SHE had been thinking of him all day—of the incredible insignificance of the point on which they had quarrelled; the babyish folly of the quarrel itself, the silly pride that had made the quarrel strong till the very memory of it was as a bar of steel to keep them apart. Three years ago, and so much had happened since then. Three years! and not a day of them all had passed without some thought of him; sometimes a happy, quiet remembrance transfigured by a wise forgetfulness; sometimes a sudden recollection, sharp as a knife. But not on many days had she allowed the quiet remembrance to give place to the knife-thrust, and then kept the knife in the wound, turning it round with a scientific curiosity, which, while it ran an undercurrent of breathless pleasure beneath the pain, yet did not lessen this—intensified it, rather. To-day she had thought of him thus through the long hours on deck, when the boat sped on evenkeel across the blue and gold of the Channel, in the dusty train from Ostend—even in the little open carriage that carried her and her severely moderate luggage from the station at Bruges to the Hôtel du Panier d'Or. She had thought of him so much that it was no surprise to her to see him there, drinking coffee at one of the little tables which the hotel throws out like tentacles into the Grande Place.
There he sat, in a grey flannel suit. His back was towards her, but she would have known the set of his shoulders anywhere, and the turn of his head. He was talking to someone—a lady, handsome, but older than he—oh! evidently much older.
Elizabeth made the transit from carriage to hotel door in one swift, quiet movement. He did not see her, but the lady facing him put up a tortoiseshell-handledlorgnonand gazed through it and through narrowed eyelids at the new comer.
Elizabeth reappeared no more that evening. It was the waiter who came out to dismiss the carriage and superintend the bringing in of the luggage. Elizabeth, stumbling in a maze of forgotten French, was met at the stair-foot by asmiling welcome, and realised in a spasm of grateful surprise that she need not have brought her dictionary. The hostess of the "Panier d'Or," like everyone else in Belgium, spoke English, and an English far better than Elizabeth's French had been.
She secured a tiny bedroom, and a sitting room that looked out over the Place, so that whenever he drank coffee she might, with luck, hope to see the back of his dear head.
"Idiot!" said Elizabeth, catching this little thought wandering in her mind, and with that she slapped the little thought and put it away in disgrace. But when she woke in the night, it woke, too, and cried a little.
That night it seemed to her that she would have all her meals served in the little sitting-room, and never go downstairs at all, lest she should meet him. But in the morning she perceived that one does not save up one's money for a year in order to have a Continental holiday, and sweeten all one's High-school teaching with one thought of that holiday, in order to spend its precious hours between four walls, just because—well, for any reason whatsoever.
So she went down to take her coffee and rolls humbly, publicly, like other people.
The dining-room was dishevelled, discomposed; chairs piled on tables and brooms all about. It was in the hotelcafé, where the marble-topped little tables were, that Mademoiselle would be served. Here was a marble-topped counter, too, where later in the dayapéritifsandpetits verreswould be handed. On this, open for the police to read, lay the list of those who had spent the night at the "Panier d'Or."
The room was empty. Elizabeth caught up the list. Yes, his name was there, at the very top of the column—Edward Brown, and below it "Mrs. Brown—"
Elizabeth dropped the paper as though it had bitten her, and, turning sharply, came face to face with that very Edward Brown. He raised his hat gravely, and a shiver of absolute sickness passed over her, for his glance at her in passing was the glance of a stranger. It was not possible.... Yet it was true. He had forgotten her. In three little years! They had been long enough years to her, but now she called them little. In three little years he had forgotten her very face.
Elizabeth, chin in air, marched down the room and took possession of the little table where her coffee waited her.
She began to eat. It was not till the sixth mouthful that her face flushed suddenly to so deep a crimson that she dared not raise her eyes to see how many of the folk now breaking their rolls in her company had had eyes for her face. As a matter of fact, only one observed the sudden colour, and he admired and rejoiced, for he had seen such a colour in that face before.
"She is angry—good!" said he, and poured out more coffee with a steady hand.
The thought that flooded Elizabeth's face and neck and ears with damask was one quite inconsistent with the calm eating of bread-and-butter. She laid down her knife and walked out, chin in air to the last. Alone in her sitting-room she buried her face in a hard cushion and went as near to swearing as a very nice girl may.
"Oh! oh! oh!—oh!bother!Why did I go down? I ought to have fled to the uttermost parts of the earth: or even to Ghent. Of course. Oh, what a fool I am! It's because he's married that he won't speak to me. You fool! you fool!you fool! Yes, of course, you knew he was married; only you thought you'd like the silly satisfaction of hearing his voice speak to you, and yours speaking to him. But—oh! fool! fool! fool!"
Elizabeth put on the thickest veil she had, and the largest hat, and went blindly out. She walked very fast, never giving a glance to the step-and-stair gables of the old houses, the dominant strength of the belfry, the curious, un-English groups in the streets. Presently she came to a bridge—a canal—overhanging houses—balconies—a glimpse like the pictures of Venice. She leaned her elbows on the parapet and presently became aware of the prospect.
"Itispretty," she said grudgingly, and at the same moment turned away, for in a flower-hung balcony across the water she sawhim.
