Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 442
“What makes you think so?” she asked.
“Evidence, madam, evidence. The evidence of facts as well as of ciphers.”
“Oh,” she said, and smiled brilliantly, “you must be a Baconian. How very interesting!”
Now she had received all Edward’s criticisms of Shakespearian legend with a growing and visible impatience. Yet for this stranger she had nothing but sympathy and interest.
“It is interesting,” said the stranger. “There’s nothing like it. I’ve spent eighteen years on it, and I know now how little I know. It isn’t only Bacon and Shakespeare; it’s a great system — a great cipher system extending through all the great works of the period.”
“But what is it that you hope to find out in the end?” she asked. “Secrets of state, or the secret of the philosopher’s stone, or what?”
“The truth,” he said, simply. “There’s nothing else worth looking for. The truth, whatever it is. To follow truth, no matter where it leads. I’d go on looking, even if I thought that at the end I should find that that Stratford man did write the plays.” He looked up contemptuously at the smug face of the bust.
“It’s a life’s work,” said Mr. Basingstoke, “and I should think more than one life’s work. Do you find that you can bring your mind to any other kind of work?”
“I gave up everything else,” said the stranger. “I was an accountant, and I had some money and I’m living on it. But now . . . now I shall have to do something else. I’ve got a situation in London. I’m going there next week. It’s the end of everything for me.”
“There ought to be some endowment for your sort of research,” said Edward.
“Of course there ought,” said the man, eagerly, “but people don’t care. The few who do care don’t want the truth to come out. They want to keep that thing” — he pointed to the bust—”to keep that thing enthroned on its pedestal forever. It pays, you see. Great is Diana of the Ephesians.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t need to be a very handsome endowment. I mean that sort of research work can be done at museums. You don’t have to buy the books,” Edward said.
“A lot can be done with libraries, of course. But I have a few books — a good few. I should like to show them to you some day — if you’re interested in the subject.”
“I am,” said Edward, with a glance at the girl, “or I used to be. Anyhow, I should like very much to see your books. You have a Du Bartas, of course?”
“Three,” said the stranger, “and six of the Sylva Sylvarum, and Argalus and Perthenia — do you know that — Quarles — and—”
Next moment the two men were up to the eyes in a flood of names, none of which conveyed anything to her. But she saw that Edward was happy. At the same time, the hour was latish. She waited for the first pause — a very little one — but she drove the point of her wedge into it sharply.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if you were to come back to dinner with us, at Warwick, then we should have lots of time to talk.”
“I was going to London to-night,” said the stranger, “but if Warwick can find me a night’s lodging I shall only too gladly avail myself of your gracious invitation, Mrs.—”
“Basingstoke,” said Edward.
The stranger had produced a card and she read on it:
Dr. C. P. Vandervelde,
Ohio College, U. S. A.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m an American. I think almost all serious Baconians are. I hope you haven’t a prejudice against my country, Mrs. Basingstoke—”
“It’s Miss Basingstoke,” she said, thinking of the hotel, “and I’ve never met an American that I didn’t like.”
He made her a ceremonious and old-fashioned bow. “Inscrutable are the ways of fate,” he said. “Only this morning I was angry because the chambermaid at my inn in Birmingham destroyed my rubbing of the grave inscription, and I had to come to Stratford to get another. Yes, I could have written, but it was so near, and I shall soon be chained to an office desk — and now, in this of all spots, I meet youth and beauty and sympathy and hospitality. It is an omen.”
“And what,” she asked, as they paced down the church, “was the cipher that said there was nothing in the tomb? Or would you rather not talk about your ciphers?”
“I desire nothing better than to talk of them,” he answered. “It’s the greatest mistake to keep these things secret. We ought all to tell all we know — and if we all did that and put together the little fragment of knowledge we have gathered, we should soon piece together the whole puzzle. The first words I found on the subject are, ‘Reader, read all, no corpse lies in this tomb,’ and so on, and with the same letters another anagram in Latin, beginning ‘Lector intra sepulcho jacet nullum cadaver.’ I’ll show you how I got it when we’re within reach of a table and light.”
