to the voice of
a lady in distress. Lay your commands on me, and be assured that, for
me, to hear is to obey."

"You are very impertinent, young man," Miss Davenant told him, "and you
won't do yourself any good by talking like a book. Clear out of this
to-night, and I'll give you twenty pounds. Stay, and take the
consequences."

"Meaning--?"

"Well, stay if you like. You won't see her. She won't return to
Jevington till you're gone. So I tell you you'd better accept my offer
and go."

"Accept your offer and go," repeated Edward.

"Twenty pounds," said the lady, persuasively.

"Tempt me not!" said Edward. "To a man in my position. . . ."

"Exactly."

"Nay," said Edward, "there are chords even in a piano-tuner's
breast--chords which, too roughly touched, will turn and rend the
smiter."

"Good gracious!" said Miss Davenant, "I believe the man's insane."

"Withdraw that harsh expression," he pleaded. And then, without warning,
the situation ceased to amuse him. Here he was, swimming in the deep,
smooth waters of diplomacy, and suddenly diplomacy seemed a sticky
medium. He would have liked Miss Davenant to be a man--a man in
green-silk Georgian coat and buckled shoes; himself also gloriously
Georgian, in murray-colored cut velvet, with Mechlin at wrists and
throat. Then they could have betaken themselves to the bowling-green and
fought it out with ringing rapiers, by the light of the lantern held in
the landlord's trembling fingers. Or at dawn, in the meadow the red wall
bounded, there could have been measured pacings--a dropped handkerchief,
two white puffs drifting away on the chill, sweet air, and Edward
Basingstoke could have handed his smoking pistol to his second and
mounted his horse--Black Belial--and so away to his lady, leaving his
adversary wounded slightly ("winged," of course, was the word). Thus
honor would have been satisfied, and Edward well in the lime-light. But
in this little box of an overfurnished room, by the light of an
ill-trimmed paraffin-lamp, to rag an anxious aunt. . . . He withdrew
himself slowly from diplomacy--tried to find an inch or two of dry truth
to stand on.

"Well, why don't you say something?" asked the anxious aunt.

"I will," said Mr. Basingstoke. "Madam, I have to ask your pardon for an
unpardonable liberty. I have deceived you. I am not what you think. I am
not a piano-tuner, but an engineer."

"But you said you were. . . ."

"Pardon me. I said there were chords in the breasts of piano-tuners."

"But if you aren't, how did you know there was one?"

This _riposte_ he had not anticipated. Frankness had its drawbacks--so
small a measure of it as he had allowed himself. He leaped headlong into
diplomacy again.

"Look back on what you have said, not only to me, but to others," he
said, solemnly, and saw that the chance shot had gone home. "Now," he
said, "don't let us prolong an interview which cannot but be painful to
us both. I am not the piano-tuner for whom you take me. You are a
complete stranger to me. The only link that binds us is the fact that
your horse ran over my dog and that you bore the apparently lifeless
body home for me. Yet if you wish me to leave the neighborhood, I will
leave it. In fact, I was going in any case," he added, struggling
against diplomacy.

Miss Davenant looked at him. "You're speaking the truth," she said;
"you're not the piano-tuner. But you got as red as fire yesterday. So
did my niece. What was that for?"

"I cannot explain my complicated color-scheme," said Edward, "without
diagrams and a magic-lantern. And as for your niece, I can lay my hand
on my heart and say that the light of declining day never illumined that
face for me till the moment when it also illumined yours."

"Are you deceiving me?" Miss Davenant asked, weakly, and Edward
answered:

"Yes, I am; but not in the way you think. We all have our secrets, but
mine are not the secrets of the piano-tuner."

Some one sneezed in the passage outside.

"Our host has been eavesdropping," said Edward, softly.

"Well, if he doesn't make more of this conversation than I do, he won't
make much," said Miss Davenant. "I don't trust you."

"That would make it all the easier for me to deceive you," said Edward,
"if I sought to deceive."

"You've got too much language for me," said Miss Davenant. "If you're
not the man, I apologize."

"Don't mention it," said Edward.

"If you are, I don't wonder so much at what happened in London. Good
night. Sorry to have disturbed you."

"Don't you think," said Edward, "that you might as well tell me why you
_did_ disturb me?"

"I thought you were the piano-tuner," she said; "you knew that
perfectly well. And I don't want piano-tuners hanging round Jevington.
I'm sorry I offered the money. I ought to have seen."

"Not at all," said Mr. Basingstoke, "and, since my presence here annoys
you, know that by this time to-morrow I shall be far away."

"There's one thing more," said Miss Davenant. But Mr. Basingstoke was
never to know what that one thing was, for at the instant a wild shriek
rang through the quiet night, there was a scuffle outside, hoarse voices
in anger and pain, the door burst open, and Miss Davenant's groom
staggered in.

"Beg pardon, ma'am"--he still remembered his station, and it was thus he
affirmed it--"beg pardon, ma'am, but this 'ere dawg--"

It was too true. Charles, perhaps conscious of his master's presence in
the parlor, had slipped his collar, scratched a hole under the stable
door, and, finding the groom and the landlord in the passage, barring
his entrance, had bitten the groom's trousers leg. It hung, gaping, from
knee to ankle--with Charles still attached. Charles's master choked the
dog off, but confidential conversation was at an end, even when a
sovereign had slipped from his hand to the groom's.

"Seems the young lady's missing," said the host, when the dog-cart had
rattled up the street.

"Indeed!" said Edward. "Well, I think I also shall retreat. Will it
inconvenience you if I leave my traps to be sent on? I shall walk into
Seaford and catch the early train."

"It wasn't my fault the lady come, sir," said the landlord, sulky but
deferential.

"I know it," said the guest, "and I am not leaving because of her
coming. I should have left in any case. But it is a fine night, I have a
fancy for a walk, and it does not seem worth while to go to bed again.
If you will kindly take this, pay your bill out of it, and divide the
remainder between Robert and Gladys, I shall be very much obliged. I've
been very comfortable here and I shall certainly come again."

He pressed a five-pound note into the landlord's hand, and before that
bewildered one could think of anything more urgent than the commonplaces
which begin, "I'm sure, sir," or, "I shouldn't like to think," he and
Charles had turned their backs on the Five Bells, and the landlord was
staring after them. The round, white back of Charles showed for quite a
long time through the darkness. Slowly he drew the bolts, put out the
lights, and went back to bed.

"It's a rum go," he told his wife, after he had told her all he had
heard and overheard, "a most peculiar rum go. But he's a gentleman, he
is, whichever way you look at it. Miss up at the Hall might do a jolly
sight worse, if you ask me. Shouldn't wonder, come to think of it, if
she ain't waiting for him around the corner, as it is."

"He's the kind of gentleman a girl _would_ wait around the corner for,"
said the landlady. "It's his eyes, partly, I think. And he's got such a
kind look. But if she is--waiting round the corner, I mean, like what
you said--he _have_ got a face to go on like what he did to Miss
Davenant."

"Yes," said the landlord, blowing out the candle, "he _have_ got a face,
whichever way you look at it."

It was bright daylight when a motor--one of the strong, fierce kind, no
wretched taxicab, but a private motor of obvious speed and
spirit--blundered over the shoulder of the downs down the rutty road to
Crow's Nest Farm.

Mr. Basingstoke, happy to his finger-tips as well as to the inmost
recesses of the mind in his consciousness of results achieved and
difficulties overcome, slipped from the throbbing motor and went quickly
around to the back door, Charles with him, straining at the lead. The
path that led to the door had its bricks outlined with green grass, a
house-leek spread its rosettes on the sloping lichened tiles of the
roof, and in the corner of the window the toad-flax flaunted its little
helmets of orange and sulphur-color. He tapped gently on the door.
Nothing from within answered him--no voice, no movement, no creak of
board, no rustle of straw, no click of little heels on the floor of
stone. She might be asleep--must be. He knocked again, and still silence
answered him. Then a wave of possibilities and impossibilities rose
suddenly and swept against Mr. Basingstoke's heart. So sudden was it,
and so strong was it, that for a moment he felt the tremor of a physical
nausea. He put his hand to the latch, meaning to try with his shoulder
the forcing of the lock. But the door was not locked. The latch clicked,
yielding to his hand, and the door opened into the kitchen, with its
wide old chimneyplace, big mantel-shelf, its oven and pump, its
brewing-copper and its washing-copper, its litter of packing-cases and
straw, and the little nest he had made for her between the copper and
the big barrel. The soft, diffused daylight showed him every corner, and
Charles sniffing, as it seemed, every corner at once. He crossed over
and tried the door that led to the house. But he knew, before his hand
found it unyielding, that it had not been unlocked since last he saw it.
He knew, quite surely, that the lady was not there. There was no sign or
trace of her, save the rounded nest where she must have snuggled for at
least a part of the night that he had spent in such strenuous diplomacy,
such ardent organization, for her sake. No other trace of her . . . yes,
on the flap-table by the window his match-box, set as weight to keep in
its place a handkerchief. It was own sister to the little one his pocket
still held--and, as he took it up, exhaled the same faint, delicate
fragrance. He read it, Charles snuffling and burrowing in the straw at
his feet. On it a few words were written, some illegible, but these few
plain:

      I will write to General Post-Office, London.

There are no words for the thoughts of the baffled adventurer as he
locked the door and walked around the farm to the waiting motor. His
only word on the way was to Charles, and it calmed, for an instant, even
that restless spirit.

"London," he said to his chauffeur. "My friend isn't coming," and he and
Charles tumbled into the car together.

A line of faces drawn up against a long fence watched his departure with
mild curiosity. Twenty or thirty calves and their rustic attendant saw
him go. The chauffeur looked again at the house's blank windows and
echoed the landlord's words.

"Rum go!" he said to himself. "Most extraordinary rum go."




VII

TUNBRIDGE WELLS


AN earnest and prolonged struggle with Charles now occupied Mr.
Basingstoke. Charles was determined to stand on the seat with his paws
on the side of the car, to look out and to be in readiness to leap out
should any passing object offer a more than trivial appeal. His master
was determined that Charles should lie on the mat in the bottom of the
car, and, what is more, that he should lie there quietly. The discussion
became animated and ended in blows. It was just at the crisis of the
affair, when Edward had lightly smitten the hard, bullet head and
Charles was protesting with screams as piercing as those of a locomotive
in distress, that the car wheeled into the highroad and narrowly missed
a dog-cart coming up from Seaford. As they passed, Edward's hand went to
his hat, for the driver of the dog-cart was Miss Davenant.

Charles, partially released, leaped toward the lady, only to hang by
his chain over the edge of the car. By the time he had been hauled in
again and cuffed into comparative quiescence Miss Davenant was left far
behind, a little, gesticulating figure against the horizon. Her gestures
seemed to Edward to be gestures of recall. But he disregarded them. It
was not till later that he regretted this.

A final struggle with Charles ended in victory, not because Edward had
enforced his will on that strong and strenuous nature, but because
Charles was now exhausted and personally inclined to surrender. He lay
at last on the floor of the car, his jaws open in a wide, white-toothed
smile, and his pink tongue palpitating to his panting breaths. Edward
sat very upright, his hands between his knees, holding the shortened
chain of Charles. Mile after mile of the smooth down country slipped
past, the car had whirled down the narrow, tree-bordered road into
Alfreston, past the old church and the thirteenth-century, half-timbered
Clergy House, where three little girls in green pinafores were seeking
to coerce a reluctant goat along to Polegate and across the railway
lines, and still Mr. Basingstoke never moved. His mind alone was alive,
and of his body he was no longer conscious. He thought and thought and
thought. Why had she left the farm? Had she been frightened? Had she
been captured? Where had she gone? And why? And behind all these
questions was a background of something too vague and yet too
complicated to be called regret--or something which, translated into
words, might have gone something like this:

"Adventures to the adventurous. And three days ago the world was before
me. I had set out for adventures and I found nothing more agitating than
the pleasant pleasing of one little child. Then suddenly the adventure
happened. And now no more charming wanderings, no more aimless
saunterings in this pleasant, green world, but rush and worry and hurry
and dust, uncertainty, anxiety, . . . the whole pretty dream of the
adventurer shattered by the reality of the adventure."

Suddenly, and without meaning to do it, he had mortgaged his future to a
stranger. The stranger had fled and he was--well, not pursuing, but
going to the place she had named as that from which he might gain a clue
and take up the pursuit. It was not exactly regret, but Mr. Basingstoke
found himself almost wishing that time could move backward and set him
in the meadow where the red wall was, and give him once more the chance
to fly or not to fly his aeroplane. Perhaps if he had the choice he
would not fly it. But all this was among the shadows at the back of his
mind. In the foreground was the small, insistent cycle of questions:
Why had she left the farm? Had she been frightened? Had she been
captured? Where had she gone? When? How? Why?