"This is too absurd," she said. "I must get out of the place—at least, for the day. I'll go to Ghent."
He had seen her, and a thrill of something very like gratified vanity straightened his shoulders. When a girl has jilted you, it is comforting to find that even after three years she has not forgottenyou enough to be indifferent, no matter how you may have consoled yourself in the interval.
Elizabeth walked fast, but she did not get to the railway station, because she took the wrong turning several times. She passed through street after strange street, and came out on a wide quay; another canal; across it showed old, gabled, red-roofed houses. She walked on and came presently to a bridge, and another quay, and a little puffing, snorting steamboat.
She hurriedly collected a few scattered items of her school vocabulary—
"Est-ce que—est-ce que—ce bateau à vapeur va—va—anywhere?"
A voluble assurance that it went at twelve-thirty did not content her. She gathered her forces again.
"Oui; mais où est-ce qu'il va aller—?"
The answer sounded something like "Sloosh," and the speaker pointed vaguely up the green canal.
Elizabeth went on board. This was as good as Ghent. Better. There was an element of adventure about it. "Sloosh" might be anywhere; one might not reach it for days. Butthe boat had not the air of one used to long cruises; and Elizabeth felt safe in playing with the idea of an expedition into darkest Holland.
And now by chance, or because her movements interested him as much as his presence repelled her, this same Edward Brown also came on board, and, concealed by the deep daydream into which she had fallen, passed her unseen.
When she shook the last drops of the daydream from her, she found herself confronting the boat's only other passenger—himself.
She looked at him full and straight in the eyes, and with the look her embarrassment left her and laid hold on him.
He remembered her last words to him—
"If ever we meet again, we meet as strangers." Well, he had kept to the very letter of that bidding, and she had been angry. He had been very glad to see that she was angry. But now, face to face for an hour and a half—for he knew the distance to Sluys well enough—could he keep silence still and yet avoid being ridiculous? He did not intend to be ridiculous; yet even this might have happened. But Elizabeth saved him.
She raised her chin and spoke in chill, distant courtesy.
"I think you must be English, because I saw you at the 'Panier d'Or'; everyone's English there. I can't make these people understand anything. Perhaps you could be so kind as to tell me how long the boat takes to get to wherever it does get to?"
It was a longer speech than she would have made had he been the stranger as whom she proposed to treat him, but it was necessary to let him understand at the outset what was the part she intended to play.
He did understand, and assumed his rôle instantly.
"Something under two hours, I think," he said politely, still holding in his hand the hat he had removed on the instant of her breaking silence. "How cool and pleasant the air is after the town!" The boat was moving now quickly between grassy banks topped by rows of ash trees. The landscape on each side spread away like a map intersected with avenues of tall, lean, wind-bent trees, that seemed to move as the boat moved.
"Good!" said she to herself; "he means to talk. We shan't sit staring at each other for two hours like stuck pigs. And he really doesn't know me? Or is it the wife? Oh! I wish I'd never come to this horrible country!" Aloud she said, "Yes, and how pretty the trees and fields are—"
"So—so nice and green, aren't they?" said he.
And she said, "Yes."
Each inwardly smiled. In the old days each had been so eager for the other's good opinion, so afraid of seeming commonplace, that their conversations had been all fine work, and their very love-letters too clever by half. Now they did not belong to each other any more, and he said the trees were green, and she said "Yes."
"There seem to be a great many people in Bruges," said she.
"Yes," he said, in eager assent. "Quite a large number."
"There is a great deal to be seen in these old towns. So quaint, aren't they?"
She remembered his once condemning in a friend the use of that word. Now he echoed it.
"So very quaint," said he. "And the dogsdrawing carts! Just like the pictures, aren't they?"
"You can get pictures of them on the illustrated post-cards. So nice to send to one's relations at home."
She was getting angry with him. He played the game too well.
"Ah! yes," he answered, "the dear people like these little tokens, don't they?"
"He's getting exactly like a curate," she thought, and a doubt assailed her. Perhaps he was not playing the game at all. Perhaps in these three years he had really grown stupid.
"How different it all is from England, isn't it?"
"Oh, quite!" said he.
"Have you ever been in Holland?"
"Yes, once."
"What was it like?" she asked.
That was a form of question they had agreed to hate—once, long ago.
"Oh, extremely pleasant," he said warmly. "We met some most agreeable people at some of the hotels. Quite the best sort of people, you know."
Another phrase once banned by both.
The sun sparkled on the moving duckweed of the canal. The sky was blue overhead. Here and there a red-roofed farm showed among the green pastures. Ahead the avenues tapered away into distance, and met at the vanishing point. Elizabeth smiled for sheer pleasure at the sight of two little blue-smocked children solemnly staring at the boat as it passed. Then she glanced at him with an irritated frown. It was his turn to smile.
"You called the tune, my lady," he said to himself, "and it is you shall change it, not I."
"Foreign countries are very like England, are they not?" he said. "The same kind of trees, you know, and the same kind of cows, and—and everything. Even the canals are very like ours."
"The canal system," said Elizabeth instructively, "is the finest in the world."
"Adieu, Canal, canard, canaille," he quoted. They had always barred quotations in the old days.
