Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 433
And as he went he told himself that she was right. She had been mad to come, and he had been mad to let her come. But there was no going back now.
There was no looking back, even. From the brow of the hill the road was down-hill all the way, and he ran, his rubber shoes patting almost noiselessly in the dust. At his inn the bolt yielded to his knife-point’s pressure, the well-oiled lock let him in without a murmur, the stairs hardly creaked more than stairs can creak in their dark solitudes when we lie awake and listen to them and wonder. . . . The night was as silent as a thought, and when at last the silence was shattered by the clatter of hoofs and the jangle of harness, Mr. Basingstoke’s head turned a little on his pillow, not restlessly.
He heard the clanging bell echo in the flagged passage; heard through the plaster walls the heavy awakening of his host, the scrape of a match, the hasty, blundering toilet; heard the big bar dropped from the front door; voices — the groom’s voice, the host’s voice, the aunt’s voice.
Then heavy steps on the stairs and a knock at his door.
“Very sorry to disturb you, sir,” came the muffled tones through the door, almost cringingly apologetic, “but could you get up, sir, just for a minute? Miss Davenant from the Hall wants a word with you — about your dawg, sir, as I understand. If you could oblige, sir — very inconvenient, I know, sir, but the Hall is very highly thought of in the village, sir.”
“What on earth — ?” said Mr. Basingstoke, very loudly, and got out of bed. “I’ll dress and come down,” he said.
He did dress, to the accompaniment of voices below — replaced, that is, the collar, tie, and boots he had taken off — and then he began to pack, his mind busy with the phrases in which he would explain that a house in which these nocturnal disturbances occurred was not fit for the sojourning of. . . . No, hang it all, that would not be fair to the landlord — he must find some other tale.
When he had kept the lady waiting as long as he thought a man might have kept her who had really a toilet to make, he went slowly down. Voices sounded in the parlor, and a slab of light from its door lay across the sanded passage.
He went in; the landlord went out, closing the door almost too discreetly.
Mr. Basingstoke and the aunt looked at each other. She was very upright and wore brown gloves and a brown, boat-shaped hat with an aggressive quill.
“You are here, then?” she said.
“Where else, madam?” said Mr. Basingstoke.
“I should like you,” said the aunt, deliberately, “to be somewhere else within the next hour. I will make it worth your while.”
“Thank you,” Edward murmured.
“I think I ought to tell you,” said she, “that I saw through that business of the dog. He was well trained, I admit. But I can’t have my niece annoyed in this way.”
“The lady must certainly not be annoyed,” said Edward, with feeling.
“I came to-night to see if you were here. . . .”
“It is an unusual hour for a call,” said Edward, “but I am proportionally honored.”
“ — to see if you were here, and, if you were, to tell you that my niece is not.”
Edward cast a puzzled eye around the crowded parlor. “No,” he said. “No.”
“I mean,” Miss Davenant went on, “that my niece has left this neighborhood and will not return while you are here; so you are wasting your time and trouble.”
“I see,” said Edward, helpfully.
“You will gain nothing by this attitude,” said Miss Davenant. “If you will consent to leave Jevington to-night I will give you twenty pounds.”
“Twenty pounds!” he repeated, softly.
“Yes, twenty pounds, on condition that you promise not to molest this defenseless girl.”
“Put up your money, madam,” said Edward Basingstoke, with a noble gesture copied from the best theatrical models, “and dry your eyes. Never shall it be said that Edward Basingstoke was deaf to the voice of a lady in distress. Lay your commands on me, and be assured that, for me, to hear is to obey.”
“You are very impertinent, young man,” Miss Davenant told him, “and you won’t do yourself any good by talking like a book. Clear out of this to-night, and I’ll give you twenty pounds. Stay, and take the consequences.”
“Meaning — ?”
“Well, stay if you like. You won’t see her. She won’t return to Jevington till you’re gone. So I tell you you’d better accept my offer and go.”
“Accept your offer and go,” repeated Edward.
“Twenty pounds,” said the lady, persuasively.
“Tempt me not!” said Edward. “To a man in my position. . . .”
