by Edith Nesbit
At Winchelsea she suddenly asked, “Where’s Charles?”
“Charles,” he said, gravely, “is visiting my old nurse. He is well and happy — a loved and honored guest.”
“The dear!” she said, absently. They were nearing Hastings before he spoke again, almost in a whisper, and this time what he said was what he meant to say.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
And she said, “Yes!”
It was at Hurstmonceaux that they opened the picnic basket — Hurstmonceaux, the great ruined Tudor castle, all beautiful in red brick and white stone. Less than a hundred years ago it was perfect to the last brick of it. But its tall old twisted red chimneys smoked. So a Hastings architect was called in. “I cannot cure your smoky chimneys, sir,” said he, “but with the lead and some of the bricks of your castle I can build you a really comfortable and convenient modern house in the corner of your park, and I pledge you my word as an architect that the chimneys of the new house sha’n’t smoke.” So he did, and they didn’t. And Hurstmonceaux was turned from a beautiful house to a beautiful ruin, and no one can live there; but parties of sightseers and tourists can be admitted on Mondays and Thursdays for a fee of sixpence a head, children half-price. All of which she read to him from the Guide to Sussex, as they sat in the grass-grown courtyard, where moss and wild flowers have covered the mounds of fallen brick.
“But this isn’t Monday or Thursday,” she said. “How did you get in?”
“You saw — with the big key, the yard of cold iron. I got special leave from the owner — for this.”
“How very clever of you! How much better than anything I could have arranged.”
“Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley,” he said, drawing the cork of the Rüdesheimer. “I do hope you really like lobster salad.”
“And chicken and raspberries and cream, and everything. I like it all — and our dining-room — it’s the most beautiful dining-room I ever had. I only thought of a wood, or a field, or perhaps a river, for Thursday.”
“You did mean to have a picnic for Thursday?”
“Yes, but this is much better. It’s a better place than I could have found, and besides—”
“Besides — ?”
“It isn’t Thursday.”
When luncheon, a merry meal and a leisurely, was over, they leaned against a fallen pillar and rested their eyes on the beauty of green floor, red walls, and the blue sky roofing all. And above the skylarks sang.
“There’s nothing between us now,” he said, contentedly—”no cloud, no misunderstanding.”
“No,” she answered, “and I don’t want there ever to be anything between us. So I’m going to tell you about Chester — the thing that worried me and I couldn’t tell. Do you remember?”
“I think I do,” he said, grimly.
“Only you must promise you won’t be angry.”
“With you?” he asked, incredulously.
“No . . . with him . . . and you must try to believe that it is true. No, of course not; I don’t mean you’re not likely to believe what I say, but what he said.”
“Please,” he pleaded, “I’m a patient man, but. . . .”
So she told him the whole story of Mr. Schultz, and, at the end, waited for him to give voice to the anger that, from the very touch of his hand on hers, she knew he felt. But what he said was:
“It was entirely my fault. I ought never to have left you alone for an instant.”
“You thought I was to be trusted,” she said, a little bitterly, “and I couldn’t even stay where you left me. But you do believe what he said?”
“I’ll try to,” he answered. “After all, he needn’t have said anything — and if you believe it — Look here, let’s never think of him or speak of him again, will you? We agreed, didn’t we, that Mr. Schultz was only a bad dream, and that he never really happened. And there’s nothing now between us at all . . . no concealments?”
“There’s one,” she said, in a very small voice, “but it’s so silly I don’t think I can tell you.”
“Try,” said he. “I could tell of the silliest things. And after that there’s one more thing I wish you’d tell me, if you can. You are happy, aren’t you? You are glad that we’re together again?”
“Yes,” she said. “Oh yes!”
“And this morning you weren’t?”
“Oh, but I was, I was! It was only — That’s the silly thing I want to tell you. But you’ll laugh.”
“It wasn’t a laughing matter to me.”
“I know I was hateful.”
“It was — bewildering. I couldn’t understand why everything was all wrong and then, suddenly, everything was all right.”
“I know — I was detestable. I can’t think how I could. But, you see, I was disappointed. I meant to arrange for you to meet me at some very pretty place and I was going to have a very pretty luncheon. I’d thought it all out . . . and it was exactly the same as yours, almost, only I shouldn’t have known the name of the quite-perfect wine and, then . . . there you were, you know, and I hadn’t been able to make things nice for you.”
“Was that really all, my Princess?”
“Yes, that was all.”
“But still I don’t understand why everything was suddenly all right.”
“It was what you said. That made everything all right.”
“What I said?”
“You see, I meant it all to be as pretty as I could make it, and I’d got a new dress, very, very pretty, and a new hat . . . and then you came upon me, suddenly, in this old rag and last year’s hat and scarf I only wore because aunty gave them to me. And I felt caught, and defrauded, and . . . and dowdy.”
“Oh, Princess!”
“And then you said . . . you said you liked my dress . . . so, then, it did not matter.”
It was then that he lifted her hand to hold it against his face as once before he had held it, and silence wrapped them around once more — a lovely silence, adorned with the rustle of leaves and grass and the skylark’s passionate song.