It was not till the car was slipping through Crowborough, that paradise
of villa-dwellers who have "done well in business," that the thought
came to him, had she, after all, gone back to her aunt? Had she thought
better of it, and just gone humbly back with confession and submission
in both hands? It was then that he remembered that Miss Davenant had
seemed to signal . . . perhaps she had some errand to him . . . perhaps
submission had been given as the price of a farewell message,
aunt-borne, to meet him at the farm? Mr. Basingstoke was not subject to
attacks of indecision, but now for a moment he wavered. Then imagination
showed him himself on the door-step of the Hall asking for Miss
Davenant, and Miss Davenant receiving or not receiving him--in either
case he himself cutting a figure which he could not for a moment admire.
Common sense reinforced imagination. The handkerchief said General
Post-Office. It could only have said that if the handkerchief's owner
meant him to go to the General Post-Office. If the handkerchief's owner
had meant him to go back to the Hall, the handkerchief could just as
easily have said the Hall. He went back to his questionings, and the
car drew near Tunbridge Wells.

Charles, exhausted by the morning's combat, had slept heavily, but now
he roused himself to take the rôle of Arbiter of Destinies. He roused
himself, sat up, snuffled and blew, and then, with wide smile and
lolling tongue, proclaimed himself to be that pitiable and suffering
creature, a bull-terrier dying of thirst. In vain Edward sought to calm
him; he insisted that he was, and that he had a right to be, thirsty.
His insistence affected his master. Edward became aware that he, also,
was thirsty; more, was hungry. His watch showed him that the chauffeur
had every right to consider himself an ill-used man. A bright-faced
hotel whose windows were underlined with marguerites and pink geraniums
beckoned attractively.

"After all, one must live," said Edward, and breathed an order. The car
drew up in front of the White Horse.

Another car was there--unattended--a very nice car. Edward wished it had
been his. It had all those charms which his own hired one lacked, and
his experienced eye dwelt fondly on those charms.

"Get yourself something to eat," he said to the chauffeur. Charles,
straining toward the horse-trough, seemed anxious to prove that his
thirst had not been simulated. Edward indulged him. Arrived at the wet
granite, however, Charles lapped a tongueful or two, as it were out of
politeness and merely to oblige, and then looked up at his master
expressively. "You have sadly misunderstood me," he seemed to say. "What
I wanted was breakfast," adding, reproachfully, "You will remember that
there has been none to-day."

He dragged his master to the hotel door, where they passed in under
hanging-baskets of pink and white flowers, and in a coffee-room adorned
with trophies of the chase Edward ordered luncheon for himself and
biscuits for Charles. Now mark the vagaries of Destiny: Charles,
impatient for the biscuits, dragged his chain about the coffee-room,
empty at this hour of all but himself and his master; he upset the tongs
and the shovel and brought them clattering to the fender. Edward
replaced them in their stands. Then Charles put his feet in an
antimacassar and dragged it to the floor. After this he went to the
writing-table under the wire blind in the middle window and snuffled
curiously in the waste-paper basket, upsetting it almost without an
effort, and a litter of letters and envelopes and torn circulars was
discharged.

Edward, hastening to repair these ravages, scooped the torn fragments
in his hands--and on the very top, fronting him, was an envelope bearing
his own name--Basingstoke.

"--Basingstoke," the envelope said plainly, adding as an incomplete
afterthought, "General Post-O"--and there ending. The handwriting was,
like Hypatia's, graceful and self-conscious. That is to say, it was
legible, clear, and the letters were shaped by design and not by
accident. He never doubted for an instant whose hand it was that had
written those words. He went through the waste-paper basket's other
contents for more of that handwriting. There was not a scrap. The
waiter, coming in with accessories to the still-withheld luncheon,
stared at him.

"Something thrown away by mistake," he said, and pursued the search.
No--nothing.

But that she had been here was plain; that she still might be here was
possible. She must have come by train or by motor--what motor? Train
from what station? He went out into the hall to question the highly
coiffured young lady whom he had noticed as he came in, the lady who
sits in the glass cage where the keys are kept, and enters your name in
the book when you engage your room. The cage was empty, the hall was
empty. On the hall-table's dark mahogany lay a shining salver, and on
the salver lay a few letters. He picked them up. The one on the top was
addressed fully--to

    MR. BASINGSTOKE,
           General Post-Office,
                           London.

The one below was addressed to--

    MISS DAVENANT,
          The Hall,
               Jevington,
                     Sussex.

Edward glanced round; he was still alone. He put the letters in his
pocket and went back to the coffee-room. Charles's attentions had been
directed, in his absence, to the waiter, who had thus been detained from
his duties.

"Any one else lunching here to-day?" he asked, restraining Charles.

"Mostly over by now, sir," said the waiter. "That dog--dangerous, ain't
he, sir?"

"Not a bit," said Edward; "he only took a fancy to you."

"Wouldn't let me pass--like," said the waiter.

"Only his play," said Edward. "He merely wants his dinner. You've been
rather a long time bringing his biscuits. I expect he thought you'd got
them in your pocket."

"Sorry, sir," the waiter said, and explained that, being single-handed
at that hour, he had had to attend to the other party's lunch, "in the
garden, sir," he added, "though why the garden when everything's nice
and ready in here--to say nothing of earwigs in your glass, and beetles,
and everything to be carried half a mile--" He ceased abruptly.

"I should like to see the garden," said Edward, "while I'm waiting."

"Lunch ready directly, sir," said the waiter. "Hardly worth while to
have it out there now, sir--"

"Which way?" Edward asked, and was told. He went through the hall, under
a vine-covered trellis, and the garden blazed before him--a really
charming garden, all green and red and yellow; beyond the lawn was an
arbor with a light network of hops above it. In that arbor was a
white-spread table. There was also movement; people were seated at the
table.

Edward stood in the sunshine between two tall vases overflowing with
nasturtiums and lobelias and opened his letter.

"Good-by," it said, "and thank you a thousand times. I shall never
forget your kindness. But when I had time to think I saw that it wasn't
fair to you. But you showed me the way out of the trap. And, now I am
free, I can go on by myself. I don't want to drag you into any bother
there may be. It would be a poor return for your kindness."

Initials followed--"K. D."

Mr. Basingstoke dragged at the chain of Charles, who was already
gardening industrially in a bed of begonias, and walked straight to the
arbor. It could not, of course, be she whose skirt he saw through the
dappled screen of leaf and shadow. The waiter would never have called
her a "party"--still, one might as well make sure before one began to
make inquiries of the hotel people. So he walked around to the arbor's
entrance and looked in. A man and woman were seated with a little table
between them; coffee, peaches, and red wine announced the meal's
completion. The man was a stranger. The woman was Herself. She raised
her eyes as he darkened the doorway and they stared at each other for an
instant in a stricken silence. It was a terrible moment for Edward.
Recognition might be the falsest of false steps. On the other hand. . . .
The question was, of course, one that must be left to her to decide. The
man with her was too young to be her father; he might, of course, be an
uncle or a brother. Untimely recognition on Edward's part might mean the
end of all things. It was only a moment, though an incredibly long one.
Then she smiled.

"Oh," she said, "here you are!" And before Edward had time to wonder
what his next move was, or was expected to be, she had turned to her
companion and said, "This is my brother; he will be able to thank you
better than I can for your kindness."

The stranger, a strongly built man with blue eyes and a red neck, looked
from one to the other. It may have been Mr. Basingstoke's fancy, but to
him it seemed that the stranger's glance was seeking that elusive thing,
a family likeness. His look said that he did not find it. His voice
said,

"Not at all. Delighted to have been of the slightest service."

"What's happened?" asked Edward, feeling his way.

"Why," she hastened to explain, "when you didn't turn up I started to
walk, and I didn't put on sensible shoes." A foot shod in a worn satin
slipper crept out to point the confession and vanished at once. "And I
sat down on a heap of stones to wait for you. And then this gentleman
came by and offered me a lift. And I couldn't think what had become of
you--and you know how important it was to get to London--so, of course,
I was most grateful. And then something went wrong with the motor, so
we stopped here for lunch--and I can't think how you found me--but I'm
so glad you did. And all's well that ends well."

Edward felt that he was scowling, and all his efforts could not smooth
out the scowl. She was patting Charles and looking at Charles's master.

"We are very much indebted to you, sir," said Edward, coldly.

"Nothing, I assure you," said the gentleman with the red neck. "Only too
happy to be of service to Miss--er--"

"Basingstoke," said Edward, and saw in her eyes that he had not done the
right thing. "I suppose you forgot to write to Aunt Emily and Uncle
James," he said, seeking to retrieve the last move.

"Indeed I didn't," she said, with plain relief. "I wrote directly I got
here, and gave them to the waiter to post."

Another silence longer than the first was broken by the waiter, who came
to announce that the gentleman's lunch was ready in the coffee-room. The
other gentleman--red-necked--asked for his bill.

While the waiter was gone for it, Edward put a sovereign on the table.
"For my sister's share," he said.

The red-necked gentleman protested.

"You know," she said, in a low voice, "I said I should pay my share."

The red-necked gentleman rose. "I will tell them," he said, "to make out
your bill separately. And now, if I cannot be of any further service to
you, I think I'll be getting on. Good day to you."

"Good day," said Edward, "and thank you for your kindness to my sister."

"Good-by," said she, "and thank you a thousand times." She held out her
hand. He bowed over it and went away through the sunlit garden,
resentment obvious in every line of his back.

Neither Edward nor the girl spoke. There was no sound in the arbor save
the convulsive gulpings of Charles absorbing the sponge fingers which
she absently offered him from among the scattered dessert.

It was she who broke the silence. "I did write," she said.

"Yes. I got the letter." He laid it and Miss Davenant's on the table.
"What does it mean?"

"What it says--"

"You won't let _me_ help you--but you let that man, right enough."

"What was I to do? The important thing was to get away."

"What tale did you tell that man?"

"The truth."

He scowled with bitter skepticism.

"I did. Except that you're not my brother. I told him I'd missed you and
that I'd got to get to London to-day as early as I could. And he was
awfully nice and kind."

"I can well believe it."

"_Nice_ and kind," she repeated, with emphasis. "And you were most
horrid to him. And I do think you're unkind--"

"I don't mean to be," said Edward, "and it's not my province to be
horrid and unkind to you, any more than it is to be nice and kind. In
this letter you say good-by. Am I to understand that you mean
good-by--that I am to leave you, here--now?"

She did not answer, and there was that in her silence which laid a
healing touch on his hurt vanity.

"If my manner doesn't please you," he went on, "do remember that you
have brought a fairly solid Spanish castle about my ears and that I am
still a little bewildered and bruised."

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I didn't think."

"You see," he went on, "I thought I'd found a girl who wasn't just like
other girls. . . ."

"I'm afraid I am," she said--"just."

"I thought that you were brave and truthful and strong--and that you
trusted me; and then I find you haven't the courage to stick to the way
we planned; you haven't even the courage to wait for me and tell me
you've changed your mind. You bolt off like a frightened rabbit and make
friends with the first bounder who comes along. I was a fool to think I
could help you. You don't need my help. Anybody else can help you just
as well. Good-by--"

"Good-by," she said, not looking up. And he perceived that she was
weeping. Also that he was no longer angry.

"Don't!" he said, "oh, don't! Do forgive me. I don't know what I've
said. But I didn't mean it, whatever it was, if it's hurt you. I'll do
just what you say. Shall I call that chap back?"

She shook her head and hid her face in her hands.

"Forgive me," he said again. "Oh, don't cry! I'm not worth it. Nothing's
worth it. Charles, you brute, lie down." For Charles, in eager sympathy
with beauty in distress, was leaping up in vain efforts to find and kiss
the hidden face.

"Don't scold him," she said. "I like him." And Edward could have
worshiped her for the words. "And, oh," she said, after a minute, "don't
scold me, either! I'm so frightfully tired and everything's been so
hateful. I thought you'd understand, and that if you cared to find me,
you would."

"How could I? You sent no address."

"I did. On the handkerchief. . . . But I suppose you couldn't read it."

"And still," he said, but quite gently now, "I don't understand--"

"Don't you? Don't you see, I thought when you'd had time to think it
over you'd be sorry and wish yourself well out of it, and yet feel
obliged to go on. And I thought how horrid for you. And how much easier
for you if you just thought I'd changed my mind. And then I set out to
walk to Seaford and take the train. And then my shoes gave out, and I
was so awfully afraid of aunt coming along that way, so that when Mr.
Schultz came along it seemed a perfect godsend."

"So that's his foreign and unhappy name?" said Edward. "How did he come
to tell it to you?"

"He had to," she said. "I borrowed ten pounds of him. I couldn't have
gone to Claridge's without money, you know."

"Why Claridge's?"

"It's the only hotel that I know. And I had to have his name and address
to send it back."

"May I send it back this afternoon?" Edward asked.

"Yes--"

"And you take back all you said in the letter? You don't mean it?"

"Not if you didn't want me to."

"And it wasn't really only because you thought I. . . ."

"Of course. At least. . . ."

"Well, then," said Mr. Basingstoke, happily, "it never happened. I
fetched you as we arranged. We go on as we arranged. And Mr. Schultz is
only a bad dream to which I owe ten pounds."

"And you're not angry? Then will you lend me some money to buy a hat,
and then we will go straight on to London."

"Yes," said Edward, controlling Charles, who had just seen the peaches
and thought they looked like something to eat. "But--if you won't think
me a selfish brute I should like to say just one thing."

"Yes--" She wrinkled her brows apprehensively.