"I don't understand Latin," said she. Then their eyes met, and he got up abruptly andwalked to the end of the boat and back. When he sat down again, he sat beside her.
"Shall we go on?" he said quietly. "I think it is your turn to choose a subject—"
"Oh! have you readAlice in Wonderland?" she said, with simple eagerness. "Such a pretty book, isn't it?"
He shrugged his shoulders. She was obstinate; all women were. Men were not. He would be magnanimous. He would not compel her to change the tune. He had given her one chance; and if she wouldn't—well, it was not possible to keep up this sort of conversation till they got to Sluys. He would—
But again she saved him.
"I won't play any more," she said. "It's not fair. Because you may think me a fool. But I happen to know that you are Mr. Brown, who writes the clever novels. You were pointed out to me at the hotel; and—oh! do tell me if you always talk like this to strangers?"
"Only to English ladies on canal boats," said he, smiling. "You see, one never knows. They might wish one to talk like that. We both did it very prettily. Of course, more know TomFool than Tom Fool knows, but I think I may congratulate you on your first attempt at the English-abroad conversation."
"Do you know, really," she said, "you did it so well that if I hadn't known who you were, I should have thought it was the real you. The felicitations are not all mine. But won't you tell me about Holland? That bit of yours about the hotel acquaintances was very brutal. I've heard heaps of people say that very thing. You just caught the tone. But Holland—"
"Well, this is Holland," said he; "but I saw more of it than this, and I'll tell you anything you like if you won't expect me to talk clever, and turn the phrase. That's a lost art, and I won't humiliate myself in trying to recover it. To begin with, Holland is flat."
"Don't be a geography book," Elizabeth laughed light-heartedly.
"The coinage is—"
"No, but seriously."
"Well, then," said he, and the talk lasted till the little steamer bumped and grated against the quay-side at Sluys.
When they had landed the two stood for a moment on the grass-grown quay in silence.
"Well, good afternoon," said Elizabeth suddenly. "Thank you so much for telling me all about Holland." And with that she turned and walked away along the narrow street between the trim little houses that look so like a child's toy village tumbled out of a white wood box. Mr. Edward Brown was left, planted there.
"Well!" said he, and spent the afternoon wandering about near the landing-stage, and wondering what would be the next move in this game of hers. It was a childish game, this playing at strangers, yet he owned that it had a charm.
He ate currant bread and drank coffee at a little inn by the quay, sitting at the table by the door and watching the boats. Two o'clock came and went. Four o'clock came, half-past four, and with that went the last return steamer for Bruges. Still Mr. Edward Brown sat still and smoked. Five minutes later Elizabeth's blue cotton dress gleamed in the sunlight at the street corner.
He rose and walked towards her.
"I hope you have enjoyed yourself in Holland," he said.
"I lost my way," said she. He saw that shewas very tired, even before he heard it in her voice. "When is the next boat?"
"There are no more boats to-day. The last left about ten minutes ago."
"You might have told me," she said resentfully.
"I beg your pardon," said he. "You bade me good-bye with an abruptness and a decision which forbade me to tell you anything."
"I beg your pardon," she said humbly. "Can I get back by train?"
"There are no trains."
"A carriage?"
"There are none. I have inquired."
"But you," she asked suddenly, "how did you miss the boat? How are you going to get back?"
"I shall walk," said he, ignoring the first question. "It's only eleven miles. But for you, of course, that's impossible. You might stay the night here. The woman at this inn seems a decent old person."
"I can't. There's a girl coming to join me. She's in the sixth at the High School where I teach. I've promised to chaperon and instructher. I must meet her at the station at ten. She's been ten years at the school. I don't believe she knows a word of French. Oh! I must go. She doesn't know the name of my hotel, or anything. I must go. I must walk."
"Have you had any food?"
"No; I never thought about it."
She did not realise that she was explaining to him that she had been walking to get away from him and from her own thoughts, and that food had not been among these.
"Then you will dine now; and, if you will allow me, we will walk back together."
Elizabeth submitted. It was pleasant to be taken care of. And to be "ordered about," that was pleasant, too. Curiously enough, that very thing had been a factor in the old quarrel. At nineteen one is so independent.
She was fed on omelettes and strange, pale steak, and Mr. Brown insisted on beer. The place boasted no wine cellar.
Then the walk began. For the first mile or two it was pleasant. Then Elizabeth's shoes began to hurt her. They were smart brown shoes, with deceitful wooden heels. In herwanderings over the cobblestones of Sluys streets one heel had cracked itself. Now it split altogether. She began to limp.
"Won't you take my arm?" said he.
"No, thank you. I don't really need it. I'll rest a minute, though, if I may." She sat down, leaning against a tree, and looked out at the darting swallows, dimpling here and there the still green water. The level sunlight struck straight across the pastures, turning them to gold. The long shadows of the trees fell across the canal and lay black on the reeds at the other side. The hour was full of an ample dignity of peace.
They walked another mile. Elizabeth could not conceal her growing lameness.
"Something is wrong with your foot," said he. "Have you hurt it?"
"It's these silly shoes; the heel's broken."