XX. THE END
THE memory of luncheon died away and the picnic-basket, again appealed to, yielded tea. They had explored the towers, and talked of Kenilworth, the underground passages, and talked of the round tower of Wales. And half their talk was, “Do you remember?” and, “Have you forgotten?” The early days of the incredible honeymoon had been days of exploration, each seeking to discover the secrets of that unknown land, each other’s mind and soul; this day of reunion was one gladly given over to the contemplation of the memories they had together amassed. It was a day dedicated to the counting of those treasures of memory which they now held in common, treasures among which this golden day itself would, all too soon, have to be laid aside to be, for each of them, forever, the chief jewel of that priceless treasury.
It was when they were repacking the picnic-basket that they first noticed how the color had gone out of the grass, that was their carpet, and how the blue had faded from the sky, that was their roof. The day had changed its mind, after all. Having been lovely in its youth and glorious in its prime, it had, in its declining hours, fallen a prey to the grayest melancholy and was now very sorry for itself indeed.
“Oh dear!” said she, “I do believe it’s going to rain.”
Even as she spoke the first big tears of the dejected day fell on the lid of the teapot.
“We must hurry,” he said, briskly. “I can’t have my princess getting wet through and catching cold in her royal head. Run for it, Princess! Run to the big gateway!”
She ran; he followed with the basket, went out to cover the seats of his car with mackintosh rugs and put up the hood, and came back, dampish, to discuss the situation. They told each other that it was only a shower, that it couldn’t possibly, as they put it, have “set in.” But it had; the landscape framed in the arch of the gateway lost color moment by moment, even the yellow of the gorse was blotted and obscured; the rain, which at first had fallen in a fitful, am
ateurish sort of way, settled down to business and fell in gray, diagonal lines, straight and sharp as ramrods.
“And it’s getting late,” he said, “and your Highness will be hungry.”
“We’ve only just had tea,” she reminded him.
“Ah, but we’ve got some way to go,” he told her.
“Where are we going?”
“I had thought,” he said, “of going to a place beyond Eastbourne; . . . my old nurse lives there. She’s rather fond of me; . . . she’ll have gotten supper for us. I thought you’d like it. It’s a farm-house, rather a jolly one, and then I thought, if you liked, we could drive back to the Eastbourne hotel by moonlight.”
“That would have been nice.”
“But there won’t be any moonlight. Perhaps we’d better go straight to the hotel.”
“But your nurse will expect you.”
“I can telegraph.”
“But she’ll be so disappointed.”
“Why didn’t I get a car that would shut up and be weather-tight? The rain will drift under that hood like the deluge.”
She laughed. “A little rain won’t hurt us.”
“Your beautiful hat!”
“I’ll tie my ugly scarf around my head and put my beautiful hat under the rug. Come, don’t let us disappoint your old nurse. No! It’s not going to leave off; it’s only taking breath to go on harder than ever.”
It was said afterward that never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, had there been such a storm of rain in those parts — rain without thunder, rain in full summer, rain without reason and without restraint. The rain drifted in, as he had said it would, and abruptly a wild wind arose and tore at the hood of the car, flapped her scarf in her eyes, and whipped their faces with sharp, stinging rain. He stopped at the village inn and brought her out ginger-brandy in a little glass shaped like a thistle-flower, “to keep the cold out.” Also he went into the post-office and bought peppermint bull’s-eyes, “to keep us warm,” he said. “How admirably fortunate that we both like peppermint!” And the journey began in earnest, up hills that were torrents, through hollows that were ponds, where the water splashed like a yellow frill from their wheels as they rushed through it. One village street was like a river, and the men were busy with spades, digging through the hedge-banks channels by which the water might escape into the flooded fields.
And so, along through Pevensey, where the great Norman castle still stands gray and threatening, through Eastbourne, like an ant-heap where the ants all use umbrellas, and, at long last, out on to the downs. Her hands were ice-cold with the rain and the effort of holding mackintosh rugs about herself and him. Her hair was blown across her eyes, the lash of rain was on her lips. Breathless, laughing for the joy of the wild rush through wind and water, they gained the top of Friston Hill, where the tall windmill is, and the pond and the sign-post and the small, gray, quiet church. And here, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain ceased; the clouds drifted away.
“As though some great tidy angel had swept them up with his wings,” said she.
The sea showed again, gray with chalk stolen from the cliffs, and white with the crests of waves left angry by the wind. Under the frowning purple clouds in the west glowed a long line of sullen crimson, and they went on along the down road in the peace of a clear, translucent twilight. Below them, in a hollow, shone lights from a little house.
“Wasn’t it somewhere here,” she asked him, “that you left me and I didn’t stay?”
“Yes,” he said, “somewhere here.”
And then they had reached the house — not so little, either, when you came close to it — and there were steady lights shining through the lower windows, and, in the upper rooms, the fitful, soft glimmer of firelight. The car stopped at the wooden gate from which a brick path led to the front door, hospitably open, showing gleams of brass and old mahogany in a wide hall paved with black-and-white checkered marble.
He peeled the streaming waterproof from her shoulders and gave her his hand for the descent. Side by side they passed down the wet path between dripping flower-beds, but at the threshold he stepped before her, entered the house, and turned to receive her.