"Neither Charles nor I have had any luncheon. Would you very much mind
if we--"

"Oh, how hateful of me not to remember!" she said. "Let me come and talk
to you and feed Charles. What a darling he is! And you do forgive me,
and you do understand? And we're friends again, just as we were
before?"

"Yes. Just as we were."

"It's curious," she said, as they went back through the red and green
and blue and yellow of the garden, "that I feel as though I knew you
ever so much better, now we've quarreled."

Mr. Schultz had, it appeared, after all, paid for the two luncheons.
Edward sent him two ten-pound notes and the sovereign, "with compliments
and thanks."

"And that's the end of poor Mr. Schultz," she said, gaily, and, as it
proved, with complete inaccuracy.




VIII

THE ROAD TO ----


THE drive to London was a silent one. Mr. Basingstoke did not want to
talk; he had come on one of those spaces where the emotions sleep,
exhausted. He felt nothing any more, neither anxiety as to the future
nor pleasure at the nearness of the furry heap beside him under which,
presently, his companion slumbered peacefully as a babe in its cot. His
mind was blank, his heart was numbed; it was not till the car reached
the houses spilled over the pretty fields like ugly toys emptied out of
the play-box of a giant child, that mind or heart made any movement.
Then it happened that the breeze caught the edge of the fur and lifted
it, and he saw her little face softly flushed with sleep, lying very
near him, and his heart seemed all at once to come to life again with an
awakening stab of something that was not affection or even passion, but
a kind of protective exultation--a deep, keen longing to take care of,
to guard, to infold safely from all possible dangers and sorrows her who
slept so happy-helpless beside him. Then his mind awoke, too, and he
found himself wondering. The Schultz episode, his suspicions,
resentment--the explication--all this should, one would have thought,
have brushed, like a rough hand, the bloom from the adventure. And,
instead of taking anything away, it had, even as she had said, added a
soft touch of intimacy to their friendship. Further, he now in his heart
had the memory that, for an instant, his thoughts had wronged her, that
he had suspected her of wavering, almost of light-mindedness, though his
thought had taken no such definite lines even to itself in its secret
heart--and all the time there had only been thought for him, sincere,
delicate consideration, and, in the matter of that man's accepted help,
the trust of a child, and that innocence of Una before which even lions
like Schultz become shy and safe. Imagine a subject who has suspected
his princess of being, perhaps, not a princess at all, but one
masquerading in the robes and crown of a princess . . . when he shall
find her to be indeed royal, to what an ecstasy of loyalty will not his
heart attain? So it was now with Mr. Basingstoke. He caught the corner
of the fur and reverently covered the face of his princess.

And now the houses were thick and the shops began to score the streets
with lines of color. He stopped at one of those big shops where they
sell everything, and she awoke and said, "Are we there?"

"I thought," said he, "that you said something about a hat."

"Here?" she said, looking at the shop with strong distaste.

"Better here than really in London, I thought. And you'll want other
things. And do you mind buying a box or a portmanteau or something?
Because hotels like you to have luggage."

"I've been thinking--" she said, but he interrupted her.

"Forgive me," he said, "but even you cannot think your best thoughts
when you're asleep."

Then she laughed. "Well, you must give me the money," she said, holding
out a bare, unashamed hand, "because I haven't any."

He composed himself to wait, and he waited a long time, a very, very
long time. He cheered the waiting by the thought that she could not,
after all, have found the shop so unsuitable as it had, at the first
glance, seemed. He watched the doorway, and his eye became weary of the
useless snippets of lace and silk at something eleven-three with which
the windows at each side of the door were plastered. He noticed the
people who went in, and the many more who waited outside and longed for
these absurd decorations--longed with that passion which, almost alone
of the passions, a girl may display to the utmost immoderation without
fear of censure or of shame. He observed the longing in the eyes of
little, half-developed, half-grown girls for this or that bit of
worthless frippery; he would have liked to call to them and say, "My
dear children, do go in and buy yourself each a fairing, and let me
pay." But he knew that so straightforward and simple a kindness would
draw on him and on the children shame and censure almost immeasurable.
So he just sat and was sorry for them, till he saw two of them titter
together and look at him.

Then he got out of the car and went into the shop--they sold toys there
as well as everything else--to buy something himself. He could not find
exactly what he wanted--in shops crowded with glittering uselessnesses
it is rarely that you can find the particular uselessness on which you
have set your heart--but Tommy of the Five Bells had no fault to find
with the big, brown-papered parcel which reached him by the next day's
afternoon post. He could not imagine any soldiers more perfectly
satisfying than these, no bricks more solid and square, no drafts more
neatly turned, no dominoes more smoothly finished. To Mr. Basingstoke's
old nurse the world seemed to hold nothing fairer than the lace collar
and the violet-silk necktie. "Do me for Sundays for years," she said,
putting them back in their tissue-paper and turning her attention to the
box of sweets and the stockings for the children. The girl who sold Mr.
Basingstoke the lace collar sniggered apart with a kindred sniggerer as
she sold it to him, and delayed to make out his bill, but the other
girl, almost a child, with a black bow tying her hair, sold him the
stockings and was sympathetic and helpful.

"How many stockings ought a child to have, so as to have plenty?" he
asked her, confidentially. At the lace-counter he had made his own
choice, in stern silence.

"Three pairs," said the girl; "that's one in wear, one in the wash, and
one in case of accidents." She glanced through the glass door at the
motor, and decided that he could afford it. "But, of course, four would
be better."

"I should think six would be best," said he, "that's one for each day in
the week, and on Saturday they can stay in bed while their mother does
the washing."

"You don't wash on Saturdays," said the girl, her little, plain face
lighting up with a smile. She saw the eye of the shop-walker on her and
added, nervously, "Shall we say six, then, sir; and what size? I mean
what aged child? About what price?"

"Three to eleven," said he.

"They're one and eleven-three," said she.

"I mean the children, not the stockings--there are five of them--what's
five sixes?"

"Thirty," the girl told him, with a glance at the shop-walker that was
almost defiant in its triumph.

"That's it, then," said he, "and sort out the sizes properly, please,
will you? Three six, two sevens, ten and eleven. And put in some
garters--children's stockings are always coming down, you know--"

The girl had not before sold garters to insane but agreeable gentlemen.
She hesitated and said in a low voice, "I don't think garters, sir.
Suspenders are more worn now--"

"Well, suspenders then. The means doesn't matter--it's the keeping up
that's the important thing." He laid a five-pound note on the counter,
just as the shop-walker came up to her with a slightly insolent,
"Serving, Miss Moore?"

"Sign, sir," said Miss Moore, defending herself from his displeasure
with the bill. "Anything more, sir?"

"I want some sweets," said Edward, and was directed to "the third shop
on the left, through there."

It was not till two weeks later that a satined and beribboned box of
sweets arrived by post for Miss Moore. "From Mary," said the legend
within, and the postmark was Warwick. Mr. Basingstoke counted on every
one's having at least one relation or friend bearing that commonest and
most lovely of all names. And he was right. A distant cousin got the
credit of the gift, which made the little apprentice happy for a day and
interested for a week--exactly as Mr. Basingstoke had intended. His
imagination pleased him with the picture of the sudden surprise of a
gift, in that drab and subordinated life. By such simple means Mr.
Basingstoke added enormously to his own agreeable sensations. And by
such little exercises of memory as that which registered Miss Moore's
name and the address of the shop he made those pleasures possible for
himself. The sweets he bought on that first day of his elopement went to
his nurse. He might have added more gifts, for the pleasure of spending
money was still as new as nice, but the voice of Charles without drew
him from the shop to settle a difference of opinion between that
tethered dog and the chauffeur.

"Wanted to hang hisself over the side of the car," the man explained,
"and no loss to his mourning relations, if you ask me," he added,
sourly.

Edward had hardly adjusted the situation before she came out--and he
felt the sight of her was worth waiting for. She wore now a white coat
with touches of black velvet, and the hat was white, too, with black and
a pink rose or two.

"It looks more like Bond Street than Peckham," he said as she got in.
"It surpasses my wildest dreams."

"I had to make them trim it," she said, "that's why I was such ages. All
the ones they had were like Madge Wildfire--insane, wild, unrelated
feathers and bows born in Bedlam."

Her eyes, under the brim of the new hat, thrilled him, and when Charles,
leaping on her lap, knocked the hat crooked, scattered the mound of
parcels, and made rosetted dust-marks on the new cloak, her reception of
these clumsy advances would have endeared her to any one to whom she was
not already dear.

"Well," she said, tucking Charles in between them, setting the hat
straight, and dusting the coat, all in one competent movement, "have you
had time yet to think what you're going to do with me?"

"I have had time," he said, rearranging the mound.

"I'm so sorry I was so long, but. . . ."

"It was worth it," he said, looking at the hat. "Well, what I propose is
that you should go, not to Claridge's, which is just the place where
your relations will look for you, but to one of those large, comfortable
hotels where strictly middle-class people stay when they come up to
London on matters connected with their shops or their farms. I will give
you as long as you like to unpack your new portmanteau and your parcels.
Then I'll call for you and take you out to dinner."

"But I thought we were going on tramp," she objected.

"Dinner first, tramping afterward," he said, "a long while afterward. I
don't propose to let you tramp in those worldly shoes." They were new
and brown and soft to look at--as soft as other people's gloves, he
thought.

"Don't dress for dinner," he said as they drew up in front of the
Midlothian Hotel. "And, I say, I expect it would be safer to dine here;
it's absolutely the last place where any of your people would look for
you."

The dress in which she rejoined him later was a walking-dress of dark
blue melting to a half transparency at neck and sleeves.

"I bought it at that shop," she said. "It isn't bad, is it? They said it
was a Paris model--and, anyhow, it fits."

He wanted to tell her that she looked adorable in it, and that she would
look adorable not only in a Paris model, but in a Whitechapel one. But
he didn't tell her this. Nor did he tell her much else. The dinner owed
to her any brightness that it showed when shelved as a memory. She
exerted herself to talk. And it was the talk of a lady to her dinner
partner--light, gay, and sparkling, anything but intimate--hardly
friendly, even; polite, pleasant, indifferent. He did not like it; he
did not like, either, his own inability to carry on the duet in the key
she had set, and at the same time he knew that he could not change the
key. The surge of the world was round them again, even though it was
only the world of the provincial haberdasher and the haberdasher's
provincial wife. The smooth, swift passage of laden waiters across the
thick carpets of the dining-room; the little tables gay with pink
sweet-peas and rosy-hued lamps; the women in smart blouses, most of them
sparkling beadily; the rare evening toilettes, worn in every case with
an air of conscious importance, as of one to whom wearing evening dress
was a rare and serious exception to the rule of life; the buzz of
conversation curiously softer and lower in pitch than the talk at the
Ritz and the Carlton--all made an atmosphere of opposition, an
atmosphere in which all that appeared socially impossible--which, under
the stars last night, had seemed natural, inevitable--the only thing to
do. This world to which he had brought her had, at least, this in common
with the world which dines at the Carlton and the Ritz, that it bristled
with the negation of what last night had seemed the simplest solution in
the world. But it had only seemed simple, as he now saw, because the
solution had been arrived at out of the world. Here, beyond any doubt,
was the antagonism to all that he and she had planned. This was the
world where the worst scandal is the unusual--where it would be less
socially blighting to steal another man's wife than to set off on a
tramp with a princess to whom you were tied neither by marriage nor by
kinship.

It was a lengthy silence in which he thought these things. She, in the
silence, had been making little patterns with bread-crumbs till the
waiter swept all away, made their table tidy, and brought the dessert.
She looked up from the table-cloth just in time to see Edward smile
grimly.

"What is it?" she asked, a little timidly.

"I was only thinking," he said, "what a two-penny halfpenny business
we've made of life, with our electric light and our motors and our ugly
houses and our civilization generally. A civilization replete with every
modern inconvenience! In the good old days nobody would have minded a
knight and a princess traveling through the world together, or even
around the world, for that matter. Whereas now. . . ."

She looked at him, gauging this thought. And he knew that he had said
enough to make a stupid woman say, "I thought you would want to back out
of it." What would she say? For a moment she said nothing. Then, sure of
herself as of him, she smiled and said:

"We're going to teach Nobody to mind . . . its own business."

And then he said what he had come near to being afraid she would say.

"You don't want to back out of it, then?" he said, and she shook her
head.

"No," she answered, slowly, and then, after a pause, again, "No."

"You are willing to go through the wood with your faithful knight,
Princess? He will be a faithful knight."

"Yes," she said, "I know."

And then suddenly he perceived what before had not been plain to
him--that the elopement that had seemed to offer so royal a road to all
that he really desired was not a road, but a barrier. That he was now in
a position far less advantageous than that of a man who meets a girl all
hedged around with the machinery of chaperonage, since, whereas the
courtship may, where there is chaperonage, evade and escape it, where
there is none the lover must himself supply its need--must, in fine, be
lover and chaperon in one. Far from placing himself in a position where
love-making would be easy, he had set himself where it was well-nigh
impossible. He who courts a lady in her own home, surrounded by all the
fences set up by custom and convention, can, at least, be sure that if
his courtship be unwelcome it will be rejected. The lady need not listen
unless she will. But when the princess rides through the wood with the
knight whom she has chosen to be her champion she must needs listen if
he chooses to speak. She can, of course, leave him and his championing,
but what sort of championship is it which drives the princess back to
the very dragon from which it rescued her? Edward saw, with dismal
exactness, the intolerable impossibilities of the situation. They would
go on--supposing her friends didn't interfere--as friends and comrades,
brother and sister, she more and more friendly, he more and more
tongue-tied, till at last every spark of the fire of the great
adventure was trampled out by the flat foot of habit.

