"Not unless you forgive me. I won"t," he added, plucking up a little spirit, "be indebted for ladders to people who won"t forgive a man because he speaks the truth clumsily."
"Come," she said, looking back over her shoulder.
"No," he said, obstinately, not moving. "Not unless you forgive me."
"It can"t possibly matter to you whether I forgive you or not," she turned to say it. And as she spoke there came to Edward quite suddenly and quite unmistakably the knowledge that it did matter. Sometimes glimpses do thus suddenly and strangely come to us--and that by some magic inner light that is not reason we know things that by the light of reason we could never know.
"Look here," he said. "I"ll go after that ladder in a minute. But first I"ve got something to say to you. Don"t be angry, because I"ve got to say it. Do you know that just now--just before I said that stupid thing that offended you--you were talking to me as though you"d known me all your life?"
"You needn"t rub it in," she said.
"Do you know why that is? It"s because you _are_ going to know me all your life. I"m perfectly certain of it. Somehow or other, it"s true.
We"re going to be friends. I sha"n"t need to say again how jolly it is of you to talk to me. We shall take all that as a matter of course.
People aren"t pitchforked into meetings like this for nothing. I"m glad I said that. I"m glad you were angry with me for saying it. If you hadn"t I might just have gone away and not known till I got outside--and then it would have been a deuce and all of a business to get hold of you again. But now I know. And you know, too. When shall I see you again? Never mind about forgiving me. Just tell me when I shall see you again. And then I"ll go."
"You must be mad," was all she could find to say. She had furled her sunshade and was smoothing its bamboo ribs with pink fingers.
"You"ll be able to find out whether I"m mad, you know, when you see me again. As a matter of fact--which seems maddest, when you meet some one you want to talk to, to go away without talking or to insist on talk and more talk? And you can"t say you didn"t want to talk to me, because you know you did. Look here, meet me to-morrow morning again--will you?"
"Certainly not."
"You"ll be sorry if you don"t. We"re like two travelers who have collected all sorts of wonderful things in foreign countries. We long to show each other our collections--all the things we"ve thought and dreamed. If we"d been what you call introduced, perhaps we shouldn"t have found this out. But as it is, we know it."
"Speak for yourself," she said.
"Thank you," he said, seriously. "I will. Will you sit down for ten minutes? This tree-root was made for you to sit down on for ten minutes, and I will speak for myself."
"I can"t," she said, and her voice--there was hurry in it, and indecision, but the ice had gone. "You must come at once for that ladder. It"s getting more dangerous every moment. If any one saw you here there"d be an awful row."
"For you?"
"Yes, for me. Come on."
He followed her along the wall under the chestnuts. There was no more spoken words till they came to the ladder.
Then, "Right," he said. "Thank you. Good-by." And set the ladder against the wall.
"Good-by," said she. "I"ll hand the aeroplane up to you?"
"Stand clear," he said, half-way up the ladder. "I"ll give it a sideways tip from the top--it"ll fall into its place. It"s too heavy for you to lift. Good-by."
He had reached the top of the wall. She stood below, looking up at him.
"There won"t be any row now?"
"No. It"s quite safe."
"Then have you nothing to say?"
"Nothing. Yes, I have. I will come to-morrow. You"ll misunderstand everything if I don"t."
"Thank you," he said.
She came up the ladder, two steps, then handed him his toy. Then the ladder fell with a soft thud among the moss and earth and dead leaves; his head showed a moment above the wall, then vanished.
He went thoughtfully through the dewy gra.s.s, along the road, and back to his inn.
Tommy met him by the horse-trough. "You been flying it?" he asked, breathlessly.
"Yes. She went like a bird."
"How far did she go?" Tommy asked.
"I don"t quite know," said Edward, quite truly, "how far she went. I shall know better to-morrow."
IV
THE SOUTH DOWNS
THE day was long. Though the aeroplane flew to admiration, though Tommy adored him and all his works, though the skylarks sang, and the downs were drenched in sunshine, Edward Basingstoke admitted to himself, before half its length was known to him, that the day was long.
He climbed the cliff above Cuckmere and sat in the sunshine there, where the gulls flashed white wings and screamed like babies; he watched the tide, milk-white with the fallen chalk of England"s edge, come sousing in over the brown, seaweed-covered rocks; he felt the crisp warmth of the dry turf under his hand, and smelt the sweet smell of the thyme and the furze and the sea, and it was all good. But it was long. And, for the first time in his life, being alone was lonely.
And for the second time since the day when Charles, bounding at him from among the clean straw of an Oxford stable, had bounded into his affections, he had left that strenuous dog behind.
