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 bra.s.s pots and pewter plates. She strayed away from him at the last shop, while he was treating for a Welsh dresser with bra.s.s handles, and when he had made his bargain he followed her, to find her lovingly fingering chairs of _papier-mache_ 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 Suss.e.x 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 gla.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s could cover the ugliness, but I should like them to be flowers planted by us living people--not just wild flowers and the gra.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sion 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 ma.s.s 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 gra.s.sy square of the castle at fine racing speed.
"It _is_ Charles," she a.s.sured 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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.sy court which Edward"s flying feet had but just now pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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, pa.s.sing 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.
The thought did not make for calmness. She said afterward that the tower must have been haunted by the very spirit of fear, for a panic terror came over her, something deeper and fiercer than anything Schultz could inspire--at any rate, in this century--and a caution and care that such as fear alone can teach. She slid from her hiding-place and down the stair, and as she went she heard above her those other steps, now returning. Nothing in the world seemed so good as the thought of the sunshine and free air into which in another moment she would come out.
Round and round the spirals of the stone staircase went her noiseless, flying feet; the sound of the feet that followed came louder and quicker; a light showed at the bottom of the stairs; she rounded the last curve with a catch of the breath that was almost a cry, and in her eyes the vision of the fair, free outside world. She sprang toward green gra.s.s and freedom and sunlight, and four dark walls received her. For half-way down that tower the steps divide and she had pa.s.sed the division and taken the stairs that led down past the level of the earth.
And the light that had seemed to come through the doorway of the tower came through the high-set window of a dungeon, and there was no way out save by the stairs on which already she could hear feet descending. The man who followed her had not missed the way.
To turn back and meet that man on the stairs was impossible. She stood at bay. And she knew what the captive in old days must have felt--what the rabbit feels when it is caught in the trap. She stood rigid, with such an access of blind terror that the sight of the man, when he came down the last three steps, was almost--no, quite--relief. She had not fled from him, but from something more vague and more terrible. And when he spoke fear left her altogether, and she asked herself, "How could I have been so silly?"
"Miss Basingstoke?" He spoke on what he meant for a note of astonishment and pleasure, but his acting was not so good as hers, and he had to supplement it by adding, "This is, indeed, a delightful surprise."
"Oh, Mr. Schultz," she said, and quite gaily and lightly, too--"how small the world is! Of all unlikely places to meet any one one knows!"
and she made to pa.s.s him and go up the stairs. But he stood square and firm at the stair-foot.
"No hurry," he said, "no hurry--since we _have_ met. It is a wonderful pleasure to me, Miss Basingstoke. Don"t cut it short. And what have you been doing all this long time?"
"Oh, traveling about," she answered, watching the stair-foot as the rabbit from beside its burrow might watch the exit at which a terrier is posted. "Just seeing England, you know. We neglect England too much, don"t you think, rushing off to the Riviera and Egypt and India and places like that when all the while there are the most beautiful things at home."
"I agree," he said, "the most beautiful things are in England," and lest his meaning should escape her, added, with a jerk of a bow, "and the most beautiful people." And still he stood there, smiling and not moving.
"Have you your car with you?" she asked, for something to say.
"No, but I"ll send for it if you like. We could have some pleasant drives--Stratford, Shakespeare"s birthplace--"
"We"ve been to Stratford," she put in, and went a step nearer to the stair-foot.
"Then anywhere you like. Shall I send for the car?"
"Mr. Basingstoke," she said, quite untruly, "doesn"t care much about motoring."
"Mr.--? Oh, your brother! Well, we did very well without him before, didn"t we? Do you remember what a jolly drive we had, and a jolly lunch; in point of fact, practically everything was jolly until _he_ turned up. I wished him far enough, I can tell you, and I hope you did.
Say you did."
"Of course I didn"t," she had to say.
"Well, he"d no right to be stuffy if another fellow took care of you when he couldn"t be bothered to."
"You know it wasn"t that. You know it was a mistake."
"I know a good deal," he said, "more than you think for." And he smiled, trying to meet her eyes.