She might--and probably would, since men and women invariably
misunderstand one another--believe his delicate reticences to be merely
the indications of a waning interest, and construe knightly chivalry
into mere indifference. If he made love to her--who could not get away
from the love-making without destroying that which made it possible--he
would be a presuming cad. If he didn't, what could she think but that he
regretted his bargain? As he sat there opposite his princess, alone with
her among the thickly thinning crowd, he wondered whether out of this
any happiness could come to them.

When he had proposed the elopement he had meant marriage; the incurable
temperamental generosity which had prompted him to offer her the help of
the escape, on her own terms, now seemed to him the grossest folly. Yet
how could he have held the pistol to her head, saying, "No marriage, no
elopement."

Her voice broke his reverie. "I am very tired," she said. "I think I'll
say good night. Do you mind?"

He almost fancied that her lip trembled a little, like a child's who is
unhappy.

"Of course you're tired," he said, "and, I say, you don't mind my not
having talked for the last few minutes? I've been thinking of
you--nothing else but you."

"Yes," said she, "it all looks very different here, as you say. Perhaps
it will look more different even than this to-morrow. Shall we start on
our tramp to-morrow--or shall I just go back and let's forget we ever
tried to do something out of a book? I think you will tell me honestly
to-morrow whether you think I had better go back."

"To-morrow," he said, looking into her eyes, "I will tell you everything
you wish to hear. We'll spend to-morrow in telling each other things.
Shall we? Good night, Princess. Sleep well, and dream of the open road."

"I shall probably," said the princess, "dream of my aunts."




IX

THE MEDWAY


"IF you had a map and I could put my finger on any place I chose, I
should open my eyes the least bit in the world and put my finger on the
Thames," she said at the breakfast-table, where she had for the first
time sat opposite to him and poured his coffee, looking as demurely
domestic as any haberdasher's wife of them all.

"The Thames?" he said. "I know a river worth two of that. . . ."

"A river that's worth two of the Thames must be the river of Paradise."

"So it is," he assured her, "and probably the Thames is infested by your
relations. For a serious and secret conference such as we propose to
ourselves there is no place like the Medway."

She had thought the Medway to be nothing but mud and barges, and said
so.

"Ah, that's below Maidstone. Above-- But you'll see. Wear a shady hat
and bring that conspirator-looking cloak you wore last night--the fine
weather can't possibly last forever. Twenty minutes for breakfast, half
an hour for a complete river toilette, and we catch the ten-seventeen
from Cannon Street, easily."

"I haven't a complete river toilette. And you? I thought you left all
your possessions at the Five Bells--"

"I am not the homeless orphan you deem me," he said, accepting kidneys
and bacon from a sleepy waiter. "I have a home, though a humble one,
and, what's more, it's just around the corner--Montague Street, to be
exact. Next door to the British Museum. So central, is it not? Some
inward monitor whispered to me, 'She will want to go on the river,' and
I laid out the complete boating-man's costume, down to white shoes with
new laces."

"Did you really think I should think of the river? How clever of you."

"I am clever," he said, modestly, "and good. It is better to be good
than clever. That is why I cannot conceal from you that I never thought
of the river till you spoke about it. But I really have some flannels,
little as you may think it, and we'll stop and get some boating-shoes
for you, if you want them. Only you'll have to buy them with lightning
speed and change them at Yalding."

"Is that the name of the place? How lovely! If I had a title I should
like it to be Lady Yalding--or the Duchess of Yalding. Her Grace the
Duchess of Yalding will give you some more coffee, if you like."

"Why come down in the world? You were a princess last night."

"Princess of where?" she asked.

"We will give a morning to a proper definition of the boundaries of your
territory one of these days. Meantime, are you aware that I don't even
know the name by which the common world knows you?"

"I know you don't," she said, "and I'd much rather you didn't. If I'm to
be a princess I'll be the Princess of Yalding, and if she has to have
another name we'll choose a new one. I should like everything to be new
for our new adventure."

They got the shoes and they caught the train, and, now the little gritty
walk from Yalding station was over, they stood on the landing-stage of
the Anchor, looking down on a sort of Sargasso Sea of small craft that
stretched along below the edge of the Anchor garden.

"The canoe would be nice," she said.

"It would not be nice with Charles," he said, firmly. "Charles's first
conscious act after we became each other's was to upset me out of a
canoe, to the heartless delight of three picnic parties, four pairs of
sweethearts, two dons, and a personal friend."

"If Charles is to come _in_ the boat," she said, "perhaps that
fishing-punt. . . ."

"Water within, water without," he said, spurning the water-logged punt.
"This little sculling-boat will do. No--no outriggers for us, thank
you," he said to the Anchor's gloomy boatman, who came toward them like
a sort of fresh-water Neptune with a boat-hook for trident.

"He might, at least, have smiled," she said, as the sour-faced Neptune
man turned toward the boat-house. "I hope he'll give us red cushions and
a nice, 'arty sort of carpet."

"You get no carpets here," he assured her. "Lucky if we have so much as
a strip of cocoanut matting. This is not the languid, luxurious Thames.
On the Medway life is real, life is earnest. You mostly pull a hundred
yards, anchor and fish; or if you do go farther from harbor you open
your own locks, with your own crowbar. The best people are always a bit
shabby. You and I, no doubt, are the cynosure of every eye. Yes, that'll
do; we'll put the basket in the stern, then the ginger-beer here. We'll
put the cloak over it to keep it cool. All right, thank you. Crowbar in?
Right. Throw in the painter. Right."

Neptune pushed them with his trident and the boat swung out into
midstream. A few strokes took them out of sight of the Anchor, its
homely, flowered garden, its thatched house, its hornbeam arbor; they
passed, too, the ugly, bare house that some utilitarian misdemeanant has
built next to it, then nothing but depths of willow copse, green and
gray, and the grassy curves of the towing-path where the loosestrife
grows, and the willow herb, the yellow yarrow, and the delicate plumes
of the meadow-sweet.

    "'Blond loosestrife and red meadow-sweet among,
        We tracked the shy Thames shore.'"

he quoted.

"It's like a passport," she said--"or finding that you haven't lost your
ticket, after all--when people have read the same things and remembered
them. But don't you love the bit that begins about 'the tempestuous moon
in early June,' and ends up with the 'uncrumpling fern and scent of hay
new-mown'? I wonder why it is that when people quote poetry in books you
feel that they're Laura-Matilda-ish, and when they do it really you
quite like it. Do you write poetry?"

He looked at her guiltily. "Look out to the left," he said; "there's an
absolutely perfect thatched barn, and four oast-houses--you know, where
they dry the hops, with little fires of oak chips. Have you ever been in
an oast-house? We will some day--"

She was silent as the boat slipped past the old farm buildings, the old
trees, the long perfection of the barn, and the deep red and green of
the mossy oast-house wall going down sheer to the smooth, brown water,
and hung at crevice and cranny with little ferns and little
flowers--herb-robert and stonecrop. The reflection, till his oars
shattered it, was as perfect as the building itself, and she drew a deep
breath and turned to look back as the boat slid past.

"You were right," she said, "it is a darling little river. And you _do_
write poetry, don't you?"

"Is this the confessional or the Medway?" he asked.

"I know you do," she said. "Of course you do--everybody does, as well as
they can, I suppose; I can't, but I do," she added, encouragingly. "We
will write poems for each other, on wet nights in the caravan, about
Nature and Fate and Destiny, and things like that--won't we?"

The quiet river, wandering by wood and meadow, bordered by its fringe of
blossoms and flowering grasses, the smooth backwaters where leaning
trees touched hands across the glassy mirror, and water-lilies gleamed
white and starry, the dappled shadows, the arch of blue sky, the gay
sunshine, and the peace of the summer noon all wrought in one fine spell
to banish from their thoughts all fear and dismay, all doubts and
hesitations. Here they were, two human beings--young, healthy,
happy--with all fair things before them and all sad things behind. It
seemed to them both, at that moment, that they need ask nothing more of
life than a long chain of days like this. They were silent, and each
felt in the other's silence no embarrassment or weariness, but only a
serene content. Even Charles, overcome by the spirit of the hour, was
silent, slumbering on the matting between them, in heavy abandonment.

The perfection of their surroundings left them free to catch the
delicate flavor of the wonderful adventure--a flavor which the dust and
hurry of yesterday had disguised and distorted a little.

He looked at her and thought, "It is worth while--it is indeed worth
while"--and knew that if only the princess were for his winning the
moment of rashness which only yesterday he had almost regretted would be
in its result the most fortunate moment of his life.

She looked at him, and a little fear lifted its head and stung her like
a snake. What if he were to regret the adventure? What if he were to
like her less and less--she put it to herself like that--while she grew
to like him more and more? She looked at his eyes and his hands, and the
way the hair grew on brow and nape, and it seemed to her that thus and
not otherwise should a man's hair and eyes and hands be.

But they did not look at each other so that their eyes met till the boat
rounded the corner to the weir-pool below Stoneham Lock. Then their eyes
met, and they smiled, and she said:

"I am very glad to be here."

It seemed to her that she owed him the admission. He took it as she
would have wished him to take it.

"I am glad you like my river," he said.

She was very much interested in the opening of the lock gates and
deplored the necessity which kept her in the boat, hanging on to the
edge of the lock with a boat-hook while he wielded the crowbar. The
locks on the Medway are primitive in their construction and heavy to
work. There are no winches or wheels or artful mechanical contrivances
of weights and levers and cables. There are sluices, and from the
sluice-gates posts rise, little iron-bound holes in them, holes in which
the urgent nose of the crowbar exactly fits. The boatman leans
indolently against the tarred, unshaped tree trunk whose ax-wrought end
is the top of the lock gate; the tree trunk swings back above the close
sweet-clover mat that edges the lock; the lock gates close--slow,
leisurely, and dignified. Then the boatman stands on the narrow plank
hung by chains to each lock gate, and with his crowbar chunks up the
sluice, with a pleasant ringing sound of iron on iron, securing the
raised sluice with a shining iron pin that hangs by a little chain of
its own against the front of the lock gate, like an ornament for a
gentleman's fob. If you get your hand under the pin and the sluice
happens to sink, you hurt your hand.

Slowly the lock fills with gentle swirls of foam-white water, slowly the
water rises, and the boat with it, the long gates unclose to let you
out--slow, leisurely, dignified--and your boat sweeps out along the
upper tide, smoothly gliding like a boat in a dream.

Thus the two passed through Stoneham Lock and the next and the next, and
then came to the Round Lock, which is like a round pond whose water
creeps in among the roots of grass and forget-me-not and spearmint and
wild strawberry. And so at last to Oak Weir Lock, where the turtledoves
call from the willow wood on the island where the big trees are, and the
wide, sunny meadows where the sheep browse all day till the shepherd
calls them home in the evening--the shepherd with his dog at his heels
and his iron crook, polished with long use and stately as a crozier in a
bishop's hand.

They met no one--or almost no one. At East Peckham a single rustic
looked at them over the middle arch of the seven-arched bridge built of
fine, strong stone in the days of the Fourth Edward, and at Lady White
Weir a tramp gave them good day and said it was a good bit yet to
Maidstone. He spat in the water, not in insolence, but contemplatively,
and Edward gave him a silver token of good will and a generous pinch of
dark tobacco, with a friendly, "Here's for luck."

"You're a gentleman," the tramp retorted, grudgingly, and spat again,
and slouched off along the green path. These two were all. Not another
human face did they see for all the length of their little voyage.

All the long and lovely way it was just these two and the river and the
fields and the flowers and the blue sky and youth and summer and the
sun.

At Oak Weir they put the boat through the lock, and under the giant
trees they unpacked the luncheon-basket they had brought from the
Midlothian--how far away and how incredibly out of the picture such a
place now seemed!--and sat among the twisted tree roots, and ate and
drank and were merry like children on a holiday. It was late when they
reached the weir, and by the time the necessity of the return journey
urged itself upon them the shadows were growing longer and blacker till
they stretched almost across the great meadow. The shepherd had taken
the sheep away, passing the two with a nod reserved, but not in its
essence unfriendly. Edward had smoked a good many cigarettes, and they
had talked a good deal. It was as he had said at their first meeting,
they were like two travelers who, meeting, hasten to spread, each before
the other, the relics and spoils of many a long and lonely journey.

"I wish we could have stayed here," she said at last. "If we had only
had the sense to fold our tents, like the Arabs, and bring them with us,
I suppose we could have camped here."

"It isn't only tents," he said; "it's all the elegancies of the
toilette--brushes and combs and slippers. You must return to the
_Caravansary_ that guards these treasures. The nine-fifty-five will do
us. But we haven't much more than time. There's the boat to pay for and
the basket to get to the station. Come, Princess, if we could stay here
forever we would, but since we can't we won't stay another minute."

