Part 15

He went back to his hotel and inspected once more certain of the purchases he had made since her decree had banished him from London. Resisting a momentary impulse toward asceticism in the matter of breakfast, as an outward and visible testimony to the unimportance of material things at such a time as this, he found himself at the other end of the pendulum's swing, ordering just such a meal as he would have ordered had she been with him, and ate his grape-fruit and omelette and delicately browned fish with thoughtful appreciation, making of them a banquet in her honor. He toasted her in the coffee, and, as he ate, romance insisted that it was not himself, but her man, whom he was treating to that perfectly served breakfast; and common sense added, "Yes, and no man's at his best if he's hungry." Before he reached the marmalade he had come to regard that impulse to tea and toast as a man might regard a vanished temptation to alcoholic excess.

"A hungry man's only half a man--the bad-tempered half," he said, lighting his first cigarette, and strolling out into the sunny inn-yard, where a hostler with a straw in his mouth was busy with a bucket of water and a horse's legs; a pleasanter man, Edward thought, than the other man there, busy with oil and petrol and cotton-waste and a very new motor-car.

"I wish motors had never been invented," he told himself.

All the same, when the hour-glass of time had let through the last grain of the space of their separation, and a pale girl withdrew her eyes from the speck of a boat growing smaller and smaller on a sea that sparkled so brilliantly that you could hardly look at it, and almost listlessly turned to walk back alone to her hotel, she was confronted with a very pale young man standing beside a very new motor-car.

"You!" she said, and, as once before, the blood rushed to her face, and his to his, answering.

This was the moment for which he had lived for weeks--and they shook hands like strangers! She was grave and cold. What would her first words be?

"But I said Thursday," she said.

He looked like a criminal detected in a larceny.

"_I_ said Tuesday," he told her. "Do you mind?"

In his anticipations of this moment he had always counted on a mutual wave of gladness in their reunion, in which all doubts should be resolved and all explanations be easy. Now, he himself felt awkward as a school-boy. And he noted in her a quite inexplicable restraint and embarrassment, although she was certainly saying that she did not mind, and that it did not matter at all.

"Where were you going?" he asked, mechanically, just for something to say as they stood there by the motor, jostled by all the people who had been seeing other people off.

"To my hotel, to pack and to write to you, as I said I would."

"Shall I go away and wait for the letter?" he asked, feeling that tea and toast would have done well enough.

"No. Don't be silly!" she said.

Now that the flush had died from her face he saw that it was paler and thinner. She saw in him a curious hardness. It was one of those moments when the light of life has gone out and there is nothing to be said that is not futile and nothing to be done that is of any use.

"It's a new car!" she said. "Yours?"

"Yes," he answered.

She wore a silky, soft-brown, holland-colored dress and a white hat with some black velvet about it and a dark rose. A wine-colored scarf fluttered about her, and in spite of her paleness and thinness she was more beautiful than ever and far more dear.

"Do you like the car?" he added, stupidly.

"Very much," she said, without so much as glancing at it. She looked up. "Well, what are we going to do?" she asked, almost crossly.

"Whatever you like."

"Oh, dear!" her voice was plaintive. "You must have had _some_ idea or you wouldn't have come to-day instead of Thursday. Hadn't you any idea, any scheme, any plan?"

"Yes," he said, "but it does not matter; I'll do anything you say."

"Oh, well," she said, "if you won't tell me your plans--" and she sketched the gesture of one who turns away and goes on her way alone.

"But I will," he said, quickly. Yet still he spoke like a very stupid child saying a lesson which it does not quite know. "I will tell you--I thought if you liked the car we might just get in and drive off--"

"Where?"

"Oh, just anywhere," he said, and hastened to add, "but I see now how silly it was. Of course I ought to have written and explained. Surprises are always silly, aren't they?"

And he felt as one who sits forlorn and feels the cold winds blow through the ruined arches of a castle in Spain. He had not read her letter as she had meant him to read it. Everything was different. Perhaps, after all, she did not--never had--he had deceived himself, like the fatuous fool he was.

