With that the interview terminated. Bechamel went back to the Angel,

perturbed. “Hang detectives!” It wasn’t the kind of thing he had

anticipated at all. Hoopdriver, with round eyes and a wondering smile,

walked down to where the mill waters glittered in the moonlight, and

after meditating over the parapet of the bridge for a space, with

occasional murmurs of, “Private Inquiry” and the like, returned, with

mystery even in his paces, towards the town.

XVIII.

That glee which finds expression in raised eyebrows and long, low

whistling noises was upon Mr. Hoopdriver. For a space he forgot the

tears of the Young Lady in Grey. Here was a new game!—and a real one.

Mr. Hoopdriver as a Private Inquiry Agent, a Sherlock Holmes in fact,

keeping these two people ‘under observation.’ He walked slowly back

from the bridge until he was opposite the Angel, and stood for ten

minutes, perhaps, contemplating that establishment and enjoying all the

strange sensations of being this wonderful, this mysterious and

terrible thing. Everything fell into place in his scheme. He had, of

course, by a kind of instinct, assumed the disguise of a cyclist,

picked up the first old crock he came across as a means of pursuit. ‘No

expense was to be spared.’

Then he tried to understand what it was in particular that he was

observing. “My wife”—“_Her_ stepmother!” Then he remembered her

swimming eyes. Abruptly came a wave of anger that surprised him, washed

away the detective superstructure, and left him plain Mr. Hoopdriver.

This man in brown, with his confident manner, and his proffered half

sovereign (damn him!) was up to no good, else why should he object to

being watched? He was married! She was not his sister. He began to

understand. A horrible suspicion of the state of affairs came into Mr.

Hoopdriver’s head. Surely it had not come to _that_. He was a

detective!—he would find out. How was it to be done? He began to submit

sketches on approval to himself. It required an effort before he could

walk into the Angel bar. “A lemonade and bitter, please,” said Mr.

Hoopdriver.

He cleared his throat. “Are Mr. and Mrs. Bowlong stopping here?”

“What, a gentleman and a young lady—on bicycles?”

“Fairly young—a married couple.”

“No,” said the barmaid, a talkative person of ample dimensions.

“There’s no married couples stopping here. But there’s a Mr. and Miss

_Beaumont_.” She spelt it for precision. “Sure you’ve got the name

right, young man?”

“Quite,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Beaumont there is, but no one of the name of—What was the name you

gave?”

“Bowlong,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“No, there ain’t no Bowlong,” said the barmaid, taking up a glasscloth

and a drying tumbler and beginning to polish the latter. “First off, I

thought you might be asking for Beaumont—the names being similar. Were

you expecting them on bicycles?”

“Yes—they said they _might_ be in Midhurst tonight.”

“P’raps they’ll come presently. Beaumont’s here, but no Bowlong. Sure

that Beaumont ain’t the name?”

“Certain,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“It’s curious the names being so alike. I thought p’raps—”

And so they conversed at some length, Mr. Hoopdriver delighted to find

his horrible suspicion disposed of. The barmaid having listened awhile

at the staircase volunteered some particulars of the young couple

upstairs. Her modesty was much impressed by the young lady’s costume,

so she intimated, and Mr. Hoopdriver whispered the badinage natural to

the occasion, at which she was coquettishly shocked. “There’ll be no

knowing which is which, in a year or two,” said the barmaid. “And her

manner too! She got off her machine and give it ’im to stick up against

the kerb, and in she marched. ‘I and my brother,’ says she, ‘want to

stop here to-night. My brother doesn’t mind what kind of room ’e ’as,

but I want a room with a good view, if there’s one to be got,’ says

she. He comes hurrying in after and looks at her. ‘I’ve settled the

rooms,’ she says, and ’e says ‘damn!’ just like that. I can fancy my

brother letting me boss the show like that.”

“I dessay you do,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “if the truth was known.”

The barmaid looked down, smiled and shook her head, put down the

tumbler, polished, and took up another that had been draining, and

shook the drops of water into her little zinc sink.

“She’ll be a nice little lot to marry,” said the barmaid. “She’ll be

wearing the—well, b-dashes, as the sayin’ is. I can’t think what girls

is comin’ to.”

This depreciation of the Young Lady in Grey was hardly to Hoopdriver’s

taste.

“Fashion,” said he, taking up his change. “Fashion is all the go with

you ladies—and always was. You’ll be wearing ’em yourself before a

couple of years is out.”

“Nice they’d look on my figger,” said the barmaid, with a titter. “No—I

ain’t one of your fashionable sort. Gracious no! I shouldn’t feel as if

I’d anything on me, not more than if I’d forgot—Well, there! I’m

talking.” She put down the glass abruptly. “I dessay I’m old

fashioned,” she said, and walked humming down the bar.

“Not you,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. He waited until he caught her eye, then

with his native courtesy smiled, raised his cap, and wished her good

evening.

XIX.