"Take them off and let me see."
She submitted without a protest, sat down, took off the shoes, and gave them to him. He looked at them kindly, contemptuously.
"Silly little things!" he said, and she, instead of resenting the impertinence, smiled.
Then he tore off the heels and dug out the remaining bristle of nails with his pocket-knife.
"That'll be better," said he cheerfully. Elizabeth put on the damp shoes. The evening dew lay heavy on the towing-path, and she hardly demurred at all to his fastening the laces. She was very tired.
Again he offered his arm; again she refused it.
Then, "Elizabeth, take my arm at once!" he said sharply.
She took it, and they had kept step for some fifty paces before she said—
"Then you knew all the time?"
"Am I blind or in my dotage? But you forbade me to meet you except as a stranger. I have an obedient nature."
They walked on in silence. He held her hand against his side strongly, but, as it seemed, without sentiment. He was merely helping a tired woman-stranger on a long road. But the road seemed easier to Elizabeth because her hand lay so close to him; she almost forgot how tired she was, and lost herself in dreams, and awoke, and taught herself to dream again, and wondered why everything should seem so different just becauseone's hand lay on the sleeve of a grey flannel jacket.
"Why should I be so abominably happy?" she asked herself, and then lapsed again into the dreams that were able to wipe away three years, as a kind hand might wipe three little tear-drops from a child's slate, scrawled over with sums done wrong.
When she remembered that he was married, she salved her conscience innocently. "After all," she said, "it can't be wrong if it doesn't makehimhappy; and, of course, he doesn't care, and I shall never see him again after to-night."
So on they went, the deepening dusk turned to night, and in Elizabeth's dreams it seemed that her hand was held more closely; but unless one moved it ever so little one could not be sure; and she would not move it ever so little.
The damp towing-path ended in a road cobblestoned, the masts of ships, pointed roofs, twinkling lights. The eleven miles were nearly over.
Elizabeth's hand moved a little, involuntarily, on his arm. To cover the movement she spoke instantly.
"I am leaving Bruges to-morrow."
"No; your sixth-form girl will be too tired, and besides—"
"Besides?"
"Oh, a thousand things! Don't leave Bruges yet; it's so 'quaint,' you know; and—and I want to introduce you to—"
"I won't," said Elizabeth almost violently.
"You won't?"
"No; I don't want to know your wife."
He stopped short in the street—not one of the "quaint" streets, but a deserted street of tall, square-shuttered, stern, dark mansions, wherein a gas-lamp or two flickered timidly.
"Mywife?" he said; "it's myaunt."
"It said 'Mrs. Brown' in the visitors' list," faltered Elizabeth.
"Brown's such an uncommon name," he said; "my aunt spells hers with an E."
"Oh! with an E? Yes, of course. I spell my name with an E too, only it's at the wrong end."
Elizabeth began to laugh, and the next moment to cry helplessly.
"Oh, Elizabeth! and you looked in the visitors'list and—" He caught her in his arms there in the street. "No; you can't get away. I'm wiser than I was three years ago. I shall never let you go any more, my dear."
The girl from the sixth looked quite resentfully at the two faces that met her at the station. It seemed hardly natural or correct for a classical mistress to look so happy.
Elizabeth's lover schemed for and got a goodnight word with her at the top of the stairs, by the table where the beautiful brass candlesticks lay waiting in shining rows.
"Sleep well, you poor, tired little person," he said, as he lighted the candle; "such little feet, such wicked little shoes, such a long, long, long walk."
"You must be tired, too," she said.
"Tired? with eleven miles, and your hand against my heart for eight of them? I shall remember that walk when we're two happy old people nodding across our own hearthrug at each other."
So he had felt it too; and if he had been married, how wicked it would have been! But he was not married—yet.
"I am not very, very tired, really," she said. "You see, itwasmy hand against—I mean your arm was a great help—"
"Itwasyour hand," he said. "Oh, you darling!"
It was her hand, too, that was kissed there, beside the candlesticks, under the very eyes of the chambermaid and two acid English tourists.
THE white crescent of the little new moon blinked at us through the yew boughs. As you walk up the churchyard you see thirteen yews on each side of you, and yet, if you count them up, they make twenty-seven, and it has been pointed out to me that neither numerical fact can be without occult significance. The jugglery in numbers is done by the seventh yew on the left, which hides a shrinking sister in the amplitude of its shadow.
The midsummer day was dying in a golden haze. Amid the gathering shadows of the churchyard her gown gleamed white, ghostlike.
"Oh, there's the new moon," she said. "I am so glad. Take your hat off to her and turn the money in your pocket, and you will get whatever you wish for, and be rich as well."
I obeyed with a smile, half of whose meaning she answered.
"No," she said, "I am not really superstitious; I'm not at all sure that the money is any good, or the hat, but of course everyone knows it's unlucky to see it through glass."
"Seen through glass," I began, "a hat presents a gloss which on closer inspection—"
"No, no, not a hat, the moon, of course. And you might as well pretend that it's lucky to upset the salt, or to kill a spider, especially on a Tuesday, or on your hat."