He got out his road map and spread it in the sun--with stones at the corners to cheat the wind that, on those Downs, never sleeps--and tried to believe that he was planning his itinerary, and even to pretend to himself that he should start to-morrow and walk to Lewes. But instead his eyes followed the map"s indication of the road to that meadow where the red wall was, and presently he found that he was no longer looking at the map, but at the book of memory, and most at the pictures painted there only that morning. Already it seemed a very long time ago.
"I am afraid," said Mr. Basingstoke, alone at the cliff"s edge, "that this time it really is _it_. It"s different from what I thought. It"s confoundedly unsettling."
Like all healthy young men, he had always desired and intended to fall in love; he had even courted the experience, and honestly tried to lose his heart, but with a singular lack of success. In the girls he had met he had found gaiety, good looks, and a certain vague and general attractiveness--the common attribute of youth and girlhood--but nothing that even began to transfigure the world as his poets taught him that love should transfigure it. The little, trivial emotions which he had found in pressing hands and gazing into eyes had never lured him further than the gaze and the hand-clasp. Yet he had thought himself to be in love more than once.
"Or perhaps this isn"t the real thing, either," he tried to rea.s.sure himself. "How could it be?"
Then he explained to himself, as he had often explained to Vernon, that love at first sight was impossible. Love, he had held and proclaimed, was not the result of the mere attraction exercised by beauty--it was the response of mind to mind, the admiration of character and qualities--the satisfaction of one"s nature by the mental and moral attributes of the beloved. That was not exactly how he had put it, but that was what he had meant. And now--he had seen a girl once, for ten minutes, and already he could think of nothing else. Even if he thought of something else he could perceive the thought of her behind those other thoughts, waiting, alluring, and sure of itself, to fill his mind the moment he let it in.
"Idiot," he said at last, got up from the turf, and pocketed the map, "to-morrow she"ll be quite ordinary and just like any other girl. You go for a long walk, young-fellow-my-lad, and think out a water-mill for Tommy."
This had, indeed, been more than half promised. Mr. Basingstoke was one of those persons whom their friends call thorough; their enemies say that they carry everything too far. If he did a thing at all, he liked to do it thoroughly. If he wrote a duty-letter to an aunt, he wrote a long one, and made it amusing. As often as not he would ill.u.s.trate it with little pictures. If he gave a shilling to a beggar he would immediately add tobacco and agreeable conversation. One of his first acts, on coming into his inheritance, had been to pension his old nurse, who was poor and a widow with far too many children--too many, because she was a widow and poor and had to go out to work instead of looking after her family, as she wanted to do. Any one else would have written and told her she was to have two pounds a week as long as she lived.
Edward sent her a large box of hot-house flowers--her birthday happening to occur at about that date--the most expensive and beautiful flowers he could find, anonymously. Then he sent her a fat hamper bursting with excellent things to eat and drink--and a box of toys and clothes for the children. The lady who "served" him with the clothes was amused at his choice--but approved it. And in the end he told his solicitors--smiling to himself at the novel possession--to write and tell the woman that an old employer had secured her an annuity. Later he went down to see her, to find her incredibly happy and prosperous, and to hear the wonderful and mysterious tale. So now, in the case of Tommy, most people would have thought an aeroplane and a motor-ride as much as any little boy could expect. But Mr. Basingstoke liked to give people much more than they could expect. It was not enough to give them enough. He liked to give a feast.
That evening after tea, Tommy breathing hard on the back of his neck, he sketched the water-wheel with the highest degree of precision and a superfluous wealth of detail. But the thought was with him through it all.
Next morning he went to the trysting-place, through the fresh, sweet morning. He climbed the wall, sat down on the log, and waited. He waited an hour, and she did not come. It says a good deal for his tenacity of purpose that when he went home he began at once on the water-wheel.
In the afternoon he took Charles out for a walk. Charles chased and killed a hen, and was b.u.t.ted by a goat, before they reached the end of the street; knocked a leg of mutton off the block at the butcher"s in the next village; bit the rural police to the very undershirt, and also to the tune of ten compensating shillings; and was run over by a bicycle, which twisted its pedal in the consequent fall, and grazed its rider"s hands and trousers knees. After each adventure Charles was firmly punished, but, though chastised, he was not chastened, and when they met a dog-cart coming slowly down a hill he was quite ready to run in front of it, barking and leaping at the horse"s nose. The horse, which appeared to Charles"s master to be a thoroughbred, shied. There was a whirl of dust and hoofs and brown flank, a cry from the driver--another cry, a fierce bark from Charles, ending in a howl of agony--the next instant the horse had bolted and Edward was left in the dusty road, Charles writhing in the dust, and the dog-cart almost out of sight.