"I ought to have thought," he blundered. "Of course you would not care to go motoring in that beautiful gown--and that hat--that makes you look like the Gardener's Daughter--'a sight to make an old man young'"--he added, recovering a very little--"and no coat! But I did buy a coat."

He leaned over and pulled out of the car a mass of soft brown fur lined with ermine. "Though, of course, it would have been better to ask you to choose one--I expect it's all wrong," and he heaved up the furry folds half-heartedly, without looking at her. "I just thought you might not have thought of getting one . . ." and his voice trailed away into silence, a silence that hers did not break.

Slowly she put out her hand and touched the fur, still without speaking. Then he did look at her, and suddenly the light of life sprang up again and the world was illumined from end to end. For her face that had been pale was pink as the wild rose is pink, and her mouth that had been sad was smiling; in her eyes was all, or almost all, that he had hoped to see there when, at last, after this long parting they should meet; and her hand was stroking the fur as if she loved it.

"It's the most beautiful coat in the world," she said, and her voice, like her face, was transfigured. She turned her shoulders to him that he might lay the coat on them, slipped her arms into the sleeves, and wheeled to confront him, her face alight with a mingled tenderness and gaiety that turned him, for a moment, faint and giddy.

"You really like it, Princess?" he faltered.

"I love it," she made answer; "and now, my lord, will you take me in your nice new motor-car to my unworthy hotel, that I may pay my miserable bill and secure my despicable luggage? Even a princess, you know, can't go to the world's end without a pair of slippers, a comb, and a clean pocket-handkerchief."

With that she was in the car, and he followed, gasping, in the sudden wave of enchantment that had changed the world. What had happened? Why had she suddenly changed? How had the cloud vanished? Whence had the cloud arisen?

His heart, or his vanity, or both, had been too bruised by the sudden blow to recover all in a minute. His brain, too, was stunned by the lack of any reason in what had happened. Why had she not been glad to see him? Why had she so suddenly turned from a cold stranger to her very self? What had worked the bad magic? Not, surely, the sight of a friend two days before she expected that sight? What had worked the good magic? It was not thinkable that any magic at all could be worked by a fur coat or even by the foresight that had provided it. His mind busied itself with such questions and felt no pain in them because it knew that his heart held in reserve, to be contemplated presently, the glorious fact that the good magic had, somehow, been wrought. But he would not call his heart into court yet. So that it was in silence that he drove through the steep streets. His own slight luggage was already at the back of the car, and when hers was added to it and they had left the town behind he still said nothing but the few words needed to such little matters as the disposing of the luggage and the satisfying of the hotel porter.

And when all the tall, stuccoed houses were left behind and they were rushing smoothly through the fresh morning, with the green sea on one side and the green marshland on the other, still he did not speak and kept his eyes on the white ribbon of road unrolling itself before him. It was just as they passed the third Martello tower that her hand crept under his arm. He took his from the steering-wheel for a moment to lay it on hers, and after that his heart had its way, and the silence, though still unbroken, was no longer the cloak for anxious questionings, but the splendid robe of a tender, tremulous joy.

They sped on; through Dymchurch, where the great sea-wall is, and where the houses are built lower than the sea, so that the high tide laps against the sea-wall level with the bedroom windows of the little houses that nestle behind its strong shelter.

It was she who spoke then. "Isn't it a dear little place?" she said. "Wouldn't you like to live in a Martello tower? They have one beautiful big room with a Norman-looking pillar in the middle, and a down-stairs part for kitchens, and an up-stairs, where the big gun is, that you could roof in for bedrooms. I should like a Martello! Don't you want to buy one? You know they built them to keep out Napoleon--and the canal as well--but no one uses them now. They just keep fishing-nets in them and wheelbarrows and eel-spears."

"Let's buy the haunted one," he said, and hoped that his voice was steady, for it was not of haunted towers that he desired to speak. "A soldier's ghost walks there; the village people say 'it's one of them there Roman soldiers that lived here when them towers was built in old ancient Roman times.'"

She laughed. "You know Dymchurch, then? Isn't it nice when people know the same places? Almost as nice as it is when they've read the same books."