Once in the boat, and in the lock, she leaned back, holding the edge of
the lock with the boat-hook, and with the other hand detaining Charles.
She looked back dreamily on the day which had been, and she did not
pretend that it had not been, the happiest day in her life. To be with
one who pleased--he certainly did please--and to whom one's every word
and look was so obviously pleasing! It is idle to deny that she felt
smoothed, stroked the right way, like a cat who is fortunate in its
friends. And now all days were to be like this. The crowbar began its
chinking--once, twice--then a jarring sound, and a low but quite
distinct "Damn!"

She started out of her dream.

"I beg your pardon," he was saying, "but I've caught my finger, like a
fool. I can't do anything. Can you come here?"

"Of course." She stepped out of the boat. The water in the lock had
hardly begun to subside. She took the painter and, holding it, went to
him, Charles following with cheerful bounds. The sluice had slipped a
little and its iron pin held his finger firmly clipped against the
tarred wood below.

She did not cry out nor tremble nor do any of the things a silly woman
might have done. "Tell me what to do," was all she said.

He told her how to hold the crowbar, how to raise the sluice so that the
finger might be released. She did it all exactly and carefully. When
the finger was released he wrapped his handkerchief around it.

"Does it hurt?" she said.

And he said, "Yes."

"You must put it in the water," she said. "You can't reach it here. Come
into the boat."

He obeyed her. She came and sat by him in the stern--sat there quite
silently. No "I'm so sorry!" or "Can't I do anything?" Her hand was on
Charles's collar. His eyes were closed. His finger was badly crushed;
the blood stained the water, and presently she saw it. She kept her eyes
fixed on the spreading splash of red.

"You haven't fainted, have you?" she said at last. "It's getting very
dark."

"No," he said, and opened his eyes. She raised hers, and both perceived
one reason for the darkness--the boat had sunk nine feet or so. The
dark, dripping walls of the lock towered above them. While he had fought
his pain and she her sympathy the lock had been slowly emptying itself.
They were at the bottom, or almost, and up those smooth walls there was
no climbing out.

"Push the boat against the lower gate," he said; and as she obeyed he
added, "I must try to climb up somehow. I'll pitch the crowbar up on
shore first. Where is it?"

"I left it on the lock gate," she said. "Wasn't that right?"

"It doesn't matter," he told her; but even as he spoke the sluice, which
the weight of the water had held in place after the pin had been
removed, now, as the waters above and below it grew level with each
other, fell into its place with a splash and an echoing boom, and with
the shock the crowbar fell from its resting-place on the tarred ledge
and disappeared in the water below.

"Lucky it didn't fall on us," he said, and laughed. "It's no use my
climbing out now, Princess. I couldn't open the gate, anyhow. We're
caught like two poor little rabbits in a trap--or three, if you count
Charles--and here we must stay till some one comes along with a crowbar.
I dare say there'll be a barge by and by. D'you mind very much?"

"Not a bit," she assured him, cheerfully. "It's all my fault, anyhow,
and, besides, I enjoy it. Let me tie your hand up, and then you must
smoke till rescue comes."

"Aren't you cold?" he asked, for indeed the air was chill in that watery
inclosure.

"Not a bit. I have my cloak," she said, and snuggled into it. "But
you'll be cold. Have half--it's a student's cloak, eight yards around."

He accepted the offer, and they sat with the cloak wrapped around them
both, with Charles snuggling under the lower folds of it.

"If you hear a footstep or a whistle or anything, shout," he said. "I do
wish I hadn't let you in for this. I hate a fool."

"I don't mind a bit, except about your finger. The bone isn't broken, is
it?"

"No," he said; "I've just made a fuss about nothing. I hate a fool, as I
said before."

She thought of the wet patch on the tarred wood and the red patch in the
water, and he felt her shiver.

"It's very decent of you," said she, "not to scold me about leaving the
crowbar there."

"A good Medway boatman should never be separated from his crowbar," he
said, monitorily.

"I know that now," she said. "I ought to have known before. I hate a
fool, too."




X

OAK WEIR LOCK


"IF it weren't for your finger--" said she.

"My finger is the just reward of idiocy and doesn't deserve any kind
thought from you."

"If it weren't for that, I should rather enjoy it," she said. "There's
plenty to eat left in the basket. Shall I get it out and let's have
supper before it's quite dark? I do really think it's fun. Don't you?"

"That's right," said he, with a show of bitterness, "make the best of it
out of pity for the insane idiot who landed you in this fix. Be bright,
be womanly, never let me guess that a cold, damp lock and a 'few bits of
broken vittles' are not really better than a decent supper and a roof
over your head. A fig for the elegancies of civilization and the
comforts of home! Go on being tactful. I adore it."

"I meant what I said," she answered, with gentle insistence. "I do
rather like it. I'll whine about my dinner and my looking-glass, if you
like, but I'll get the supper first. Isn't it glorious to think that
there's no one at home--where the comforts and the elegancies are--no
one to be anxious about us because we're late, and scold us when we get
home? Liberty," she ended, reflectively, "is a very beautiful thing. I
suppose no one is likely to come along this way till the shepherd comes
in the morning?"

"We'll hope for better luck," said he. "I say, you'll never trust me to
take care of you again after this silly business--"

"I don't know," she said, deliberately, "that I ever asked you to take
care of me. Did I? You were to help me--yes, and you have helped me--but
I don't think I want to be taken care of, any more than another man
would want it. I was in a difficulty and you helped me. If you were in a
difficulty and I helped you, you wouldn't expect me to take care of you
forever, would you?"

"I don't know," he said. "If you hadn't been extraordinarily sensible I
should still be there with my hand in the thumbscrew."

"Did you think," she asked, sweetly, "that all women were inevitably
silly?"

Charles raised his head and growled.

"There," said she, "you see, even Charles repudiates the idea."

If this was so, Charles instantly repudiated the idea with more growls
and the added violence of barks. She muffled him in the cloak and
listened. A footstep on the towing-path.

"Hullo!" she called, and Edward added, "Hi, you there!" and Charles,
wriggling forcefully among the folds of the cloak, barked again.

"That ought to fetch them, whoever they are," said Edward, and stood up.

Even as he did so a voice said, urgently and quite close above them.
"'Ush, can't yer!" and a head and shoulders leaning over the edge of the
lock came as a dark silhouette against the clear dark blue of the starry
sky. For it was now as dark as a July night is--and that, as we know, is
never really dark at all. '"Ush!" repeated the voice. "Shut up, I tell
yer!" and, surprisingly and unmistakably, it was to the two in the boat
that he was speaking. "Make that dawg o' yours choke hisself--stow it,
can't yer! Yer don't want to be lagged, do yer? Yer aren't got 'arf a
chants once any one knows you're 'ere. Don't you know you're wanted? The
police'll be along some time in the night, and then you're done for."

"I think," said Edward, with extreme politeness, "that you are, perhaps,
mistaking us for acquaintances, whereas we are strangers to you. But if
you could be so kind as to open the gates and lend us a crowbar to get
through the other locks you would not be the loser."

"I know yer, right enough," said the man. "Yer ain't no strangers to me.
It was me as 'ired yer the boat up at the Anchor. The boss 'e sent me
out to look for yer. Only 'e doesn't know I know about your being
wanted. Least said soonest mended's what I allus say. Where's yer crow
got to?"

"In the water," said Edward; "dropped off the lock gate."

"Clumsy!" said the man, giving the word its full vocative value.
"Whereabouts?"

"Just over there," said Edward.

"Then yer tuck up yer shirt-sleeve and run yer 'and down and pass that
there crow up to me. There ain't not above two foot o' water in 'er, if
there's that."

To your Medway man the lock is as unalterably feminine as his ship to a
sailor.

It was she who plunged her arm in the water, and, sure enough, there was
the crowbar lying quietly and tamely beside them--"like a pet poodle,"
as she said.

"Give me ahold of that there crow," said the man. He lay face downward
and reached down an arm. Edward stood on the thwart and reached up. The
crowbar changed hands, and the head and shoulders of the deliverer
disappeared.

"I don't see what he wants the bar for," said Edward. "The lock's empty.
Perhaps he means to go on ahead and open the other locks for us. I
wonder who he took us for, and what the poor wretches are 'wanted'
for--"

"It's a sinister word in that connection, isn't it?" said she. "Wanted!"

They pushed the boat toward the lower lock gate and held on to the
lock-side, waiting till the lock gate should open and they should be
able to pass out and begin their journey down the river to the Anchor.
But the gates did not open, and almost at once a tremor agitated the
boat. Edward tightened his grip of the boat-hook as the incoming rush of
water took the boat's nose and held it hard.

"The idiot!" he said. "The silly idiot! He's filling the lock."

He was, and the rush of the incoming water quite drowned any
remonstrances that might have been addressed to him. Boat and water rose
swiftly, the upper gates opened, and, as they passed through, their
deliverer laid his hand on the gunwale, as though to aid the boat's
passage. But, instead, he stopped it.

"See 'ere, gov'ner," he said, low and hoarse and exactly like a
conspirator, "I couldn't bleat it out for all the country to hear while
yer was down in the lock, but I knows as you're wanted and yer may think
it lucky it's me as come after yer and not the gov'ner nor yet the
police."

"I do really think," said she, softly, "that you're making a mistake.
The police don't really want us."

"Oh, I got a bit of candle," was the unexpected rejoinder. "Get the
young lady to hold the cloak up so as it don't shine from 'ere to
Tunbridge to give yer away like, and yer light the dip and 'ave a squint
at this 'ere."

He held out the candle and matches and a jagged rag of newspaper.

"'Ere," he said, "'longside where I'm 'olding of it."

She made a sort of screen of the cloak. Edward lit the candle, and when
the flame had darkened and brightened again he read as follows:

      MISSING--Young lady, height five feet six, slight
      build, dark hair and eyes, pale complexion. Last seen
      at Jevington, Sussex. Wearing black chiffon and satin
      dress, black satin slippers, and a very large French
      circular cloak with stitched collar. Has no money and
      no hat. Twenty pounds will be paid to any one giving
      information as to her whereabouts.

"Well," said Edward, blowing out the candle, "this lady has a hat, as
you see, and she hasn't a black dress and satin slippers. Thank you for
letting us through; here's something to get a drink with. Hand over the
crowbar, please, and good night to you."

"Not so fast, sir," said the man, still holding on, "and don't make to
jab me over the fingers with the boat-'ook, like what you was thinking
of. I'm your friend, I am. I see that piece in the paper 'fore ever a
one of them, but I never let on. That's why the gov'ner sent me, 'cause
why--'e didn't think I knowed, and 'e means to 'ave that twenty pounds
hisself."

"But," said she, "you see, I have got a hat and--"

"Yes, miss," said the man, "an' you've got the cloak, large and black
and stitched collar, and all; it's that what's give yer away."

"But supposing I _was_ the young lady," she said, grasping Edward's arm
in the darkness, and signaling to him not to interfere with feminine
diplomacy, "you wouldn't give me up to the police, would you? I wouldn't
give you up if the police wanted you."

"'Course I wouldn't," he answered, earnestly. "Ain't that what I'm
a-saying? I'm 'ere to 'elp yer do a bolt. The minute I saw that there
bit in the paper I says to myself, 'It's them,' and why shouldn't I 'ave
the twenty pounds as well as any one else?"

"There," said Edward, in a low voice, "you see! Let me deal with him."

But again her hand implored. "You're going to give us up to the police
for twenty pounds?" she said, reproachfully.

He groaned. "'Ow yer do talk!" he said. "Women is all alike when it
comes to talking. Stop talking and listen to me. Can't yer understand
plain words? What yer got to do is to leave the boat at Mutton Worry
Lock--that's three locks up--bunk across the fields to Tunbridge. If yer
got money enough--and I'm sartain yer 'as, by the looks of yer--yer 'ire
one of them motors and get away as fast as yer can. Get one at the
Castle. Say yer going to Brighton, and when yer get away from the town
tell the chap to drive t'other way."

"That's a good plan," said she.

"I mapped it all out as I come along," he said, with simple pride. "And,
mind yer, I'm trusting yer like I shouldn't have thought I'd 'a' trusted
nobody. 'Ave yer got the twenty pounds about yer?" he asked, anxiously.

"No," said she.

"Can't be helped, then." He breathed a sigh of resignation. "I'll just
give yer my direction and yer send the ready to me. 'Oo says I don't
trust yer?"

"You mean," said Edward, slowly, and would not be checked any longer by
that hand on his arm--"you mean that you expect us to give you twenty
pounds not to give us up to the police? The police have nothing to do
with us. The whole thing's moonshine. Take your hand off the boat and
get along home."

"Any man," said he who had been called Neptune--"any man as had the
feelings of a man would think of this--young lady. Even if yer was to
prove to Poad as yer wasn't wanted for nothin' criminal--it's none so
easy to make Poad see anything, neither"--he ended, abruptly, and began
anew. "Look 'ere, gov'ner, on account of your lady I say do a bolt. An'
why should I be the loser? I only got to stick to the boat, whichever
way yer go--up and down--and soon as yer land where there's a copper,
lagged yer'll be to a dead cart, and only yourself to thank for it.
Whereas I'm only trying to be your friend, if you'd only see it."

"I don't see why you should be so friendly," said Edward, now entirely
losing control of the situation.