“Exactly.”
“Nay,” said Edward, “there are chords even in a piano-tuner’s breast — chords which, too roughly touched, will turn and rend the smiter.”
“Good gracious!” said Miss Davenant, “I believe the man’s insane.”
“Withdraw that harsh expression,” he pleaded. And then, without warning, the situation ceased to amuse him. Here he was, swimming in the deep, smooth waters of diplomacy, and suddenly diplomacy seemed a sticky medium. He would have liked Miss Davenant to be a man — a man in green-silk Georgian coat and buckled shoes; himself also gloriously Georgian, in murray-colored cut velvet, with Mechlin at wrists and throat. Then they could have betaken themselves to the bowling-green and fought it out with ringing rapiers, by the light of the lantern held in the landlord’s trembling fingers. Or at dawn, in the meadow the red wall bounded, there could have been measured pacings — a dropped handkerchief, two white puffs drifting away on the chill, sweet air, and Edward Basingstoke could have handed his smoking pistol to his second and mounted his horse — Black Belial — and so away to his lady, leaving his adversary wounded slightly (“winged,” of course, was the word). Thus honor would have been satisfied, and Edward well in the lime-light. But in this little box of an overfurnished room, by the light of an ill-trimmed paraffin-lamp, to rag an anxious aunt. . . . He withdrew himself slowly from diplomacy — tried to find an inch or two of dry truth to stand on.
“Well, why don’t you say something?” asked the anxious aunt.
“I will,” said Mr. Basingstoke. “Madam, I have to ask your pardon for an unpardonable liberty. I have deceived you. I am not what you think. I am not a piano-tuner, but an engineer.”
“But you said you were. . . .”
“Pardon me. I said there were chords in the breasts of piano-tuners.”
“But if you aren’t, how did you know there was one?”
This riposte he had not anticipated. Frankness had its drawbacks — so small a measure of it as he had allowed himself. He leaped headlong into diplomacy again.
“Look back on what you have said, not only to me, but to others,” he said, solemnly, and saw that the chance shot had gone home. “Now,” he said, “don’t let us prolong an interview which cannot but be painful to us both. I am not the piano-tuner for whom you take me. You are a complete stranger to me. The only link that binds us is the fact that your horse ran over my dog and that you bore the apparently lifeless body home for me. Yet if you wish me to leave the neighborhood, I will leave it. In fact, I was going in any case,” he added, struggling against diplomacy.
Miss Davenant looked at him. “You’re speaking the truth,” she said; “you’re not the piano-tuner. But you got as red as fire yesterday. So did my niece. What was that for?”
“I cannot explain my complicated color-scheme,” said Edward, “without diagrams and a magic-lantern. And as for your niece, I can lay my hand on my heart and say that the light of declining day never illumined that face for me till the moment when it also illumined yours.”
“Are you deceiving me?” Miss Davenant asked, weakly, and Edward answered:
“Yes, I am; but not in the way you think. We all have our secrets, but mine are not the secrets of the piano-tuner.”
Some one sneezed in the passage outside.
“Our host has been eavesdropping,” said Edward, softly.
“Well, if he doesn’t make more of this conversation than I do, he won’t make much,” said Miss Davenant. “I don’t trust you.”
“That would make it all the easier for me to deceive you,” said Edward, “if I sought to deceive.”
“You’ve got too much language for me,” said Miss Davenant. “If you’re not the man, I apologize.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Edward.
“If you are, I don’t wonder so much at what happened in London. Good night. Sorry to have disturbed you.”
“Don’t you think,” said Edward, “that you might as well tell me why you did disturb me?”
“I thought you were the piano-tuner,” she said; “you knew that perfectly well. And I don’t want piano-tuners hanging round Jevington. I’m sorry I offered the money. I ought to have seen.”
“Not at all,” said Mr. Basingstoke, “and, since my presence here annoys you, know that by this time to-morrow I shall be far away.”
“There’s one thing more,” said Miss Davenant. But Mr. Basingstoke was never to know what that one thing was, for at the instant a wild shriek rang through the quiet night, there was a scuffle outside, hoarse voices in anger and pain, the door burst open, and Miss Davenant’s groom staggered in.