But the silence was not broken, only lifted. Her hand crept a little farther into the crook of his arm.

It was as they passed the spick-and-span white-painted windmill at New Romney that he said: "Don't you think it would be nicer to buy a windmill? There are four stories to that, and you can shift the top one around so that your window's always away from the wind."

"Yes," she said, "we really ought to buy a windmill."

The "we" lay warm at his heart until they came near Rye that stands upon its hill, looking over the marshes to the sea that deserted it so many years ago.

"There's a clock in Rye church that Sir Walter Raleigh presented to the town," he said, instructively.

"And Henry James lived there," said she.

"Shall we have lunch at the Mermaid Tavern? Or would you rather have a picnic? I've got a basket."

"How clever of you! Of course we'll have the picnic. And it's quite early. How beautifully the car is going!"

"Yes, isn't she?"

"Has she a name yet?"

"No. You must christen her."

"I should call her Time, because she flies so fast."

"You'd have to particularize. All time doesn't fly."

"No," she said, "ah, no! And she ought to have a splendid sort of name, she is so magnificently triumphant over space and time. Raleigh would have called her the 'Gloriana.'"

"So will we," said he. And they left Rye behind, and again the silence folded them round, and still her hand lay close in the crook of his arm.

At Winchelsea she suddenly asked, "Where's Charles?"

"Charles," he said, gravely, "is visiting my old nurse. He is well and happy--a loved and honored guest."

"The dear!" she said, absently. They were nearing Hastings before he spoke again, almost in a whisper, and this time what he said was what he meant to say.

"Are you happy?" he asked.

And she said, "Yes!"

It was at Hurstmonceaux that they opened the picnic basket--Hurstmonceaux, the great ruined Tudor castle, all beautiful in red brick and white stone. Less than a hundred years ago it was perfect to the last brick of it. But its tall old twisted red chimneys smoked. So a Hastings architect was called in. "I cannot cure your smoky chimneys, sir," said he, "but with the lead and some of the bricks of your castle I can build you a really comfortable and convenient modern house in the corner of your park, and I pledge you my word as an architect that the chimneys of the new house sha'n't smoke." So he did, and they didn't. And Hurstmonceaux was turned from a beautiful house to a beautiful ruin, and no one can live there; but parties of sightseers and tourists can be admitted on Mondays and Thursdays for a fee of sixpence a head, children half-price. All of which she read to him from the _Guide to Sussex_, as they sat in the grass-grown courtyard, where moss and wild flowers have covered the mounds of fallen brick.

"But this isn't Monday or Thursday," she said. "How did you get in?"

"You saw--with the big key, the yard of cold iron. I got special leave from the owner--for this."

"How very clever of you! How much better than anything _I_ could have arranged."

"Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley," he said, drawing the cork of the Rüdesheimer. "I do hope you _really_ like lobster salad."

"And chicken and raspberries and cream, and everything. I like it all--and our dining-room--it's the most beautiful dining-room I ever had. I only thought of a wood, or a field, or perhaps a river, for Thursday."

"You did mean to have a picnic for Thursday?"

"Yes, but this is much better. It's a better place than I could have found, and besides--"

"Besides--?"

"It isn't Thursday."

When luncheon, a merry meal and a leisurely, was over, they leaned against a fallen pillar and rested their eyes on the beauty of green floor, red walls, and the blue sky roofing all. And above the skylarks sang.

"There's nothing between us now," he said, contentedly--"no cloud, no misunderstanding."

"No," she answered, "and I don't want there ever to be anything between us. So I'm going to tell you about Chester--the thing that worried me and I couldn't tell. Do you remember?"

"I think I do," he said, grimly.

"Only you must promise you won't be angry."

"With you?" he asked, incredulously.

"No . . . with him . . . and you must try to believe that it is true. No, of course not; I don't mean you're not likely to believe what _I_ say, but what he said."

"Please," he pleaded, "I'm a patient man, but. . . ."

