"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 said, "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."
"But this isn't. . . . Isn't this. . . . Surely that's the bookcase you
bought at Warwick--and these chairs and those candlesticks."
"I own it, Princess; I would scorn to deceive you."
"Then this is _your_ house?"
"It is; just that."
"Only that? Is there nothing else that it is? Wasn't it once my house,
for a very little while? Wasn't it here that you left me, that night
when I ran away and I met Mr. Schultz? . . . No, I forgot. . . . Of
course I didn't meet any one. . . . I mean when you came after me and
found me at Tunbridge Wells. Oh! Suppose you hadn't found me!"
"How am I to suppose the impossible? You couldn't be in the same world
with me and I not find you. Yes, you are right, as always; this is the
house. Did you ever try bananas with chicken? Do! They rhyme perfectly."
"Don't seek to put me off with bananas. Was the house yours when you
brought me here?"
"Yes; I had just bought it. All concealment is really at an end now. And
I am rather glad I did buy it, because this is certainly better than the
coffee-room of an inn, isn't it?"
"How proud he is of his house! And well he may be! And when did he
arrange all this beautiful furniture?"
"When she banished him from London. It was something to do; and she does
like it?"
"She does indeed. Have you furnished it all?"
"Not nearly all. I wanted your advice about the other parlor and the
housekeeper's room and--oh, lots of things. Yes, you are quite right in
the surmise which I see trembling on those lips. Mrs. Burbidge is going
to be our housekeeper. She's staying at old nurse's, ready to come in
whenever she's wanted. If any one else decides to keep house for me she
can be sewing-maid, or still-room maid, or lady-in-waiting to the
hen-roost."
"I see," she said, crumbling bread and looking at him across the glass
and the silver and the white flowers. "So this was the house! When I was
in the straw nest you made me I never thought the house could be like
this. I imagined it damp and desolate, with strips of torn paper--ugly
patterns--hanging from the wall, and dust and cobwebs and mice, perhaps
even a rat. I was almost sure I heard a rat!"
"Poor, poor little princess."
"Yes, I will!" she said, suddenly, answering a voice that was certainly
not his. "I don't care what you say, I _will_ tell him. Edward, when I
ran away it wasn't only because I didn't want to be a burden and all
that--though that was true, too--the real true truth was that I was
frightened. Yes, I was! I shivered in that straw nest and listened and
listened and listened, and held my breath and listened again, and I was
almost sure I heard something moving in the house; and it was so
velvet-dark, and I had to get up every time I wanted to strike a match,
because of not setting fire to the straw, and at last there were only
four matches left. And I kept thinking--suppose something should come
creeping, creeping, very slowly and softly, through the darkness, so
that I shouldn't know it until it was close to me and touched me! I
couldn't bear it--so I ran away. Now despise me and call me a coward."
But he only said, "My poor Princess, how could I ever have left you
alone for a moment?" and came around the table expressly to cut just the
right number of white grapes for her from the bunch in the silver
basket. Being there, his hand touched her head, lightly, as one might
touch the plumage of a bird.
"How soft your hair is!" he said, in a low voice, and went back to his
place.
When the meal was over, "Let's clear away," she said, "it won't look so
dismal for your nurse when she comes in the morning."
"Let me do it," said he. "Why should you?"
"Ah, but I want to," she said. "And I want to see the kitchen."
And the kitchen was worth seeing, with its rows of shining brasses, its
tall clock, its high chintz-flounced mantelpiece. When all was in order,
when the table shone bare in its bright, dark mahogany, he mended the
fire, for the evening was still chill with the rain, and drew up the big
chair for her to the hearth she had just swept. He stood a moment
looking down at her.
"May I sit at your feet, Princess?" he asked.
She swept aside her muslin and her gold embroideries to make a place for
him. The house was silent, so silent that the crackle of the wood on the
hearth seemed loud, and louder still the slow ticking of the tall clock
on the other side of the wall. Outside not a breath stirred, only now
and then came the tinkle of a sheep-bell, the sound of a hoof on the
cobblestones of the stable across the yard, or the rattle of the ring
against the manger as some horse, turning, tossed his head.
He leaned back against her chair and threw his head back until he could
look at her face. The tips of her fingers touched his forehead lightly
and his head rested against her knee; and now he could not see her face
any more. Only he felt those smooth finger-tips passing across his brow
with the touch of a butterfly caress.
"Are you happy?" he said, once again and very softly.