"Hats," I began again, "certainly seem to—"
"It's not the hat," she answered, pulling up the wild thyme and crushing it in her hands, "you know very well it's the spider. Doesn't that smell sweet?"
She held out the double handful of crushed sun-dried thyme, and as I bent my face over the cup made by her two curved hands, I was constrained to admit that the fragrance was delicious.
"Intoxicating even," I added.
"Not that. White lilies intoxicate you, so does mock-orange; and white may too, only it's unlucky to bring it into the house."
I smiled again.
"I don't see why you should call it superstitious to believe in facts," she said. "My cousin's husband's sister brought some may into her house last year, and her uncle died within the month."
"My husband's uncle's sister's nieceWas saved from them by the police.She says so, so I know it's true—"
I had got thus far in my quotation when she interrupted me.
"Oh, well, if you're going to sneer!" she said, and added that it was getting late, and that she must go home.
"Not yet," I pleaded. "See how pretty everything is. The sky all pink, and the red sunset between the yews, and that good little moon. And how black the shadows are under the buttresses. Don't go home—already they will have lighted the yellow shaded lamps in your drawing-room. Your sister will be sitting down to the piano. Your mother is trying to match her silks. Your brother has got out the chess board. Someone is drawing the curtains. The day is over for them, but for us, here, there is a little bit of it left."
We were sitting on the lowest step of a high, square tomb, moss-grown and lichen-covered. The yellow lichens had almost effaced the long list of the virtues of the man on whose breast this stone had lain, as itself in round capitals protested, since the year of grace 1703. The sharp-leafed ivy grew thickly over one side of it, and the long, uncut grass came up between the cracks of its stone steps.
"It's all very well," she said severely.
"Don't be angry," I implored. "How can you be angry when the bats are flying black against the rose sky, when the owl is waking up—his is a soft, fluffy awakening—and wondering if it's breakfast time?"
"I won't be angry," she said. "Besides the owl, it's disrespectful to the dear, sleepy, dead people to be angry in a churchyard. But if I were really superstitious, you know, I should be afraid to come here at night."
"At the end of the day," I corrected. "It is not night yet. Tell me before the night comes all the wonderful things you believe. Recite yourcredo."
"Don't be flippant. I don't suppose I believemore unlikely things than you do. You believe in algebra and Euclid and log—what's-his-names. Now I don't believe a word of all that."
"We have it on the best authority that by getting up early you can believe six impossible things before breakfast."
"But they're not impossible. Don't you see that's just it? The things I like to believe are the very things thatmightbe true. And they're relics of a prettier time than ours, a time when people believed in ghosts and fairies and witches and the devil—oh, yes! and in God and His angels, too. Now the times are bound in yellow brick, and we believe in nothing but ... Euclid and—and company prospectuses and patent medicines."
When she is a little angry she is very charming, but it was too dark for me to see her face.
"Then," I asked, "it is merely the literary sense that leads you to make the Holy Sign when you find two knives crossed on your table, or to knock under the table and cry 'Unberufen' when you have provoked the Powers with some kind word of the destiny they have sent you?"
"I don't," she said. "I don't talk foreign languages."
"You say, 'unbecalled for,' I know, but this is mere subterfuge. Is it the literary sense that leads you to treasure farthings, to refuse to give pins, to object to a dinner party of thirteen, to fear the plucking of the golden elder, to avoid coming back to the house when once you've started, even if you've forgotten your prayer-book or your umbrella, to decline to pass under a ladder—"
"I always go under a ladder," she interrupted, ignoring the other counts; "it only means you won't be married for seven years."
"I never go under ladders. Tell me, is it the literary sense?"
"Bother the literary sense," she said. "Bother" is not a pretty word, but this did not strike me till I came to write it down. "Look," she went on, "at the faint primrose tint over the pine trees and those last pink clouds high up in the sky."
I could see the outline of her lifted chin and her throat against the yew shadows, but I determined to be wise. I looked at the pine trees and said—
"I want you to instruct me. Why is it unlucky to break a looking-glass? and what is the counter-charm?"
"I don't know"—there was some awe in her voice—"I don't think there is any counter-charm. If I broke a looking-glass I believe I should have to give up believing in these things altogether. It would make me too unhappy."
I was discreet enough to pass by the admission.
"And why is it unlucky to wear black at a wedding? And if anyone did wear black at your wedding, what would you do?"
"You are very tiresome this evening," she said. "Why don't you keep to the point? Nobody was talking of weddings, and if you must wander, why not stray in more amusing paths? Why don't you talk of something interesting? Why do you try to be disagreeable? If you think I'm silly to believe all these nice picturesque things, why don't you give me your solid, dull, dry, scientific reasons for not believing them?"
"Your wish is my law," I responded with alacrity. "Superstition, then, is the result of theimperfect recognition in unscientific ages of the relations of cause and effect. To persons unaccustomed correctly to assign causes, one cause is as likely as another to produce a given effect. Hallucinations of the senses have also, doubtless—"
"And now you're only dull," she said.
The light had slowly faded while we spoke till the churchyard was almost dark, the grass was heavy with dew, and sadness had crept like a shadow over the quiet world.
"I am sorry. Everything I say is wrong to-night. I was born under an unlucky star. Forgive me."
