Part 13

"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 her wanderings 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 because one'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 make _him_ happy; 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.

"My _wife_?" he said; "it's my _aunt_."

"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, it _was_ my hand against--I mean your arm was a great help--"

"It _was_ your 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.

UNDER THE NEW MOON

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 niece Was 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 your _credo_."

"Don't be flippant. I don't suppose I believe more 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 that _might_ be 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 the imperfect 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 crosses the 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 reach out 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, it _is_ so unlucky!"

THE LOVE OF ROMANCE

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 wrists were 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 down the 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's _not_ Harry," 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.

"_He_ told 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 did _not_ think 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 they won'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, how _dare_ you!" 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's all 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'm _not_ crying," 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 from _him_ as 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, _I_ don'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 you knew 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, I _will_ tell 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!"