They lingered a moment on the churchyard terrace where the willows overhang the Avon and the swans move up and down like white-sailed ships.
“How hospitable we’re getting,” she said to Edward that night when their guest had gone to his humbler inn—”two visitors in one day!”
“Katherine,” he said, just for the pleasure of saying it, for they two were alone, so he could not have been speaking to any one else—”Katherine, that man’s ciphers are wonderful. And what a gift of the gods — to possess an interest that can never fail and that costs nothing for its indulgence, not like postage-stamps or orchids or politics or racing!”
“The ciphers were wonderful,” she said. “I had no idea such things were possible. I understood quite a lot,” she added, a little defiantly. “But it’s rather hateful to think of his being chained to a desk doing work that isn’t his work.”
“That, or something like it, is the lot of most people,” he said, “but it needn’t be his lot. It’s for you to say. I can very well afford a small endowment for research, if you say so.”
“But why must I decide?”
“Because,” he said, slowly, “I felt when I was talking to you to-day that you hated everything I said; you wanted to go on believing in all the Shakespeare legends.”
“I think I said so. I’m not sure that I meant it. Anyhow, if it rests with me I say give him his research endowment, if he’ll take it.”
“He’ll take it. I’ll get a man I know at Balliol to write, offering it. In his beautiful transatlantic simplicity the dear chap will think the college is offering the money. He’ll take it like a lamb. But won’t you tell me — why was it that you hated me to be interested in this business and you are glad that this Vandervelde should be helped to go on with it?”
“I should like him to be happy,” she said, “and there’s nothing else in life for him — he has given up everything else for it. I want him, at least, to have the treasure he’s paid everything for — the joy of his work. But that sort of joy should be reserved for the people who can have nothing else. But for you — well, somehow, I feel that people who take up a thing like this ought to be prepared to sacrifice everything else in life to it, as he has done. And I could not bear that you should do it. Life has so much besides for you.”
“Yes,” he said, “life holds very much for me.”
“And for me, too,” she said, and with that gave him her hand for good night.
He was certain afterward that it had not been his doing, and yet it must have been, for her hand had not moved in his. And yet he had found it laid not against his lips, but against his cheek, and he had held it there in silence for more than a moment before she drew it away and said good night.
At the door she turned and looked back over her shoulder. “Good night,” she said again. “Good night, Edward.”
And that was the first time she called him by his name.
XV. KENILWORTH
THERE are some very pleasant shops in Warwick, and if you have time and no money you can spend some very agreeable mornings wandering from one shop to another, asking the prices of things you have all the will but none of the means to buy. If you have money and time you will buy a few of the things whose prices you have asked. Edward bought a ring, crystal with brilliants around it, very lovely and very expensive, and some topazes set in old silver, quite as beautiful but not so dear.
Then they went to the old-furniture shops, where he excited the vexed admiration of the dealers by his unerring eye for fakes. He bought an oak chest, carved with a shield of arms, the date 1612, and the initials “I. B.”
“If we were really married,” he told her, “I should be vandal enough to alter that ‘I’ to make it stand for your name.”
“I should not think it a vandal’s act — if we were married,” she answered, and their eyes met. He bought tables and chairs of oak and beech; a large French cupboard whose age, he said, made it a fit mate for the chest; he bought a tall clock with three tarnished gold pines atop, and some brass pots and pewter plates. She strayed away from him at the last shop, while he was treating for a Welsh dresser with brass handles, and when he had made his bargain he followed her, to find her lovingly fingering chairs of papier-mâché painted with birds and flowers and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There was a table, too, graceful and gay as the chairs, and a fire-screen of fine needlework.
“You hate anything that isn’t three or four hundred years old,” she said. “It’s dreadful that our tastes don’t agree, isn’t it? Don’t you think we ought to part at once? ‘They separated on account of incompatibility of furniture.’”