"It was I who was cross," she admitted at once very cheerfully, but, indeed, not without some truth. "But it doesn't do anyone any harm to play at believing things; honestly, I'm not sure whether I believe them or not, but they have some colour about them in an age grown grey in its hateful laboratories and workshops. I do want to try to tell you if you really want to know about it. I can't think why, but if I meet a flock of sheep I know it is lucky, and I'm cheered; and if a hare crossesthe path I feel it is unlucky, and I'm sad; and if I see the new moon through glass I'm positively wretched. But all the same, I'm not superstitious. I'm not afraid of ghosts or dead people, or things like that"—I'm not sure that she did not add, "So there!"
"Would you dare to go to the church door at twelve at night and knock three times?" I asked, with some severity.
"Yes," she said stoutly, though I know she quailed, "I would. Now you'll admit that I'm not superstitious."
"Yes," I said, and here I offer no excuse. The devil entered into me, and though I see now what a brute beast I was, I cannot be sorry. "I own that you are not superstitious. How dark it is growing. The ivy has broken the stone away just behind your head: there is quite a large hole in the side of the tomb. No, don't move, there's nothing there. If you were superstitious you might fancy, on a still, dark, sweet evening like this, that the dead man might wake and want to come up out of his coffin. He might crouch under the stone, and then, trying to come out, he might very slowly reachout his dead fingers and touch your neck. Ah!"
The awakened wind had moved an ivy spray to the suggested touch. She sprang up with a cry, and the next moment she was clinging wildly to me, as I held her in my arms.
"Don't cry, my dear, oh, don't! Forgive me, it was the ivy."
She caught her breath.
"How could you! how could you!"
And still I held her fast, with—as she grew calmer—a question in the clasp of my arms, and, presently, on my lips.
"Oh, my dear, forgive me! And is it true—do you?—do you?"
"Yes—no—I don't know.... No, no, not through my veil, itisso unlucky!"
SHE opened the window, at which no light shone. All the other windows were darkly shuttered. The night was still: only a faint breath moved among the restless aspen leaves. The ivy round the window whispered hoarsely as the casement, swung back too swiftly, rested against it. She had a large linen sheet in her hands. Without hurry and without delayings she knotted one corner of it to the iron staple of the window. She tied the knot firmly, and further secured it with string. She let the white bulk of the sheet fall between the ivy and the night, then she climbed on to the window-ledge, and crouched there on her knees. There was a heart-sick pause before she grasped the long twist of the sheet as it hung—let her knees slip from the supporting stone and swung suddenly, by her hands. Her elbows and wristswere grazed against the rough edge of the window-ledge—the sheet twisted at her weight, and jarred her shoulder heavily against the house wall. Her arms seemed to be tearing themselves from their sockets. But she clenched her teeth, felt with her feet for the twisted ivy stems on the side of the house, found foothold, and the moment of almost unbearable agony was over. She went down, helped by feet and hands, and by ivy and sheet, almost exactly as she had planned to do. She had not known it would hurt so much—that was all. Her feet felt the soft mould of the border: a stout geranium snapped under her tread. She crept round the house, in the house's shadow—found the gardener's ladder—and so on to the high brick wall. From this she dropped, deftly enough, into the suburban lane: dropped, too, into the arms of a man who was waiting there. She hid her face in his neck, trembling, and said, "Oh, Harry—I wish I hadn't!" Then she began to cry helplessly. The man, receiving her embrace with what seemed in the circumstances a singularly moderated enthusiasm, led her with one arm still lightly about her shoulders downthe lane: at the corner he stood still, and said in a low voice—
"Hush—stop crying at once! I've something to say to you."
She tore herself from his arm, and gasped.
"It'snotHarry," she said. "Oh, how dare you!" She had been brave till she had dropped into his arms. Then the need for bravery had seemed over. Now her tears were dried swiftly and suddenly by the blaze of anger and courage in her eyes.
"Don't be unreasonable," he said, and even at that moment of disappointment and rage his voice pleased her. "I had to get you away somehow. I couldn't risk an explanation right under your aunt's windows. Harry's sprained his knee—cricket. He couldn't come."
A sharp resentment stirred in her against the lover who could play cricket on the very day of an elopement.
"Hetold you to come? Oh, how could he betray me!"
"My dear girl, what was he to do? He couldn't leave you to wait out here alone—perhaps for hours."
"I shouldn't have waited long," she said sharply; "you came to tell me: now you've told me—you'd better go."
"Look here," he said with gentle calm, "I do wish you'd try not to be quite so silly. I'm Harry's doctor—and a middle-aged man. Let me help you. There must be some better way out of your troubles than a midnight flight and a despairingly defiant note on the pin-cushion."
"I didn't," she said. "I put it on the mantelpiece. Please go. I decline to discuss anything with you."