So she told him the whole story of Mr. Schultz, and, at the end, waited for him to give voice to the anger that, from the very touch of his hand on hers, she knew he felt. But what he said was:

"It was entirely my fault. I ought never to have left you alone for an instant."

"You thought I was to be trusted," she said, a little bitterly, "and I couldn't even stay where you left me. But you do believe what he said?"

"I'll try to," he answered. "After all, he needn't have said anything--and if _you_ believe it-- Look here, let's never think of him or speak of him again, will you? We agreed, didn't we, that Mr. Schultz was only a bad dream, and that he never really happened. And there's nothing now between us at all . . . no concealments?"

"There's one," she said, in a very small voice, "but it's so silly I don't think I _can_ tell you."

"Try," said he. "I could tell of the silliest things. And after that there's one more thing I wish you'd tell me, if you can. You _are_ happy, aren't you? You are glad that we're together again?"

"Yes," she said. "Oh yes!"

"And this morning you weren't?"

"Oh, but I was, I was! It was only-- That's the silly thing I want to tell you. But you'll laugh."

"It wasn't a laughing matter to me."

"I know I was hateful."

"It was--bewildering. I couldn't understand why everything was all wrong and then, suddenly, everything was all right."

"I know--I was detestable. I can't think how I could. But, you see, I was disappointed. I meant to arrange for you to meet me at some very pretty place and I was going to have a very pretty luncheon. I'd thought it all out . . . and it was exactly the same as yours, almost, only I shouldn't have known the name of the quite-perfect wine and, then . . . there you were, you know, and I hadn't been able to make things nice for you."

"Was that really all, my Princess?"

"Yes, that was all."

"But still I don't understand why everything was suddenly all right."

"It was what you said. That made everything all right."

"What I said?"

"You see, I meant it all to be as pretty as I could make it, and I'd got a new dress, very, very pretty, and a new hat . . . and then you came upon me, suddenly, in this old rag and last year's hat and scarf I only wore because aunty gave them to me. And I felt caught, and defrauded, and . . . and dowdy."

"Oh, Princess!"

"And then you said . . . you said you liked my dress . . . so, then, it did not matter."

It was then that he lifted her hand to hold it against his face as once before he had held it, and silence wrapped them around once more--a lovely silence, adorned with the rustle of leaves and grass and the skylark's passionate song.

XX

THE END

THE memory of luncheon died away and the picnic-basket, again appealed to, yielded tea. They had explored the towers, and talked of Kenilworth, the underground passages, and talked of the round tower of Wales. And half their talk was, "Do you remember?" and, "Have you forgotten?" The early days of the incredible honeymoon had been days of exploration, each seeking to discover the secrets of that unknown land, each other's mind and soul; this day of reunion was one gladly given over to the contemplation of the memories they had together amassed. It was a day dedicated to the counting of those treasures of memory which they now held in common, treasures among which this golden day itself would, all too soon, have to be laid aside to be, for each of them, forever, the chief jewel of that priceless treasury.

It was when they were repacking the picnic-basket that they first noticed how the color had gone out of the grass, that was their carpet, and how the blue had faded from the sky, that was their roof. The day had changed its mind, after all. Having been lovely in its youth and glorious in its prime, it had, in its declining hours, fallen a prey to the grayest melancholy and was now very sorry for itself indeed.

"Oh dear!" said she, "I do believe it's going to rain."

Even as she spoke the first big tears of the dejected day fell on the lid of the teapot.

"We must hurry," he said, briskly. "I can't have my princess getting wet through and catching cold in her royal head. Run for it, Princess! Run to the big gateway!"

She ran; he followed with the basket, went out to cover the seats of his car with mackintosh rugs and put up the hood, and came back, dampish, to discuss the situation. They told each other that it was only a shower, that it couldn't possibly, as they put it, have "set in." But it had; the landscape framed in the arch of the gateway lost color moment by moment, even the yellow of the gorse was blotted and obscured; the rain, which at first had fallen in a fitful, amateurish sort of way, settled down to business and fell in gray, diagonal lines, straight and sharp as ramrods.

"And it's getting late," he said, "and your Highness will be hungry."