"Nor I shouldn't see it, neither, if it was only you," was the
rejoinder.

"He's quite right," she whispered. "Promise what he wants and let's get
away. I know exactly what Poad is like. We should never make him
understand anything. I couldn't bear it. Let's go. If you've got twenty
pounds, give it to him and let's go."

"Think of your young lady," repeated the voice out of the darkness. "If
yer promise to let me 'ear by the post, I'll take your word for it. I'm
your true friend, and I knows a gentleman when I sees one."

"If you were a true friend," said Edward, "you wouldn't want paying for
minding your own business."

"Aw, naw," he said, "'old 'ard, gov'ner. Ain't it a man's own business
when there's twenty pounds to be made? Says I to myself, if it's worth
some one's while to pay the money to catch 'er, it's well worth the
gentleman's while to shell out and keep 'er, and. . . ."

"Oh, hold your tongue!" said Edward. "Go on ahead and get the next lock
ready. I'll give you the money. The lady wishes it."

"She's got her 'ead the right way on," said the friend in need. "Pull
ahead, sir."

"But you can't, with your finger like that," she said. "I'll pull."

"Why not let me?" Neptune suggested. "We'd get there in 'alf the time,"
he added, with blighting candor.

So Neptune pulled the boat up to Mutton Worry Lock and the two crouched
under the cloak. Charles, who might have been expected to be hostile to
so strange a friend, received him with almost overwhelming
condescension. At Mutton Worry Lock the deliverer said:

"Now 'ere yer deserts the ship, and 'ere I finds 'er and takes her back.
And look 'ere, sir, I'm nobody's enemy but my own, so I am. And of
course if I was to 'ave the twenty pounds it's my belief I'd drink
myself under the daisies inside of a week. Let me 'ear by the
post--William Beale, care of the Anchor Hotel--and send me ten bob a
week till the money's gone. It'll come easier to yer, paying it a
little at a time like--and better for me in the long run. Yer ought to
be a duke, yer ought. I never thought you'd 'a' ris' to the twenty. I'd
'a' been satisfied with five--and that'll show yer whether I'm a true
friend or not."

"I really think you are," she said, and laughed gently. "Good-by."

"Good evening, miss, and thank yer, I'm sure. Never say good-by; it's
unlucky between friends."

"Here's a sovereign," said Edward, shortly. "Good night. You're jolly
fond of the sound of your own voice, aren't you?"

"Sort of treat for me, sir," said Beale, always eagerly explanatory.
"Don't often 'ear it. D'you know what they calls me at the Anchor, owing
to me 'aving learnt to keep my tongue atween my teeth, except among
friends? 'William the Silent's' my pet name. A gent as comes for the
angling made that up, and it stuck, it did. Bear to the left till you
come to the boat-'ouse, cater across the big meadow, and you'll hit
Tunbridge all right, by the Printing Works. So long, sir; so long,
miss."

Thus they parted.

"What an adventure!" she said; "and I believe William the Silent
believes himself to be a model of chivalrous moderation. He would have
been satisfied with five pounds."

"I believe he would, too," said Edward, with a grudging laugh. "It's
your _beaux yeux_. The man has gone home feeling that he has as good as
sacrificed fifteen pounds to a quixotic and romantic impulse. Wretched
blackmailer though he is, he could not resist a princess."

"I like William," she said, decisively. "After all, as he says, one must
live. Let's leave the cloak under this hedge. Shall we? It's like
getting rid of the body. And I'll buy a flaxen wig to-morrow. And do you
think it would be a help if I rouged a little and wore blue spectacles?
It will be the saving of us, of course."

"I hope to heavens we get a motor in Tunbridge," said he. "You must be
tired out."

"I'm not in the least tired," she said. "I'm stepping out like a man,
don't you think? I've enjoyed everything beyond words. What a world it
is for adventures once you step outside the charmed circle of your
relations. Look at all the things that have happened to us already!"

"I didn't mean anything to happen except pleasant things," said he.

"Ah!" she said, with a fleeting seriousness, "life isn't like that. But
there's been nothing but pleasant things so far--at least, almost
nothing."

"Won't you take my arm?" he said.

"What for?"

"To help you along, I suppose," he said, lamely.

She stopped expressly to stamp her foot. "I don't want helping along,"
she said. "I'm not a cripple or a baby--and--"

He did not answer. And they walked on in silence through the starry,
silent night. She spoke first.

"I don't want helping along," she said. "But I'd like to take your arm
to show there's no ill-feeling. You take an arm on the way to dinner,"
she assured the stars, "and why not on the way to Tunbridge?"

The way to Tunbridge was short. They found a car, and the night held no
more adventures for them.

But in a sheltered nook in the weir stream below Jezebel's Lock a candle
set up on a plate illuminated the green of alder and ash and the smooth
blackness of the water, shedding on a lonely supper that air as of a
festival which can only be conferred by candle-light shining on the
green of growing leaves. There, out of sight of the towing-path, Mr.
William Beale, charmed to fancy and anticipation by the possession of a
golden milled token, made himself a feast of the "broken vittles" in the
derelict Midlothian basket, and in what was left of the red wine of
France toasted the lady of his adventure.

"'Ere's to 'er," he said to the silence and mysteries of wood and water.
'"Ere's to 'er. She was a corker, for sure. Sight too good for a chap
like 'im," he insisted, adding the natural tribute of chivalry to
beauty; drank again and filled his pipe. Edward, from sheer force of
habit, had smoothed the parting with tobacco.

"Not but," said William the Silent--"not but what I've known worse than
'im, by long chalks. Ten bob a week--and 'e'll send it along, too--good
as a pension. 'E'll send it along."

He did. William the Silent had not misjudged his man.




XI

THE GUILDHALL


"WHERE is Charles?" she asked next day.

Edward had called for her early, had paid the Midlothian's bill and
tipped the Midlothian's servants, and now they were in a taxi on their
way to Paddington. She had definitely put her finger on the map that
morning, and its tip had covered the K's of Kenilworth and Warwick. She
was still almost breathless with the hurry with which she had been swept
away from the safe anchorage of the hotel, "and couldn't we have the
hood down?" she added.

"Charles," said Edward, "is at present boarded out at a mews down
Portland Road way, and I think we'd better keep the hood up. Look here!
I never thought of the newspapers. This is worse than ever."

He handed her the _Telegraph_. Yesterday's advertisement was repeated in
it--with this addition:

      May be in company with tall, fair young man. Blue
      eyes, military appearance. Possesses large, white
      bull-terrier.

"Oh dear! They'll track us down," she said, and laughed. "What
sleuth-hounds they are! But they can't do anything to me, can they? They
can't take me back, I mean. I'm twenty-one, you know. Can't you do as
you like when you're twenty-one?"

She looked at the paper again, and now her face suddenly became clouded
and her eyes filled with tears. "I never thought of that." She hesitated
a moment and handed him the paper, pointing to the place with the finger
that had found Warwick and Kenilworth. Below the advertisement touching
the young man and the bull-terrier, he read:

      SILVER LOCKS--Come back. I am ill and very anxious.

                                           AUNT ALICE.

"That means. . . ?"

"It means me. I'm Silver Locks--it's her pet name for me. I called my
aunts the three bears once, when I was little, in fun, you know. And the
others were angry--but _she_ laughed and called me Silver Locks. And
she's called it me ever since. I never thought about her worrying. What
am I to do? I must go back. I thought it was too good to last,
yesterday," she added, bitterly.

He put the admission away in a safe place, whence later he could take it
out and caress it, and said, "Of course you must go back if you want
to. But don't do it without thinking. We meant to talk over our plans
yesterday, but somehow we didn't. Let's do it to-day."

"But I can't go to Warwick. I must go back to her--I must."

"If you do," he said, "you won't go back to just her--you'll go back to
the whole miserable muddle you've got away from. You'll go back to your
other aunts and to your father. Besides, how do you know who put that
advertisement in? Think carefully. Is the advertisement like her?"

"It's like her to be anxious and kind," said she.

"I mean, is she the sort of woman to advertise that she's ill? To
advertise your pet name--and her own name--so that every one who knows
you both and sees the advertisement will know that you are being
advertised for? Is that like her?" He ended, astonished at his own
penetration.

"No," she said, slowly, "it isn't. And it isn't like her to say she's
ill. She never complains."

"She wouldn't use her illness as a lever to move events to her liking?"

"Never!" she said, almost indignantly.

"Then I think that this advertisement is some one else's. Where does she
live."

"Hyde Park Square."

"Let us telegraph her, and not go to Warwick."

They stopped the taxi and composed a message. He despatched it.

      Did you put advertisement in paper to-day? And are you
      ill? I am quite well and will write at once. Wire
      reply to Silver Locks, General Post-Office.

Then they told the man to drive around Regent's Park, to pass the time
till there should be an answer.

In the park the trees were already brown, and on the pale, trampled
grass long heaps of rags, like black grave-mounds, showed where weary
men who had tramped London all night, moved on by Law and Order,
inexorable in blue and silver, now at last had their sleep out, in broad
sunshine, under the eyes of the richest city in the world. Little
children, dirty and poor--their childhood triumphant over dirt and
poverty--played happily in the grass that was less grass than dust.

"What a horrible place London is!" she said. "Think of yesterday."

That, too, he put away to be taken out and loved later.

"We won't stay in London," he said, "if the answer is what I think it
will be. We'll go out into the green country and decide what we're going
to do."

"But if she _did_ put the advertisement in, it means that she's _very_
ill. And then I must go to her."

"But if she didn't--and I more and more think she didn't--they may send
some one to the General Post-Office post-haste--so it won't do for you
to go for the telegram. Do you know the Guildhall Library?"

"No."

"It's a beautiful place--very quiet, very calm. And the officials are
the best chaps I've ever found in any library anywhere. We'll go there.
You must want to look up something. Let's see--the dates of the
publication of Bacon's works. Write your name in the book--any name you
like, so long as it isn't your own; then ask one of the officials to
help you, and go and sit at one of the side tables--they're like side
chapels in a cathedral--and stay there till I come. You'll be as safe
and as secret as if you were in the Bastille. And I'll baffle pursuit
and come to you as soon as I can."

"Yes," she said, meekly.

"And don't worry," he urged. "The more I think of it, the more certain I
am that it was not the aunt you like who wrote that advertisement--"

He was right. The telegram with which, an hour later, he presented
himself at the Guildhall Library ran thus:

      I did not write advertisement and I am not specially
      ill, but I am very anxious. Write at once. Aunt Loo
      and Aunt Enid are both here. I think they must have
      inserted the advertisement. A.

"Your Aunt Alice is a sportsman," he said, "to warn you like that."

"I told you she was a darling," she answered--and her whole face had
lighted up with relief--"and you are the cleverest person in the world!
I should never have thought about its not being her doing, never in a
thousand years. You deserve a medal and a statue and a pension."

"I don't deserve more than I've got," said he, "nor half so much. The
sun shines again."

She flashed a brilliant smile at him, and pushed a brown book along the
table.

"I suppose we ought to look studious," she said, "or they'll turn us
out. I am so glad Aunt Alice isn't really worse. You don't know how I've
felt while you've been away. It seemed so horribly selfish--to have been
so happy and all while she was ill and worried. But, of course, you do
know."

"Let us go out," he said, putting the books together.

"Yes," she said, "I know all about Bacon. Not that I'll ever want to
know."

"I'm not so sure," said he. "Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the
Baconians are right, and he was an intellectual giant, almost like Plato
and Aristotle rolled into one? We'll go to Stratford some day, and look
at Shakespeare's bust and see if we think he could have written 'The
Tempest.'"

"You shouldn't judge people by their faces," she said. "Handsome is as
handsome does."

"Oh, but you should," said he. "It's handsome does as handsome is. I
always go by appearances. Don't you? But of course, I know you do--"

She opened one of the books and began to turn the pages. "Look what I
found," she said, and all the time their voices had been lowered to the
key of that studious place. "Look, isn't it pretty? And do you see?--the
e's are like the Greek [Greek: th]. Can you read it?"

He read:

    "Fair Lucrece, kind Catherine, gentle Jane,
     But Maria is the dearest name.
                           Robert Swinford, 1863."

"Yes, that's what I make it. It doesn't rhyme, but I expect Maria was
very pleased. Do you think they were studying with a stern tutor, and he
wrote that and pushed it over to her when no one was looking? It's an
odd thing to have written in a Natural History book. There's something
more on another page--but it doesn't make sense:

    "I am true rew Hebrew--CXIX--101."

"I expect he was just trying a pen. Come, the librarian has his
scholarly eye on you."

"I should like to look through all the old books and find out all the
names people have written and make stories about them," she said, and he
received the curious impression that she was talking against time; there
was about her a sort of hanging back from the needful movement of
departure. He picked the books up and carried them to the counter, she
following, and they walked in silence down the gallery hung with
Wouvermans and his everlasting gray horse.

"Let's go into the Hall," he said. So they turned under the arch and
went into the beautiful great vaulted Guildhall, where the giants Gog
and Magog occupy the gallery, and little human people can sit below on
stone benches against the wall, and gaze on the monuments of the elder
and the younger Pitt, and talk at long leisure, undisturbed and
undisturbing, which is not the case in the Library, as Edward pointed
out.