"Ah, don't!" he said; "I knew you must be a very romantic person, or you wouldn't be here; and I knew you must be rather sill—well, rather young, or you wouldn't have fallen in love with Harry. But I did not think, after the brave and practical manner in which you kept your appointment, I didnotthink that you'd try to behave like the heroine of a family novelette. Come, sit down on this heap of stones—there's nobody about. There's a light in your house now. You can't go back yet. Here, let me put my Inverness round you. Keep it up round your chin, and then if anyone sees you theywon't know who you are. I can't leave you alone here. You know what a lot of robberies there have been in the neighbourhood lately; there may be rough characters about. Come now, let's think what's to be done. You know you can't get back unless I help you."
"I don't want you to help me; and I won't go back," she said.
But she sat down and pulled the cloak up round her face.
"Now," he said, "as I understand the case—it's this. You live rather a dull life with two tyrannical aunts—and the passion for romance...."
"They're not tyrannical—only one's always ill and the other's always nursing her. She makes her get up and read to her in the night. That's her light you saw—"
"Well, I pass the aunts. Anyhow, you met Harry—somehow—"
"It was at the Choral Society. And then they stopped my going—because he walked home with me one wet night."
"And you have never seen each other since?"
"Of course we have."
"And communicated by some means more romantic than the post?"
"It wasn't romantic. It was tennis-balls."
"Tennis-balls?"
"You cut a slit and squeeze it and put a note in, and it shuts up and no one notices it. It wasn't romantic at all. And I don't know why I should tell you anything about it."
"And then, I suppose, there were glances in church, and stolen meetings in the passionate hush of the rose-scented garden."
"There's nothing in the garden but geraniums," she said, "and we always talked over the wall—he used to stand on their chicken house, and I used to turn our dog kennel up on end and stand on that. You have no right to know anything about it, but it was not in the least romantic."
"No—that sees itself! May I ask whether it was you or he who proposed this elopement?"
"Oh, howdareyou!" she said, jumping up; "you have no right to insult me like this."
He caught her wrist. "Sit down, you little firebrand," he said. "I gather that he proposed it. You, at any rate, consented, no doubt after the regulation amount of proper scruples. It'sall very charming and idyllic and—what are you crying for? Your lost hopes of a happy life with a boy you know nothing of, a boy you've hardly seen, a boy you've never talked to about anything but love's young dream?"
"I'mnotcrying," she said passionately, turning her streaming eyes on him, "you know I'm not—or if I am, it's only with rage. You may be a doctor—though I don't believe you are—but you're not a gentleman. Not anything like one!"
"I suppose not," he said; "a gentleman would not make conditions. I'm going to make one. You can't go to Harry, because his Mother would be seriously annoyed if you did; and so, believe me, would he—though you don't think it. You can get up and leave me, and go 'away into the night,' like a heroine of fiction—but you can't keep on going away into the night for ever and ever. You must have food and clothes and lodging. And the sun rises every day. You must just quietly and dully go home again. And you can't do it without me. And I'll help you if you'll promise not to see Harry, or write to him for a year."
"He'll see me. He'll write to me," she said with proud triumph.
"I think not. I exacted the promise fromhimas a condition of my coming to meet you."
"And he promised?"
"Evidently."
There was a long silence. She broke it with a voice of concentrated fury.
"If he doesn't mind,Idon't," she said. "I'll promise. Now let me go back. I wish you hadn't come—I wish I was dead."
"Come," he said, "don't be so angry with me. I've done what I could for you both."
"On conditions!"
"You must see that they are good, or you wouldn't have accepted them so soon. I thought it would have taken me at least an hour to get you to consent. But no—ten minutes of earnest reflection are enough to settle the luckless Harry's little hash. You're quite right—he doesn't deserve more! I am pleased with myself, I own. I must have a very convincing manner."
"Oh," she cried passionately, "I daresay you think you've been very clever. But I wish youknew what I think of you. And I'd tell you for twopence."
"I'm a poor man, gentle lady—won't you tell me for love?" His voice was soft and pleading beneath the laugh that stung her.
"Yes, Iwilltell you—for nothing," she cried. "You're a brute, and a hateful, interfering, disagreeable, impertinent old thing, and I only hope you'll have someone be as horrid to you as you've been to me, that's all!"
"I think I've had that already—quite as horrid," he said grimly. "This is not the moment for compliments—but you have great powers. You are brave, and I never met anyone who could be more 'horrid,' as you call it, in smaller compass, all with one little tiny adjective. My felicitations. Youareclever. Come—don't be angry any more—I had to do it—you'll understand some day."
"You wouldn't like it yourself," she said, softening to something in his voice.
"I shouldn't have liked it at your age," he said; "sixteen—fifteen—what is it?"
"I'm nineteen next birthday," she said with dignity.
"And the date?"
"The fifteenth of June—I don't know what you mean by asking me."
"And to-day's the first of July," he said, and sighed. "Well, well!—if your Highness will allow me, I'll go and see whether your aunt's light is out, and if it is, we'll attempt the re-entrance."
He went. She shivered, waiting for what felt like hours. And the resentment against her aunts grew faint in the light of her resentment against her lover's messenger, and this, in its turn, was outshone by her anger against her lover. He had played cricket. He had risked his life—on the very day whose evening should have crowned that life by giving her to his arms. She set her teeth. Then she yawned and shivered again. It was an English July, and very cold. And the slow minutes crept past. What a fool she had been! Why had she not made a fight for her liberty—for her right to see Harry if she chose to see him? The aunts would never have stood up against a well-planned, determined, disagreeable resistance. In the light of this doctor's talk the whole thingdid seem cowardly, romantic, and, worst of all, insufferably young. Well—to-morrow everything should change; she would fight for her Love, not merely run away to him. But the promise? Well, Harry was Harry, and a promise was only a promise!