“But don’t you like the things we have been getting?”
“Of course I do, but I like these, too. They’re like lavender and pot-pourri, and ladies who had still-rooms and made scents and liqueurs and confections in them, and walked in their gardens in high-heeled shoes and peach-blossom petticoats.”
“Why not buy them, then?”
“I would if I had a house. If I were buying things I should first buy everything I liked, and not try to keep to any particular period. I believe the things would all settle down and be happy together if you loved them all. Did you get your precious dresser? And are you going to buy that Lowestoft dessert-service to go on it?”
He bought the Lowestoft dessert-service, beautiful with red, red roses and golden tracery; and next day he got up early and went around and bought all the painted mother-of-pearly things that she had touched. He gave the man an address in Sussex to which to send everything, and he wrote a long letter to his old nurse, whose address it was that he had given.
They had had dinner in the little private sitting-room over the front door, the smallest private room, I believe, that ever took an even semi-public part in the life of a hotel. It was quite full of curly glass vases and photographs in frames of silver and of plush, till Edward persuaded the landlady to remove them, “for fear,” as he said, “we should have an accident and break any of them.”
They breakfasted here, and here, too, luncheon was served, so that they met none of the other guests at meals, and in their in-goings and out-comings they only met strangers. Mr. Schultz might still have been at Tunbridge Wells, for any sense they had of him.
Presently and inevitably came the afternoon when they motored to Kenilworth.
“I’ve always wanted to see Kenilworth,” she told him, “almost more than any place. Kenilworth and the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Lost City in India — you know the one that the very name of it is forgotten, and they just found it by accident, all alone and beautiful, with panthers in it instead of people, and trees growing out of the roofs of the palaces, like Kipling’s Cold Lairs.”
“I get a sort of cold comfort from the thought of that city,” he said. “That and Babylon and Nineveh and the great cities in Egypt. When I go through Manchester or New Cross or Sheffield I think, ‘Some day grass and trees will cover up all this ugliness and flowers will grow again in the Old Kent Road.’”
“It is cold comfort,” she said. “I wish flowers and grass could cover the ugliness, but I should like them to be flowers planted by us living people — not just wild flowers and the grass on graves.”
The first sight of Kenilworth was naturally a great shock to her, as it always is to those who know of it only from books and photographs and engravings.
“Oh dear,” she said, “how horrible! Why, it’s pink!”
It is, bright pink, and to eyes accustomed to the dignified gray monochrome of our South Country castles, Bodiam and Hever, Pevensey and Arundel, Kenilworth at first seems like a bad joke, or an engraving colored by a child who has used up most of the paints in its paint-box and has had to make shift with Indian red and vermilion, the only two tints surviving. But when you get nearer, when you get quite near, when you look up at the great towers, when you walk between the great masses of it, and see the tower that Elizabeth’s Leicester built, and the walls that Cromwell’s soldiers battered down, you forgive Kenilworth for being pink, and even begin to admit that pink is not such a bad color for castles.
At Kenilworth you talk, of course, about Queen Elizabeth, and the one who has read the guide-books tells the one who hasn’t that when the Queen visited Leicester he had a new bridge built over his lake so that she might enter the castle by a way untrodden by any previous guest. Also that during her visit the clock bell rang not a note and that the clock stood still withal, the hands of it pointing ever to two o’clock, the hour of banquet. Further, that during her visit of seventeen days Kenilworth Castle managed to put away three hundred and twenty hogsheads of beer.
“Those were great days,” said Edward.
There are towers to climb at Kenilworth, as well as towers to gaze at, and with that passion for ascending steps which marks the young the two made their way to the top of one tower after another. It was as they leaned on the parapet of the third and looked out over the green country that Edward broke off in an unflattering anecdote of my Lord of Leicester. He stiffened as a pointer stiffens when it sees a partridge.