"Now, then," he began.

"Yes," she said, hurriedly. "Something will have to be done about Aunt
Alice."

"Yes. But what?"

"I don't know." She turned and leaned one hand on the stone seat so that
she faced him. "You do believe that I don't regret coming away? I think
it would have been splendid to have gone on--like yesterday--but you see
it's impossible."

"No, I don't," he said, stoutly.

She made a movement of impatience. "Oh yes, it is--quite," she said.
"However rich you are, you can't go on forever being blackmailed. Every
one would know us, or else you'd have to give up Charles, and even then
I expect you'd be obliged to pay twenty pounds every three-quarters of
an hour. It can't be done. And, besides, we should never know a moment's
peace. Wherever we went we should imagine a blackmailer behind every
bush, and every one we spoke to might be a detective. It's no use. I
must go back. Do say you know I must."

"I don't."

"Well, say you know I don't want to."

"I can't say that . . . because, if you don't want to . . . there's
always the old alternative, you know." He was looking straight before
him at the majestic form of the Earl of Chatham.

"What alternative?"

"Marrying me," he said, humbly. "Do. I don't believe that you'd regret
it."

"When I marry," she said, strongly, "it won't be just because I want to
get myself out of a scrape."

"I hoped there might be other considerations," he said, still gazing at
the marble. "You were happy yesterday. You said so."

"You talk as though marrying were just nothing--like choosing a partner
for a dance. It's like--like choosing what patterns you'd be tattooed
with, if you were a savage. It's for life."

"And you can't like me well enough to choose me?"

"I do like you," she answered, with swift and most disheartening
eagerness, "I do like you awfully; better than any man I've ever
known--oh, miles better--not that that's saying much. But I don't know
you well enough to marry you."

"You don't think it would turn out well?"

She faltered a little. "It--it mightn't."

"We could go on being friends just as we are now," he urged.

"It wouldn't be the same," she said, "because there'd be no way out. If
we found we didn't like each other, to-morrow, or next month, or on
Tuesday week, we could just say good-by and there'd be no harm done.
But if we were married--no--no--no!"

"Do you feel as though you would dislike me by Tuesday week?"

"You know I don't," she said, impatiently, "but I might. Or you might.
One never knows. It isn't safe. It isn't wise. I may be silly, but I'm
not silly enough to marry for any reason but one."

"And that?"

"That I couldn't bear to part with him, I suppose."

"And you can bear to part with me. There hasn't been much, has there?
Just these three days, and all our talks, and. . . ." He stopped. A tear
had fallen on her lap. "I won't worry any more," he said, in an altered
voice. "You shall do just what you like. Shall I get a taxi and take you
straight to your aunt's? I will if you like. Come."

"There's no such hurry as all that," she said, "and it's no use being
angry with me because I won't jump over a wall without knowing what's on
the other side. No, why I should jump, either," she added, on the
impulse of a sudden thought. "You haven't told me that yet. What good
would my getting married do to Aunt Alice? I don't mean that I would,
because you know I couldn't--even for her--but what good would it do if
I did?"

"If we were married," he said, with a careful absence of emotion, "we
could send your aunt a copy of our marriage certificate and a reference
to my solicitor. She would then know that you had married a respectable
person with an assured income, instead of which you now appear to be
running about the country stealing ducks with Heaven knows who."

"Yes," she said, "I see that. Oh, I have a glorious idea! It will suit
you and me and Aunt Alice and make everybody happy!--like in books.
Let's have a mock marriage, and forge the certificate."

"Have you ever seen a marriage certificate?"

"No, of course not."

"Well, it would be as difficult to forge as a bank-note."

"Why--have you ever seen one?" she asked, and he hoped it was anxiety he
read in her tone.

"Yes; I know a chap who's a registrar. I've witnessed a marriage before
now."

"Then there's no need to forge," she said, light-heartedly. "Your friend
would give you one of the certificates, of course, if you asked him, and
we could fill it in and make Aunt Alice happy."

He laughed, and the sound, echoing in the gray emptiness of the Hall,
drew on him the sour glance of a barrister, wigged and gowned, hastening
to the mayor's court.

"He's wondering what you've got to laugh at," she said, "and I don't
wonder. _I_ don't know. Why shouldn't we pretend to be married? I'm sure
your friend would help us to. Oh, do!" she said, clasping her hands with
an exaggerated gesture that could not quite hide the genuine appeal
behind it. "Then we sha'n't have to part. I mean I sha'n't have to go
back to the aunts and all the worry that I thought I'd got away from."

"You're not really serious."

"But I am. You will--oh, do say you will."

"No," he said, "it's impossible--Princess, don't ask if I can't."

"Then it's all over?"

"I suppose so, if you insist on going back."

"I don't insist. But I must do something about Aunt Alice. She's always
been a darling to me. I can't go away and be happy and not care whether
she's miserable or not. You'd hate me if I could. I'll go back to-morrow
or to-night. You said we should go into the country and think things
out. At least we can do that--we can have one more day. Shall we?"

Her sweet eyes tempted and implored.

"What sort of day would it be," he said, "with the end of everything at
the end of it? How could we be happy as we were yesterday?--for you were
happy, you owned it. How could we be happy together when we knew we'd
got to part in six hours--five hours--two hours--half an hour? Besides,
why should I give you the chance to grow any dearer? So as to make it
hurt more when you took yourself away from me? No--"

"I didn't know I was dear," she said, in a very small voice.

Perhaps he did not hear it, for he went on: "If the splendid adventure
is to end like this, let it end here--now. I've had the two days; you
can't take those from me."

"I don't want to take anything from you, but--"

"Let's make an end of it, then," he said, ruthlessly, "since that's what
you choose. Good-by, Princess. Let's shake hands and part friends." He
rose. "Let's part friends," he repeated, and paused, remembering that
you cannot go away and leave a lady planted in the Guildhall. Yet he
could not say, "Let us part friends, and now I will call a cab."

She was more expert. "At least," she put it, "we needn't part here in
the dark among the images of dead people. Come out into the sunshine and
look at the pretty pigeons."

He was grateful to her. In the Guildhall yard the cab would happen, if
it happened at all, naturally and without any effect of bathos.

They stood watching the sleek birds strutting on little red feet, and
fluttering gray wings in the sunshine. She thought of the wood-pigeon in
the wood by the river, and the calm brightness of yesterday held out
beckoning hands to her.

"I didn't think it was going to end like this," she said.

"Nor I," he answered, inexorably.

"Are you quite sure it's impossible? The mock marriage, I mean? In books
it's always so frightfully easy, even when the girl isn't helping?"

"I'm afraid it's impossible," said he. "I wish it wasn't. Look at that
blue chap," he added, indicating a fat pigeon for the benefit of a
passing boy. "You must go back to your aunts. And I must go back to
. . . oh, well, there's nothing much for me to go back to."

They were walking along King Street now. "It does seem rather as though
a sponge were going to pass over the slate . . . and there wouldn't be
much left," she said.

He glanced at her, suddenly alert. If she felt that . . . why,
then. . . .

He wished that the scene had not been in one of the most frequented
streets of the City of London. If it had been in a drawing-room, for
instance--her drawing-room--it would have been possible to say the words
of parting with something of dignity and finality. But here, with--in
the background and not to be evaded--that snorting taxicab over whose
closed door their farewells must be made. . . . But need it be across
a taxicab door?

"Let us," he said, "take a cab. I will go with you as far as Hyde Park
Square."

"Shall we have the hood down?" she asked, with intention. "It doesn't
matter now if any one does see us." But he pretended not to hear, and
the hood remained as it was.

They were silent all the crowded way along Cheapside, where there were
blocks, as usual, and the drivers of lorries and wagons were cheerfully
profane. Silent, too, along Newgate Street and New Oxford Street. The
driver, being a wise man, turned up Bloomsbury Street to escape from the
blocks in Oxford Street; they passed the British Museum and, presently,
the Midlothian Hotel. And as they passed it, each thought of the
breakfast there only that morning, when she had poured the coffee of one
from whom she had then had no mind to part.

"Oh, why are we doing it?" She spoke suddenly, and her speech had the
effect of a cry. "We didn't mean to say good-by, and now we're going
to. Don't let's."

"But your aunt," he said, feeling as foolish as any young man need wish.
"If you don't go back to her now you'll want to to-morrow--and I
can't. . . . I told you why I want to part now, if we are to part. Now,
before it gets any worse."

"We shall be at Hyde Park Square in a minute," she said, desperately.

"Yes," he said, "it's nearly over. What number is it? I must tell the
man."

"Tell him to turn around and go somewhere else--into the country; we
said we would, you know. I'm not going back to Hyde Park Square. Tell
him. . . ."

"Princess," he said, "I can't bear it. Let him go on."

"But I'm not asking you to bear anything. Don't you understand?"

"Not. . . ?"

"Yes, I will; if you'll ask me."

"You'll marry me?"

"Yes," she said, "rather than have everything end in absolute silliness,
like this."

He looked at her, at her clasped hands and the frown of her great
resolve. He perceived that he was worth something to her--that she was
prepared to pay a price--the price he set--rather than lose him
altogether. Her eyes met his with a mingling of courage and desperation,
as of one who has chosen a difficult and dangerous path, one who makes a
great sacrifice, leads a forlorn hope. And his eyes dwelt for a moment
on hers, appreciatively, thoughtfully. And in that moment his resolve
was taken.

"No," he said, "you didn't want to jump the wall without knowing what it
would be like on the other side. I won't have an unwilling wife. On the
other hand, I won't lose you now, Princess, for a thousand fathers and
ten thousand aunts. Make up your mind to the mock marriage, and that
shall be the way out."

"But I thought you said it was impossible."

"So it was. But it isn't now. I've been thinking."

She leaned back, turned toward him from the corner, and faced him with
fearless eyes.

"What a nightmare of a day it's been," she said. "Aren't you glad we're
awake again? When can I send the certificate?" she asked, eager and
alert.

"At the earliest possible moment," said he. "I must see my friend about
it at once. Would you mind waiting for me--say in St. Paul's? And then
we'll end our day in the country, after all."

"You are good," she said, and laid her hand for a fleeting instant on
his arm. "I do think it's good of you to give way about the mock
marriage. You know I had really set my heart on it. Now everything will
be plain sailing, won't it? And we'll go to Warwick the minute we're
mock-married, because my putting my finger on it and Kenilworth ought to
count, oughtn't it?"

"It shall," he said, gravely.




XII

WESTMINSTER


A WEDDING-DAY--even a real wedding-day--leaves at best but a vague and
incoherent memory. To the bridegroom it is a confused whirling
recollection of white satin and tears and smiles and flowers and
music--or perhaps a dingy room with a long table and an uninterested
registrar at the end of it.

Edward Basingstoke thought with regret of the flowers and the white
satin. If he had accepted her submission, had consented to the real
marriage, there should have been white roses by the hundred, and the
softest lace and silk to set off her beauty. As it was--

"We shall have to go through some sort of form," he told her, "because
of the clerks. If my friend were just to tear out a certificate and give
it to us the people in the office. . . . You understand."

"Quite," she said.

"It'll be rather like a very dingy pretense at a marriage. You won't
mind that?"

"Of course not. Why should I?"

"Then, if you're sure you really want to go through with it . . . shall
we go to my friend's now, and get it over?"

"He doesn't mind?"

"Not a bit."

"He must be a very accommodating friend."

"He is," said Edward.

"Where did you leave the luggage?" she asked, suddenly. They were
walking along the Embankment.

"At Charing Cross."

"Well, I'm going to get it. And I shall go to the Charing Cross Hotel
with it, and you can meet me in three hours."

"But that'll only just give us time," he said. "Why not come with me
now?"

"Because," she said, firmly, "I won't play at mock marriages unless I
like, and I won't play at all unless you let me do as I like first."

"Won't you tell me why?"

"I'll tell you when I meet you again."

"Where?" he asked. And she stopped at the statue of Forster in the
Embankment Gardens, and answered:

"Here."

Then she smiled at him so kindly that he asked no more questions, but
just said:

"In three hours, then," and they walked on together to Charing Cross.

And after three hours, in which he had time to be at least six different
Edwards, he met, by the statue of the estimable Mr. Forster, a lady all
in fine white linen, wearing a white hat with a wreath of white roses
around it, and long white gloves, and little white shoes. And she had a
white lace scarf and a live white rose at her waist.

"I thought I'd better dress the part," she said, a little nervously,
"for the sake of the clerks, you know."

"How beautiful you are," he said, becoming yet another kind of Edward at
the sight of her, and looking at her as she stood in the afternoon
sunshine. "Why didn't you tell me before how beautiful you were?"

"I. . . . How silly you are," was all she found to say.

"I wish, though," he said, as they walked together along the gravel of
the garden, "that you'd done it for me, and not for those clerks,
confound them!"

"I didn't really do it for them," she said. "Oh no--and not for you,
either. I did it for myself. I couldn't even pretend to be married in
anything but white. It would be so unlucky."