There were footsteps in the lane. The man was coming back to her. She rose.
"It's all right," he said. "Come."
In silence they walked down the lane. Suddenly he stopped.
"You'll thank me some day," he said. "Why should you throw yourself away on Harry? You're worth fifty of him. And I only wish I had time to explain this to you thoroughly, but I haven't!"
She, too, had stopped. Now she stamped her foot.
"Look here," she said, "I'm not going to promise anything at all. You needn't help me if you don't want to—but I take back that promise. Go!—do what you like! I mean to stick to Harry—and I'll write and tell him so to-night. So there!"
He clapped his hands very softly. "Bravo!"he said; "that's the right spirit. Plucky child! Any other girl would have broken the promise without a word to me. Harry's luckier even than I thought. I'll help you, little champion! Come on."
He helped her over the wall; carried the ladder to her window, and steadied it while she mounted it. When she had climbed over the window-ledge she turned and leaned out of the window, to see him slowly mounting the ladder. He threw his head back with a quick gesture that meant "I have something more to say—lean out!"
She leaned out. His face was on a level with hers.
"You've slept soundly all night—don't forget that—it's important," he whispered, "and—you needn't tell Harry—one-sided things are so trivial, but I can't help it.Ihave the passion for romance too!"
With that he caught her neck in the curve of his arm, and kissed her lightly but fervently.
"Good-bye!" he said; "thank you so much for a very pleasant evening!" He dropped from the ladder and was gone. She drew hercurtain with angry suddenness. Then she lighted candles and looked at herself in the looking-glass. She thought she had never looked so pretty. And she was right. Then she went to bed, and slept like a tired baby.
Next morning the suburb was electrified by the discovery, made by the nursing aunt, that all the silver and jewels and valuables from the safe at the top of the stairs had vanished.
"The villains must have come through your room, child," she said to Harry's sweetheart; "the ladder proves that. Slept sound all night, did you? Well, that was a mercy! They might have murdered you in your bed if you'd happened to be awake. You ought to be humbly thankful when you think of what might have happened."
The girl did not think very much of what might have happened. Whathadhappened gave her quite food enough for reflection. Especially when to her side of the night's adventures was added the tale of Harry's.
He had not played cricket, he had not hurt his knee, he had merely confided in his father'svalet, and had given that unprincipled villain a five-pound note to be at the Cross Roads—in the orthodox style—with a cab for the flight, a post-chaise being, alas! out of date. Instead of doing this, the valet, with a confederate, had gagged and bound young Harry, and set him in a convenient corner against the local waterworks to await events.
"I never would have believed it of him," added Harry, in an agitated india-rubber-ball note, "he always seemed such a superior person, you'd have thought he was a gentleman if you'd met him in any other position."
"I should. I did," she said to herself. "And, oh, how frightfully clever! And the way he talked! And all the time he was only keeping me out of the way while they stole the silver and things. I wish he hadn't taken the ruby necklace: it does suit me so. And what nerve! He actually talked about the robberies in the neighbourhood. He must have done them all. Oh, what a pity! But he was a dear. And how awfully wicked he was, too—but I'll never tell Harry!"
She never has.
Curiously enough, her Burglar Valet Hero was not caught, though the police most intelligently traced his career, from his being sent down from Oxford to his last best burglary.
She was married to Harry, with the complete consent of everyone concerned, for Harry had money, and so had she, and there had never been the slightest need for an elopement, save in youth's perennial passion for romance. It was on her birthday that she received a registered postal packet. It had a good many queer postmarks on it, and the stamps were those of a South American republic. It was addressed to her by her new name, which was as good as new still. It came at breakfast-time, and it contained the ruby necklace, several gold rings, and a diamond brooch. All were the property of her late aunts. Also there was an india-rubber ball, and in it a letter.
"Here is a birthday present for you," it said. "Try to forgive me. Some temptations are absolutely irresistible. That one was. And it was worth it. It rounded off the whole thing so perfectly. That last indiscretion of mine nearly ruined everything. There was a policemanin the lane. I only escaped by the merest fluke. But even then it would have been worth it. At least, I should like you to believe that I think so."
"His last indiscretion," said Harry, who saw the note but not the india-rubber ball, "that means stealing your aunts' things, of course, unless it was dumping me down by the waterworks, but, of course, that wasn't the last one. But worth it? Why, he'd have had seven years if they'd caught him—worth it? Hemusthave a passion for burglary."
She did not explain to Harry, because he would never have understood. But the burglar would have found it quite easy to understand that or anything. She was so shocked to find herself thinking this that she went over to Harry and kissed him with more affection even than usual.
"Yes, dear," he said, "I don't wonder you're pleased to get something back out of all those things. I quite understand."
"Yes, dear," said she. "I know. You always do!"