“Welcome!” he said, caught her by the elbows, and lifted her lightly over the threshold.
“Why did you do that?” she asked, breathless and smiling through the drift of wet, disordered tresses.
“It’s an old custom for welcoming a princess,” he said.
The old nurse came from the kitchen, rustling in stiff print and white apron.
“Oh, Master Edward, sir,” she said, beaming, “I never thought you’d come in all this rain, not even when I got the telegraph. Nicely, ma’am, thanking you kindly and hoping you’re the same,” she said, in answer to the greeting and the hand that the girl offered. “And your good lady, Master Edward, she must be wet through, but I’ve got a lovely fire in her room, if you’ll come along with me, ma’am, and I’ll bring up some hot water in two ticks.”
So now, after the wind and the rain and the car, the girl finds herself in a long, low, chintz-curtained room where a wood fire burns on an open hearth and a devoted nurse of his is pulling off wet shoes and offering cups of tea and hot water.
“And are you quite sure there ain’t nothing more I can do for you, ma’am, for I’m sure it’s a pleasure?”
The girl, left alone at last, found herself wondering. He must have felt very sure of her, surely, to have brought her thus to his nurse, as if . . . as if their marriage had been a real marriage, like other people’s.
“Well, and why shouldn’t he be sure of me?” she asked herself. “I’m sure of him, thank God!”
The appointments about her were so charming, all so perfectly in keeping with one another and with the room that held them, that she found herself making a comfortable, complete, and ceremonious toilette. She had with her, by a fortunate accident, as she told herself, a dress of soft, cream-colored India muslin, fine as gauze. But when she looked at herself in the glass she said, “Too white . . . it’s like a wedding-dress,” and sought for some color to mitigate the dress’s bridal simplicity. There was no scarf that quite stifled criticism, but there was the Burmese coat, long and red, with gold-embroidered hems a foot deep. She slipped it over the white gown and was satisfied.
She thought of the morning when she had last worn the Burmese coat, and “He liked the red rose,” she said, as she put it on. When she was dressed she sat down in the great arm-chair before the fire and rested, tasting the simple yet perfect luxury of it all. She did not know how long she sat there, and reverie had almost given place to dreaming when a tap at the door aroused her.
She opened it. Edward stood there.
“Shall we go down to supper?” he said, exactly as though they had been at a dance. And, indeed, they might have been at a dance, as far as their dress went, except that he wore a dinner-jacket in place of the tail-coat which dances demand.
He offered his arm, and she took it and they went together down the shallow, wide, polished, uncarpeted stairs on which the lamps from the corridor above threw the shadows of the slender, elegant balustrades.
“What a beautiful house!” she said. “And how nice of you to make yourself pretty for supper!”
“Well, we had to change into something, and I won’t attack you with the obvious rejoinder. But you’ll let me say, won’t you, that you’re like a princess in a fairy-tale? Did your fairy godmother give you a hundred dresses at your christening, each one more beautiful than the other?”
“She gave me something,” the girl answered—”a secret amulet. It’s invisible, but it brings me good fortune. It’s brought me here,” she added, “where everything is perfect. My room’s lovely, and those stuffed sea-gulls over there . . . nothing else could have been absolutely right in that recess. How odd that I never knew before how much I loved stuffed sea-gulls,” she added, meditatively.
He stopped in front of the sea-gulls. “I got a ring for you at Warwick,” he s
aid, “only I didn’t dare to ask you to take it. Will you take it now? The other one was the symbol of something you didn’t mean. Let this one stand for — whatever you will.”
Without a word she held out her hand, so he set the diamond and crystal above the golden circlet.
“I am a fairy princess,” she said then. “No one but a fairy princess ever had such a ring as this. Thank you, my Prince.”
With the word, planted on the hour like a flag, they went on.
The dining-room was paneled with beech, gray and polished. In the middle a round table spread with silver and glass, white lawn and white roses, shone like a great wedding-cake.
“Do you mind,” he said, as he set the chair for her—”do you mind if we make it another picnic and wait on ourselves? My old nurse was anxious to get back to her babies — she’s got five of them — so I ran her down in the car.”
“She lives in the village, then? I thought she lived here.”
“I thought the five children might be rather too much for you, especially when you’re so tired.”
“But I’m not,” she said, “and oh, what a pretty supper!”
The curtains were drawn, wax candles shone from Sheffield-plated candlesticks on table and mantelpiece and gleamed reflected in china and silver and the glass of pictures and bookcases. A little mellow fire burned on the hearth.
“What a darling room!” she said, “and how all the things fit it, every single thing, exactly right. They couldn’t go any other way, possibly.”
“You told me they would,” he said, “at Warwick. I remember you told me they would fit in if one only loved them and gave them the chance. I drink to you, Princess; and I know sparkling wine is extravagant; but to-day isn’t every day, and it’s only Moselle, which is not nearly so expensive as champagne, and much nicer.”
Raising their glasses, they toasted each other.
“But I thought,” she said, presently—”I thought — there were to be no concealments.”
“No more there are.”