All that he remembered well. And what came afterward--the dingy house
with the grimy door-step, and the area where dust and torn paper lay,
the bare room, the few words that were a mockery of what a marriage
service should be, the policeman who met them as they went in, the
charwoman who followed them as they went out, the man at the end of the
long, leather-covered table--Edward's old acquaintance, but that seemed
negligible--who who wished them joy with, as it were, his tongue in his
cheek. And there was signing of names and dabbing of them with a little
oblong of pink blotting-paper crisscrossed with the ghosts of the names
of other brides and bridegrooms--real ones, these--and then they were
walking down the sordid street, she rather pale and looking straight
before her, and in her white-gloved hand the prize of the expedition,
the marriage certificate, to gain which the mock marriage had been
undertaken.

And suddenly the romantic exaltation of the day yielded to deepest
depression, and Edward Basingstoke, earnestly and from the heart, wished
the day's work undone. It was all very well to talk about mock
marriages, but he knew well enough that his honor was as deeply engaged
as though he had been well and truly married in Westminster Abbey by
His Grace of York assisted by His Grace of Canterbury. Freedom was over,
independence was over, and all his life lay at the mercy of a girl--the
girl who, a week ago, had no existence for him. The whole adventure,
from his first sight of her among dewy grass and trees, had been like a
fairy-tale, like a romance of old chivalry. He had played his part
handsomely, but with the underlying consciousness that it was a part--a
part sympathetic to his inclinations, but a part, none the less. The
whole thing had been veiled in the mists of poetry, illuminated by the
glow of adventure. And now it seemed as though he had thoughtlessly
plucked the flower of romance which, with patience and careful tending,
would have turned to the fruit of happiness. He had plucked the flower,
and all he had gained was the power to keep a beautiful stranger with
him--on false pretenses. He wished that she, at least, had not so gaily
entered on the path of deception. Never a scruple had disturbed her--the
idea of deceiving an aunt who loved her had been less to her than--than
what? Less, at least, than the pain of losing him forever, he reminded
himself. He tried to be just--to be generous. But at the back of his
mind, and not so very far back, either, Iago's words echoed, "She did
deceive her father, and may thee." His part of the deception now seemed
to him the blackest deed of his life, and he could not undo it. It was
impossible to turn to this white shape, moving so quietly beside him,
with:

"Let's burn the certificate. Deceit is dishonorable."

If she did not think so . . . well, women's code of honor was different
from men's. And she _had_ been willing to marry him in earnest, with no
deceptions or reservations. This mock business had been, in the end, his
doing, not hers. And now they had gone through with it, and here he was
walking beside her, silent, like a resentful accomplice. They had walked
the street's length, its whole dingy length, in silence. The light of
life had, once more, for Mr. Basingstoke, absolutely gone out. They
turned the corner, and still he could find nothing to say; nor, it
appeared, could she. The hand with the paper hung loosely. The other
hand was busy at her belt--and now the white rose fell on the dusty
pavement, between a banana-skin and a bit of torn printed paper. He
stooped, automatically, to pick up the rose.

"Don't," she said. "It's faded."

It so manifestly wasn't that he looked at her, and on the instant the
light of life began to be again visible to him, very faint and far, like
the pin-point of daylight at the end of a long tunnel, but still
visible. For he now perceived that for her, too, the light had gone
out--blown out, most likely, by the same breath of remorse. Sublime
egoist! He was to have the monopoly of fine sentiments and regretful
indecisions, was he? Not a thought for her, and what she must have been
feeling. But perhaps what she had felt had not been that at all; yet
something she had felt, something not happy--something that led to the
throwing away of white roses.

"I can't let it lie there," he said, holding it in his hand. "I should
like to think," he added, madly trying to find some words to break the
spell that, he now felt, held them both--"I should like to think it
would never fade."

She smiled at that--a small and pitiful smile.

"Cheer up," she said; "lots of people have got _really_ married and then
parted, as they say, at the church door. This is a perfect spot for a
parting," she added, a little wildly, waving toward a corn-chandler's
and a tobacconist's; "or, if your chivalry won't let you desert me in
this desolate neighborhood . . . let me tell you something, something to
remember; you'll find it wonderfully soothing and helpful. From this
moment henceforth, forever, every place in the world where we are will
be the best place for parting--if we want to part. Isn't that almost as
good as the freedom you're crying your eyes out for?"

"I'm not," he said, absurdly; but she went on.

"Do you think I don't understand? Do you think I don't know how you feel
twenty times more bound to me than if we were really married? Perhaps
it's only because everything's so new and nasty. Perhaps you won't feel
like that when you get used to things. But if you do--if you don't get
over it then--it's all been for nothing, and we might as well have
parted among the pigeons."

She walked faster and faster.

"What we have to remember--oh yes, it's for me as well as you--what
we've got to remember is that we're to be perfectly free. We needn't
stay with each other an instant after we wish not to stay. Doesn't that
help?"

"You're a witch," he said, keeping pace with her quickened steps, "but
you don't know everything. And you're tired and--"

"I know quite enough," she said.

Never had he felt more helpless. Their aimless walking was leading them
into narrower and poorer streets where her bridal whiteness caught the
eye and turned the head of every passer-by. The pavements were choked
with slow passengers and playing children, small, dirty, pale, with the
anxious expression of little old men and women.

"Do you like deer?" he asked, suddenly.

"Deer?"

"Yes--fawns, does, stags, antlers?"

"Of course I do."

"Then let's go to Richmond Park. Let's get out of this."

The points of her white shoes showed like stars among the filth of the
pavement, her clean, clear beauty shining against the drab and dirty
houses like a lily against a dust-heap. He felt a surge of impotent fury
that such a background should be possible. The children, tired and pale
with the summer heat that had been so glad and gay and shining to him
and to her yesterday on the quiet river, looked like some sort of living
fungus--and their clothes looked like decaying vegetables. If Mr.
Basingstoke had been alone he would have solaced himself by going to the
nearest baker's and buying buns for every child in sight. But somehow it
is very difficult to do that sort of thing unless you are alone or have
a companion who trusts you and whom you trust beyond the limit of life's
cheaper confidences. He felt that self-exculpatory eagerness to give
which certain natures experience in the presence of sufferings which
they do not share. Also he felt--and hated himself for feeling--a fear
lest, if he should act naturally, she might think he wanted to "show
off." To show off what, in the name of all that was pretentious and
insincere? Had civilization come to this, that a man was "showing off"
who took want as he found it and changed it, without its costing him the
least little loss or self-denial, into a radiant, if momentary,
satisfaction? And yet, somehow, he found he could not say, "Let's go and
raid the bun-shop for these kiddies."

"We're to pass our lives together, and I can't say a simple thing like
that," he thought, with curious bitterness--but, indeed, all his
thoughts were confused and bitter just then.

What a travesty of a wedding-day! He would have liked his wedding-feast
to be in the big barn of the bride's father, and every neighbor, rich
and poor, to have drunk their health in home-brewed ale of the best, and
the tables cleared away and a jolly dance to follow, and when the fun
was at its merriest he and she would have slipped out and ridden home to
his own house on the white horse--Dobbin, his name--she on the pillion
behind him, her arm soft about his waist, and the good horse so sure of
foot that he never stumbled, however often his master turned his face
back to the dear face over his shoulder. Instead of which she had
consented to a mock marriage in a registry-office--and this.

"Let's get out of this," he repeated.

"We are getting out of it," she said, and, abruptly, "Don't people who
have real weddings pay the ringers and the beadle and give a feast to
the villagers--open house, and all that?"

He thrilled to the magic of that apt capping of his thought.

"Yes," he said, and, not knowing why, hung on her next words.

"Couldn't we?" she said, and her eyes wandered to the rose he still
carried. "Of course it was only pretending, but we might pretend a
little longer. Couldn't we give our wedding-feast here? The guests are
all ready," she added, and her voice trembled a little.

How seldom can man follow his desire. Edward would have liked to fall on
his knees among the cabbage-stalks and the drifting dust and straw and
paper--to kneel before her and kiss her feet. For, in that moment, and
for the first time, he worshiped her.

The imbecile irrationality of this will not have escaped you. He
worshiped her for the very thought, the very impulse of simple
loving-kindness which he had been ashamed to let her know as his own.

She kindled to the lighting of his face. "I knew you would," she said.
"You are a dear." The same irrational admiration shone in her eyes.
"Sweets? Pounds and pounds of?"

"Buns," he answered, "buns and rock-cakes. Sweets afterward, if you
like," and enthusiastically led the way to the nearest baker's.

Now this is difficult to believe and quite impossible to explain, but it
is true. No human ear but their own had heard this interchange.
"Sweets," "buns," and "rock-cakes," those words of power had, in fact,
been spoken in the softest whisper, but from the moment of their being
spoken a sort of wireless telegraphy ran down that mean street from end
to end, and by the time they reached the baker's they had a ragged
following of some fifty children, while from court and alley and narrow
side-street came ever more and more children, ragged children, stuffily
dressed children, children carrying bags, children carrying parcels,
children carrying babies and jugs and jars and bundles. The crowd of
children pressed around the baker's door, and noses flattened like the
suckers of the octopus in aquariums marked a long line across the window
a little above the level of the bun-trays. I do not pretend to explain
how this happened. Good news proverbially travels fast. It also travels
by ways past finding out.

She began to take the buns by twos and threes from the tray in the
window, and held them out. A forest of lean arms reached up and a shrill
chorus of, "Me, teacher! Me!" varied by, "She's 'ad one--me next,
teacher! Let the little boy 'ave one, lady; 'e 'ain't 'ad nuffin."

The woman of the shop rolled forward. She was as perfectly spherical as
is possible to the human form.

"Treat, sir?" she said, in a thick, rich, husky voice (like cake, as
Edward said later). They owned her guess correct.

"How much'll you go to?"

"A bun apiece," said Edward.

"For the whole street? Why, there's hundreds!"

"The more the merrier," said Mr. Basingstoke.

"Do 'e mean it?" the woman asked, turning to the bun-giver.

"Yes, oh yes." The girl turned from the door to lean over the smooth
deal counter. "It's our wedding-day," she whispered, "and we didn't give
any wedding-breakfast, so we thought we'd give one now."

Edward had turned to the door and was making a speech.

"You shall all have a bun," he said, "to eat the lady's health in. But
it's one at a time. Now you just hold on a minute and don't be
impatient."

"Bless your good 'art, my dear," the globular lady was wheezing into
the ear of the mock bride. "Married to-day, was you? I'm sure you look
it, both of you--every inch you do. But we 'aven't got the stuff in the
place for 'arf that lot."

"How soon could you get it?"

"I could send a couple of the men out. Do it in ten minutes--or less, if
Prickets around the corner's not sold out."

"How much will it cost--something for each of them--cake if not
buns--sweets if not cake--?"

The round woman made a swift mental calculation and announced the
result.

She who looked so much like a bride turned to him who seemed her
bridegroom. "Give me some money, please, will you?"

Money changed hands, and changed again.

"Now, lookee 'ere," said the round one, "you let me manage this 'ere for
you. If you don't you'll be giving three times over to the pushing ones,
and the quiet ones won't get nothing but kicked shins and elbows in the
pit of stomachs. I know every man jack of them 'cept the hinfans in
arms, and even them I knows the ones as is carrying of them. Wait till I
send the chaps off for the rest of the stuff."

The crowd outside surged excitedly, and the frail arms still waved to
the tune of, "Me next, teacher!" All along the street the faces of the
houses changed features as slatternly women and shirt-sleeved men leaned
out of the windows to watch and wonder. When the baker's wife rolled
back into the shop she found the girl silent, with lips that trembled.

"There, don't you upset yourself, my pretty," said the round one.
"You'll like to give it to 'em with your own hands, I lay. Take and
begin on what's before you--let 'em come in one door and out of the
other, and I'll see as they don't come twice."

"You do it," said the girl, and she spoke to Edward over her shoulder.
"I didn't think it would be like this. Tell them we've got to go, but
Mrs. Peacock will give them each a bun."

"How clever of her to have noticed the name," he thought; but he said,
"Are you sure you don't want to have the pleasure of seeing their
pleasure?"

"No--no," she said. "Let's get away. I can't bear it. Mrs. Peacock will
see to it for us--won't you?"

"That I will, lovey, and keep the change for you against you call again.
You can trust me."

"We don't want any change," she said. "Spend it all on buns, or cake, or
anything you like. It _is_ good of you. Oh, good-by, and thank you--so
much. I didn't think it would be like this," she said, and gave Mrs.
Peacock both hands, while Edward explained to the crowd outside.

A wail of disappointment went up, but stayed itself as Mrs. Peacock
rushed to the door.

"It's all true," she said, in that thick, rich, caky voice; "every good
little boy and gell's to have a bun. Now then," she added, in a perfect
blaze of tactlessness, "three cheers for the bride and bridegroom, and
many happy returns."

The two had to stand side by side and hear those shrill, thin cheers,
strengthened by the voices of fathers and mothers at the windows. He had
to wave his hat to the crowd and to be waved at in return from every
window in the street--even those too far away for their occupants to
have any certain idea why they cheered and waved. She had to bow and
kiss her hand to the children and to bow and smile to the
window-dwellers.

Next moment she was out of the shop and running like a deer along a
side-street, he following. They took hands and ran; and by luck their
street brought them to a road where trams were, and escape. They rode on
the top of the tram, and she held his hand all the way to Charing Cross.
I c

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