“Look!” he said, “look!”
Two fields away sheep were feeding — a moment ago calm, white shapes dotting a pastoral landscape, now roused to violent and unsuitable activities by the presence among them of some strange foe, some inspirer of the ungovernable fear that can find relief only in flight. The scurrying mass of them broke a little, and the two on the tower saw the shape of terror. They heard it, also. It was white and active. It barked.
“Oh, run,” said she; “it is Charles. I’m almost certain it is. Oh, run!” And he turned and ran down the tower steps. She saw him come out and cross the grassy square of the castle at fine racing speed.
“It is Charles,” she assured herself. “It must be.” Yet how could even that inspired dog have escaped from the stable at Warwick where they had left him, have followed their motor, and got here so soon. She could not know that another motor from the hotel, coming out to pick up a client, had overtaken Charles laboring up the hill from the top of which you get your first view of the castle towers, and, recognizing the dog — as who that had ever seen him could fail to do — had, so to speak, offered him a lift. Charles had accepted, and would have been handed over to his master’s chauffeur at the Castle Gate House but that, a little short of that goal, as the car waited for a traction engine to pass it in the narrow way, Charles had seen the sheep, and with one bound of desperate gallantry was out and after them before his charioteer could even attempt restraint. And now Charles was in full pursuit of the sheep, barking happily in complete enjoyment of this thrilling game, and Edward was in pursuit of Charles, shouting as he ran. But Charles had no mind to listen — one could always pretend afterward that one had not heard, and no dog was more skilful than Charles in counterfeiting unconsciousness, nor in those acts of cajolery which soften the hearts of masters. His surprised delight when he should at last discover that his master was there and desired his company would be acted to the life and would be enough to soften any heart. If either had looked up and back he could have seen a white speck on a red tower, which was Herself, watching the chase. But neither of them did. More observant and, to his own thinking, more fortunate, was another visitor to the castle; he, to be exact, whom what we may call Charles’s motor had come to Kenilworth to pick up.
He had seen the fleecy scurrying, heard the yaps of pursuit, seen the flying form of Edward, and entered sufficiently into the feelings of Charles to be certain that the chase was not going to be a short one. He now saw from the foot of Mervyn’s tower the white speck against blue sky. He made his way straight to the tower where she stood. She saw him crossing the grassy court which Edward’s flying feet had but just now passed over. He came quickly and purposefully, and he was Mr. Schultz — none other.
Now she was not afraid of Mr. Schultz. Why should she be? He had been very kind, and of course she was not ungrateful, but it was a shock to see him there — a shock almost as great as that given by the pinkness of Kenilworth, and, anyhow, she did not want to meet him again; anyhow, not to-day; anyhow, not on the top of a tower. And it was quite plain to her that he had perceived her presence, had recognized her, and was coming up expressly because of that — that his views were not hers, that he did want to meet her again, did want to meet her to-day, did want to meet her on top of a tower — this tower.
She looked around her “like a hunted thing,” as they say, and then she remembered a very little room, hardly more than a recess, opening from the staircase. If she hurried down, hid there, and stood very close to the wall, he would pass by and not notice, and as he went up she could creep down and out, and, keeping close to the walls, get away toward Edward and Charles and the sheep and all the things that do not make for conversation with Mr. Schultz.
Lightly and swiftly as a hunted cat she fled down the stairs on whose lower marches was the sound of boots coming up toward her, echoing in the narrow tower like the tramp of an armed man. It came to her, as she reached the little room and stood there, her white gown crushed against the red stones, how a captive in just such a tower in the old days she and Edward had been talking of might have seized such a chance of escape from real and horrible danger, might have hidden as she was hiding, have held his breath as she now held hers, and how his heart would have beat, even as hers was beating, at the step of the guard coming toward the hiding-place, passing it, going on to the tower-top while he, the fugitive, crept down toward liberty and sunlight and the good green world roofed with the good free sky.