“Beg pardon, ma’am” — he still remembered his station, and it was thus he affirmed it—”beg pardon, ma’am, but this ‘ere dawg—”
It was too true. Charles, perhaps conscious of his master’s presence in the parlor, had slipped his collar, scratched a hole under the stable door, and, finding the groom and the landlord in the passage, barring his entrance, had bitten the groom’s trousers leg. It hung, gaping, from knee to ankle — with Charles still attached. Charles’s master choked the dog off, but confidential conversation was at an end, even when a sovereign had slipped from his hand to the groom’s.
“Seems the young lady’s missing,” said the host, when the dog-cart had rattled up the street.
“Indeed!” said Edward. “Well, I think I also shall retreat. Will it inconvenience you if I leave my traps to be sent on? I shall walk into Seaford and catch the early train.”
“It wasn’t my fault the lady come, sir,” said the landlord, sulky but deferential.
“I know it,” said the guest, “and I am not leaving because of her coming. I should have left in any case. But it is a fine night, I have a fancy for a walk, and it does not seem worth while to go to bed again. If you will kindly take this, pay your bill out of it, and divide the remainder between Robert and Gladys, I shall be very much obliged. I’ve been very comfortable here and I shall certainly come again.”
He pressed a five-pound note into the landlord’s hand, and before that bewildered one could think of anything more urgent than the commonplaces which begin, “I’m sure, sir,” or, “I shouldn’t like to think,” he and Charles had turned their backs on the Five Bells, and the landlord was staring after them. The round, white back of Charles showed for quite a long time through the darkness. Slowly he drew the bolts, put out the lights, and went back to bed.
“It’s a rum go,” he told his wife, after he had told her all he had heard and overheard, “a most peculiar rum go. But he’s a gentleman, he is, whichever way you look at it. Miss up at the Hall might do a jolly sight worse, if you ask me. Shouldn’t wonder, come to think of it, if she ain’t waiting for him around the corner, as it is.”
“He’s the kind of gentleman a girl would wait around the corner for,” said the landlady. “It’s his eyes, partly, I think. And he’s got such a kind look. But if she is — waiting round the corner, I mean, like what you said — he have got a face to go on like what he did to Miss Davenant.”
“Yes,” said the landlord, blowing out the candle, “he have got a face, whichever way you look at it.”
It was bright daylight when a motor — one of the strong, fierce kind, no wretched taxicab, but a private motor of obvious speed and spirit — blundered over the shoulder of the downs down the rutty road to Crow’s Nest Farm.
Mr. Basingstoke, happy to his finger-tips as well as to the inmost recesses of the mind in his consciousness of results achieved and difficulties overcome, slipped from the throbbing motor and went quickly around to the back door, Charles with him, straining at the lead. The path that led to the door had its bricks outlined with green grass, a house-leek spread its rosettes on the sloping lichened tiles of the roof, and in the corner of the window the toad-flax flaunted its little helmets of orange and sulphur-color. He tapped gently on the door. Nothing from within answered him — no voice, no movement, no creak of board, no rustle of straw, no click of little heels on the floor of stone. She might be asleep — must be. He knocked again, and still silence answered him. Then a wave of possibilities and impossibilities rose suddenly and swept against Mr. Basingstoke’s heart. So sudden was it, and so strong was it, that for a moment he felt the tremor of a physical nausea. He put his hand to the latch, meaning to try with his shoulder the forcing of the lock. But the door was not locked. The latch clicked, yielding to his hand, and the door opened into the kitchen, with its wide old chimneyplace, big mantel-shelf, its oven and pump, its brewing-copper and its washing-copper, its litter of packing-cases and straw, and the little nest he had made for her between the copper and the big barrel. The soft, diffused daylight showed him every corner, and Charles sniffing, as it seemed, every corner at once. He crossed over and tried the door that led to the house. But he knew, before his hand found it unyielding, that it had not been unlocked since last he saw it. He knew, quite surely, that the lady was not there. There was no sign or trace of her, save the rounded nest where she must have snuggled for at least a part of the night that he had spent in such strenuous diplomacy, such ardent organization, for her sake. No other trace of her . . . yes, on the flap-table by the window his match-box, set as weight to keep in its place a handkerchief. It was own sister to the little one his pocket still held — and, as he took it up, exhaled the same faint, delicate fragrance. He read it, Charles snuffling and burrowing in the straw at his feet. On it a few words were written, some illegible, but these few plain:
I will write to General Post-Office, London.