"We've only just had tea," she reminded him.

"Ah, but we've got some way to go," he told her.

"Where _are_ we going?"

"I had thought," he said, "of going to a place beyond Eastbourne; . . . my old nurse lives there. She's rather fond of me; . . . she'll have gotten supper for us. I thought you'd like it. It's a farm-house, rather a jolly one, and then I thought, if you liked, we could drive back to the Eastbourne hotel by moonlight."

"That would have been nice."

"But there won't be any moonlight. Perhaps we'd better go straight to the hotel."

"But your nurse will expect you."

"I can telegraph."

"But she'll be so disappointed."

"Why didn't I get a car that would shut up and be weather-tight? The rain will drift under that hood like the deluge."

She laughed. "A little rain won't hurt us."

"Your beautiful hat!"

"I'll tie my ugly scarf around my head and put my beautiful hat under the rug. Come, don't let us disappoint your old nurse. No! It's not going to leave off; it's only taking breath to go on harder than ever."

It was said afterward that never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, had there been such a storm of rain in those parts--rain without thunder, rain in full summer, rain without reason and without restraint. The rain drifted in, as he had said it would, and abruptly a wild wind arose and tore at the hood of the car, flapped her scarf in her eyes, and whipped their faces with sharp, stinging rain. He stopped at the village inn and brought her out ginger-brandy in a little glass shaped like a thistle-flower, "to keep the cold out." Also he went into the post-office and bought peppermint bull's-eyes, "to keep us warm," he said. "How admirably fortunate that we both like peppermint!" And the journey began in earnest, up hills that were torrents, through hollows that were ponds, where the water splashed like a yellow frill from their wheels as they rushed through it. One village street was like a river, and the men were busy with spades, digging through the hedge-banks channels by which the water might escape into the flooded fields.

And so, along through Pevensey, where the great Norman castle still stands gray and threatening, through Eastbourne, like an ant-heap where the ants all use umbrellas, and, at long last, out on to the downs. Her hands were ice-cold with the rain and the effort of holding mackintosh rugs about herself and him. Her hair was blown across her eyes, the lash of rain was on her lips. Breathless, laughing for the joy of the wild rush through wind and water, they gained the top of Friston Hill, where the tall windmill is, and the pond and the sign-post and the small, gray, quiet church. And here, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain ceased; the clouds drifted away.

"As though some great tidy angel had swept them up with his wings," said she.

The sea showed again, gray with chalk stolen from the cliffs, and white with the crests of waves left angry by the wind. Under the frowning purple clouds in the west glowed a long line of sullen crimson, and they went on along the down road in the peace of a clear, translucent twilight. Below them, in a hollow, shone lights from a little house.

"Wasn't it somewhere here," she asked him, "that you left me and I didn't stay?"

"Yes," he said, "somewhere here."

And then they had reached the house--not so little, either, when you came close to it--and there were steady lights shining through the lower windows, and, in the upper rooms, the fitful, soft glimmer of firelight. The car stopped at the wooden gate from which a brick path led to the front door, hospitably open, showing gleams of brass and old mahogany in a wide hall paved with black-and-white checkered marble.

He peeled the streaming waterproof from her shoulders and gave her his hand for the descent. Side by side they passed down the wet path between dripping flower-beds, but at the threshold he stepped before her, entered the house, and turned to receive her.

"Welcome!" he said, caught her by the elbows, and lifted her lightly over the threshold.

"Why did you do that?" she asked, breathless and smiling through the drift of wet, disordered tresses.

"It's an old custom for welcoming a princess," he said.

The old nurse came from the kitchen, rustling in stiff print and white apron.

"Oh, Master Edward, sir," she said, beaming, "I never thought you'd come in all this rain, not even when I got the telegraph. Nicely, ma'am, thanking you kindly and hoping you're the same," she said, in answer to the greeting and the hand that the girl offered. "And your good lady, Master Edward, she must be wet through, but I've got a lovely fire in her room, if you'll come along with me, ma'am, and I'll bring up some hot water in two ticks."