I will write to General Post-Office, London.
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."
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 thelady, 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 shebeen 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. Inthe 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 easilyhave 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 thirsthad 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. Hepicked 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 ofthe 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 wasonly 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 somethingwent 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 letmehelp 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."
"Niceand 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 truthfuland 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.
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 doorwere 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 moreneatly 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. Shesaw 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 wasdirected 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 thecar," 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 inpitch 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, withour 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 allthat 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 adventurewas 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."
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 thatconspirator-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 comeinthe 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.