There are no words for the thoughts of the baffled adventurer as he locked the door and walked around the farm to the waiting motor. His only word on the way was to Charles, and it calmed, for an instant, even that restless spirit.
“London,” he said to his chauffeur. “My friend isn’t coming,” and he and Charles tumbled into the car together.
A line of faces drawn up against a long fence watched his departure with mild curiosity. Twenty or thirty calves and their rustic attendant saw him go. The chauffeur looked again at the house’s blank windows and echoed the landlord’s words.
“Rum go!” he said to himself. “Most extraordinary rum go.”
VII. TUNBRIDGE WELLS
AN earnest and prolonged struggle with Charles now occupied Mr. Basingstoke. Charles was determined to stand on the seat with his paws on the side of the car, to look out and to be in readiness to leap out should any passing object offer a more than trivial appeal. His master was determined that Charles should lie on the mat in the bottom of the car, and, what is more, that he should lie there quietly. The discussion became animated and ended in blows. It was just at the crisis of the affair, when Edward had lightly smitten the hard, bullet head and Charles was protesting with screams as piercing as those of a locomotive in distress, that the car wheeled into the highroad and narrowly missed a dog-cart coming up from Seaford. As they passed, Edward’s hand went to his hat, for the driver of the dog-cart was Miss Davenant.
Charles, partially released, leaped toward the lady, only to hang by his chain over the edge of the car. By the time he had been hauled in again and cuffed into comparative quiescence Miss Davenant was left far behind, a little, gesticulating figure against the horizon. Her gestures seemed to Edward to be gestures of recall. But he disregarded them. It was not till later that he regretted this.
A final struggle with Charles ended in victory, not because Edward had enforced his will on that strong and strenuous nature, but because Charles was now exhausted and personally inclined to surrender. He lay at last on the floor of the car, his jaws open in a wide, white-toothed smile, and his pink tongue palpitating to his panting breaths. Edward sat very upright, his hands between his knees, holding the shortened chain of Charles. Mile after mile of the smooth down country slipped past, the car had whirled down the narrow, tree-bordered road into Alfreston, past the old church and the thirteenth-century, half-timbered Clergy House, where three little girls in green pinafores were seeking to coerce a reluctant goat along to Polegate and across the railway lines, and still Mr. Basingstoke never moved. His mind alone was alive, and of his body he was no longer conscious. He thought and thought and thought. Why had she left the farm? Had she been frightened? Had she been captured? Where had she gone? And why? And behind all these questions was a background of something too vague and yet too complicated to be called regret — or something which, translated into words, might have gone something like this:
“Adventures to the adventurous. And three days ago the world was before me. I had set out for adventures and I found nothing more agitating than the pleasant pleasing of one little child. Then suddenly the adventure happened. And now no more charming wanderings, no more aimless saunterings in this pleasant, green world, but rush and worry and hurry and dust, uncertainty, anxiety, . . . the whole pretty dream of the adventurer shattered by the reality of the adventure.”
Suddenly, and without meaning to do it, he had mortgaged his future to a stranger. The stranger had fled and he was — well, not pursuing, but going to the place she had named as that from which he might gain a clue and take up the pursuit. It was not exactly regret, but Mr. Basingstoke found himself almost wishing that time could move backward and set him in the meadow where the red wall was, and give him once more the chance to fly or not to fly his aeroplane. Perhaps if he had the choice he would not fly it. But all this was among the shadows at the back of his mind. In the foreground was the small, insistent cycle of questions: Why had she left the farm? Had she been frightened? Had she been captured? Where had she gone? When? How? Why?
