"That means. . . ?"
"It means me. I'm Silver Locks--it's her pet name for me. I called my
aunts the three bears once, when I was little, in fun, you know. And the
others were angry--but _she_ laughed and called me Silver Locks. And
she's called it me ever since. I never thought about her worrying. What
am I to do? I must go back. I thought it was too good to last,
yesterday," she added, bitterly.
He put the admission away in a safe place, whence later he could take it
out and caress it, and said, "Of course you must go back if you want
to. But don't do it without thinking. We meant to talk over our plans
yesterday, but somehow we didn't. Let's do it to-day."
"But I can't go to Warwick. I must go back to her--I must."
"If you do," he said, "you won't go back to just her--you'll go back to
the whole miserable muddle you've got away from. You'll go back to your
other aunts and to your father. Besides, how do you know who put that
advertisement in? Think carefully. Is the advertisement like her?"
"It's like her to be anxious and kind," said she.
"I mean, is she the sort of woman to advertise that she's ill? To
advertise your pet name--and her own name--so that every one who knows
you both and sees the advertisement will know that you are being
advertised for? Is that like her?" He ended, astonished at his own
penetration.
"No," she said, slowly, "it isn't. And it isn't like her to say she's
ill. She never complains."
"She wouldn't use her illness as a lever to move events to her liking?"
"Never!" she said, almost indignantly.
"Then I think that this advertisement is some one else's. Where does she
live."
"Hyde Park Square."
"Let us telegraph her, and not go to Warwick."
They stopped the taxi and composed a message. He despatched it.
Did you put advertisement in paper to-day? And are you
ill? I am quite well and will write at once. Wire
reply to Silver Locks, General Post-Office.
Then they told the man to drive around Regent's Park, to pass the time
till there should be an answer.
In the park the trees were already brown, and on the pale, trampled
grass long heaps of rags, like black grave-mounds, showed where weary
men who had tramped London all night, moved on by Law and Order,
inexorable in blue and silver, now at last had their sleep out, in broad
sunshine, under the eyes of the richest city in the world. Little
children, dirty and poor--their childhood triumphant over dirt and
poverty--played happily in the grass that was less grass than dust.
"What a horrible place London is!" she said. "Think of yesterday."
That, too, he put away to be taken out and loved later.
"We won't stay in London," he said, "if the answer is what I think it
will be. We'll go out into the green country and decide what we're going
to do."
"But if she _did_ put the advertisement in, it means that she's _very_
ill. And then I must go to her."
"But if she didn't--and I more and more think she didn't--they may send
some one to the General Post-Office post-haste--so it won't do for you
to go for the telegram. Do you know the Guildhall Library?"
"No."
"It's a beautiful place--very quiet, very calm. And the officials are
the best chaps I've ever found in any library anywhere. We'll go there.
You must want to look up something. Let's see--the dates of the
publication of Bacon's works. Write your name in the book--any name you
like, so long as it isn't your own; then ask one of the officials to
help you, and go and sit at one of the side tables--they're like side
chapels in a cathedral--and stay there till I come. You'll be as safe
and as secret as if you were in the Bastille. And I'll baffle pursuit
and come to you as soon as I can."
"Yes," she said, meekly.
"And don't worry," he urged. "The more I think of it, the more certain I
am that it was not the aunt you like who wrote that advertisement--"
He was right. The telegram with which, an hour later, he presented
himself at the Guildhall Library ran thus:
I did not write advertisement and I am not specially
ill, but I am very anxious. Write at once. Aunt Loo
and Aunt Enid are both here. I think they must have
inserted the advertisement. A.
"Your Aunt Alice is a sportsman," he said, "to warn you like that."
"I told you she was a darling," she answered--and her whole face had
lighted up with relief--"and you are the cleverest person in the world!
I should never have thought about its not being her doing, never in a
thousand years. You deserve a medal and a statue and a pension."
"I don't deserve more than I've got," said he, "nor half so much. The
sun shines again."
She flashed a brilliant smile at him, and pushed a brown book along the
table.
