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?
It was not till the car was slipping through Crowborough, that paradise
of villa-dwellers who have "done well in business," that the thought
came to him, had she, after all, gone back to her aunt? Had she thought
better of it, and just gone humbly back with confession and submission
in both hands? It was then that he remembered that Miss Davenant had
seemed to signal . . . perhaps she had some errand to him . . . perhaps
submission had been given as the price of a farewell message,
aunt-borne, to meet him at the farm? Mr. Basingstoke was not subject to
attacks of indecision, but now for a moment he wavered. Then imagination
showed him himself on the door-step of the Hall asking for Miss
Davenant, and Miss Davenant receiving or not receiving him--in either
case he himself cutting a figure which he could not for a moment admire.
Common sense reinforced imagination. The handkerchief said General
Post-Office. It could only have said that if the handkerchief's owner
meant him to go to the General Post-Office. If the handkerchief's owner
had meant him to go back to the Hall, the handkerchief could just as
easily have said the Hall. He went back to his questionings, and the
car drew near Tunbridge Wells.
Charles, exhausted by the morning's combat, had slept heavily, but now
he roused himself to take the rôle of Arbiter of Destinies. He roused
himself, sat up, snuffled and blew, and then, with wide smile and
lolling tongue, proclaimed himself to be that pitiable and suffering
creature, a bull-terrier dying of thirst. In vain Edward sought to calm
him; he insisted that he was, and that he had a right to be, thirsty.
His insistence affected his master. Edward became aware that he, also,
was thirsty; more, was hungry. His watch showed him that the chauffeur
had every right to consider himself an ill-used man. A bright-faced
hotel whose windows were underlined with marguerites and pink geraniums
beckoned attractively.
"After all, one must live," said Edward, and breathed an order. The car
drew up in front of the White Horse.
Another car was there--unattended--a very nice car. Edward wished it had
been his. It had all those charms which his own hired one lacked, and
his experienced eye dwelt fondly on those charms.
"Get yourself something to eat," he said to the chauffeur. Charles,
straining toward the horse-trough, seemed anxious to prove that his
thirst had not been simulated. Edward indulged him. Arrived at the wet
granite, however, Charles lapped a tongueful or two, as it were out of
politeness and merely to oblige, and then looked up at his master
expressively. "You have sadly misunderstood me," he seemed to say. "What
I wanted was breakfast," adding, reproachfully, "You will remember that
there has been none to-day."
He dragged his master to the hotel door, where they passed in under
hanging-baskets of pink and white flowers, and in a coffee-room adorned
with trophies of the chase Edward ordered luncheon for himself and
biscuits for Charles. Now mark the vagaries of Destiny: Charles,
impatient for the biscuits, dragged his chain about the coffee-room,
empty at this hour of all but himself and his master; he upset the tongs
and the shovel and brought them clattering to the fender. Edward
replaced them in their stands. Then Charles put his feet in an
antimacassar and dragged it to the floor. After this he went to the
writing-table under the wire blind in the middle window and snuffled
curiously in the waste-paper basket, upsetting it almost without an
effort, and a litter of letters and envelopes and torn circulars was
discharged.
Edward, hastening to repair these ravages, scooped the torn fragments
in his hands--and on the very top, fronting him, was an envelope bearing
his own name--Basingstoke.
"--Basingstoke," the envelope said plainly, adding as an incomplete
afterthought, "General Post-O"--and there ending. The handwriting was,
like Hypatia's, graceful and self-conscious. That is to say, it was
legible, clear, and the letters were shaped by design and not by
accident. He never doubted for an instant whose hand it was that had
written those words. He went through the waste-paper basket's other
contents for more of that handwriting. There was not a scrap. The
waiter, coming in with accessories to the still-withheld luncheon,
stared at him.
"Something thrown away by mistake," he said, and pursued the search.
No--nothing.
But that she had been here was plain; that she still might be here was
possible. She must have come by train or by motor--what motor? Train
from what station? He went out into the hall to question the highly
coiffured young lady whom he had noticed as he came in, the lady who
sits in the glass cage where the keys are kept, and enters your name in
the book when you engage your room. The cage was empty, the hall was
empty. On the hall-table's dark mahogany lay a shining salver, and on
the salver lay a few letters. He picked them up. The one on the top was
addressed fully--to
MR. BASINGSTOKE,
General Post-Office,
London.