"I suppose we ought to look studious," she said, "or they'll turn us
out. I am so glad Aunt Alice isn't really worse. You don't know how I've
felt while you've been away. It seemed so horribly selfish--to have been
so happy and all while she was ill and worried. But, of course, you do
know."
"Let us go out," he said, putting the books together.
"Yes," she said, "I know all about Bacon. Not that I'll ever want to
know."
"I'm not so sure," said he. "Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the
Baconians are right, and he was an intellectual giant, almost like Plato
and Aristotle rolled into one? We'll go to Stratford some day, and look
at Shakespeare's bust and see if we think he could have written 'The
Tempest.'"
"You shouldn't judge people by their faces," she said. "Handsome is as
handsome does."
"Oh, but you should," said he. "It's handsome does as handsome is. I
always go by appearances. Don't you? But of course, I know you do--"
She opened one of the books and began to turn the pages. "Look what I
found," she said, and all the time their voices had been lowered to the
key of that studious place. "Look, isn't it pretty? And do you see?--the
e's are like the Greek [Greek: th]. Can you read it?"
He read:
"Fair Lucrece, kind Catherine, gentle Jane,
But Maria is the dearest name.
Robert Swinford, 1863."
"Yes, that's what I make it. It doesn't rhyme, but I expect Maria was
very pleased. Do you think they were studying with a stern tutor, and he
wrote that and pushed it over to her when no one was looking? It's an
odd thing to have written in a Natural History book. There's something
more on another page--but it doesn't make sense:
"I am true rew Hebrew--CXIX--101."
"I expect he was just trying a pen. Come, the librarian has his
scholarly eye on you."
"I should like to look through all the old books and find out all the
names people have written and make stories about them," she said, and he
received the curious impression that she was talking against time; there
was about her a sort of hanging back from the needful movement of
departure. He picked the books up and carried them to the counter, she
following, and they walked in silence down the gallery hung with
Wouvermans and his everlasting gray horse.
"Let's go into the Hall," he said. So they turned under the arch and
went into the beautiful great vaulted Guildhall, where the giants Gog
and Magog occupy the gallery, and little human people can sit below on
stone benches against the wall, and gaze on the monuments of the elder
and the younger Pitt, and talk at long leisure, undisturbed and
undisturbing, which is not the case in the Library, as Edward pointed
out.
"Now, then," he began.
"Yes," she said, hurriedly. "Something will have to be done about Aunt
Alice."
"Yes. But what?"
"I don't know." She turned and leaned one hand on the stone seat so that
she faced him. "You do believe that I don't regret coming away? I think
it would have been splendid to have gone on--like yesterday--but you see
it's impossible."
"No, I don't," he said, stoutly.
She made a movement of impatience. "Oh yes, it is--quite," she said.
"However rich you are, you can't go on forever being blackmailed. Every
one would know us, or else you'd have to give up Charles, and even then
I expect you'd be obliged to pay twenty pounds every three-quarters of
an hour. It can't be done. And, besides, we should never know a moment's
peace. Wherever we went we should imagine a blackmailer behind every
bush, and every one we spoke to might be a detective. It's no use. I
must go back. Do say you know I must."
"I don't."
"Well, say you know I don't want to."
"I can't say that . . . because, if you don't want to . . . there's
always the old alternative, you know." He was looking straight before
him at the majestic form of the Earl of Chatham.
"What alternative?"
"Marrying me," he said, humbly. "Do. I don't believe that you'd regret
it."
"When I marry," she said, strongly, "it won't be just because I want to
get myself out of a scrape."
"I hoped there might be other considerations," he said, still gazing at
the marble. "You were happy yesterday. You said so."
"You talk as though marrying were just nothing--like choosing a partner
for a dance. It's like--like choosing what patterns you'd be tattooed
with, if you were a savage. It's for life."
"And you can't like me well enough to choose me?"
"I do like you," she answered, with swift and most disheartening
eagerness, "I do like you awfully; better than any man I've ever
known--oh, miles better--not that that's saying much. But I don't know
you well enough to marry you."
"You don't think it would turn out well?"