Then Mr. Hoopdriver returned to the little room with the lead-framed

windows where he had dined, and where the bed was now comfortably made,

sat down on the box under the window, stared at the moon rising on the

shining vicarage roof, and tried to collect his thoughts. How they

whirled at first! It was past ten, and most of Midhurst was tucked away

in bed, some one up the street was learning the violin, at rare

intervals a belated inhabitant hurried home and woke the echoes, and a

corncrake kept up a busy churning in the vicarage garden. The sky was

deep blue, with a still luminous afterglow along the black edge of the

hill, and the white moon overhead, save for a couple of yellow stars,

had the sky to herself.

At first his thoughts were kinetic, of deeds and not relationships.

There was this malefactor, and his victim, and it had fallen on Mr.

Hoopdriver to take a hand in the game. _He_ was married. Did she know

he was married? Never for a moment did a thought of evil concerning her

cross Hoopdriver’s mind. Simple-minded people see questions of morals

so much better than superior persons—who have read and thought

themselves complex to impotence. He had heard her voice, seen the frank

light in her eyes, and she had been weeping—that sufficed. The rights

of the case he hadn’t properly grasped. But he would. And that

smirking—well, swine was the mildest for him. He recalled the

exceedingly unpleasant incident of the railway bridge. “Thin we won’t

detain yer, thenks,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, aloud, in a strange,

unnatural, contemptible voice, supposed to represent that of Bechamel.

“Oh, the _beggar!_ I’ll be level with him yet. He’s afraid of us

detectives—that I’ll _swear_.” (If Mrs. Wardor should chance to be on

the other side of the door within earshot, well and good.)

For a space he meditated chastisements and revenges, physical

impossibilities for the most part,—Bechamel staggering headlong from

the impact of Mr. Hoopdriver’s large, but, to tell the truth, ill

supported fist, Bechamel’s five feet nine of height lifted from the

ground and quivering under a vigorously applied horsewhip. So pleasant

was such dreaming, that Mr. Hoopdriver’s peaked face under the

moonlight was transfigured. One might have paired him with that

well-known and universally admired triumph, ‘The Soul’s Awakening,’ so

sweet was his ecstasy. And presently with his thirst for revenge

glutted by six or seven violent assaults, a duel and two vigorous

murders, his mind came round to the Young Lady in Grey again.

She was a plucky one too. He went over the incident the barmaid at the

Angel had described to him. His thoughts ceased to be a torrent,

smoothed down to a mirror in which she was reflected with infinite

clearness and detail. He’d never met anything like her before. Fancy

that bolster of a barmaid being dressed in that way! He whuffed a

contemptuous laugh. He compared her colour, her vigour, her voice, with

the Young Ladies in Business with whom his lot had been cast. Even in

tears she was beautiful, more beautiful indeed to him, for it made her

seem softer and weaker, more accessible. And such weeping as he had

seen before had been so much a matter of damp white faces, red noses,

and hair coming out of curl. Your draper’s assistant becomes something

of a judge of weeping, because weeping is the custom of all Young

Ladies in Business, when for any reason their services are dispensed

with. She could weep—and (by Gosh!) she could smile. _He_ knew that,

and reverting to acting abruptly, he smiled confidentially at the

puckered pallor of the moon.

It is difficult to say how long Mr. Hoopdriver’s pensiveness lasted. It

seemed a long time before his thoughts of action returned. Then he

remembered he was a ‘watcher’; that to-morrow he must be busy. It would

be in character to make notes, and he pulled out his little note-book.

With that in hand he fell a-thinking again. Would that chap tell her

the ’tecks were after them? If so, would she be as anxious to get away

as _he_ was? He must be on the alert. If possible he must speak to her.

Just a significant word, “Your friend—trust me!”—It occurred to him

that to-morrow these fugitives might rise early to escape. At that he

thought of the time and found it was half-past eleven. “Lord!” said he,

“I must see that I wake.” He yawned and rose. The blind was up, and he

pulled back the little chintz curtains to let the sunlight strike

across to the bed, hung his watch within good view of his pillow, on a

nail that supported a kettle-holder, and sat down on his bed to

undress. He lay awake for a little while thinking of the wonderful

possibilities of the morrow, and thence he passed gloriously into the

wonderland of dreams.

XX.

THE PURSUIT

And now to tell of Mr. Hoopdriver, rising with the sun, vigilant,

active, wonderful, the practicable half of the lead-framed window stuck

open, ears alert, an eye flickering incessantly in the corner panes, in

oblique glances at the Angel front. Mrs. Wardor wanted him to have his

breakfast downstairs in her kitchen, but that would have meant

abandoning the watch, and he held out strongly. The bicycle,

_cap-à-pie_, occupied, under protest, a strategic position in the shop.

He was expectant by six in the morning. By nine horrible fears

oppressed him that his quest had escaped him, and he had to reconnoitre

the Angel yard in order to satisfy himself. There he found the ostler

(How are the mighty fallen in these decadent days!) brushing down the

bicycles of the chase, and he returned relieved to Mrs. Wardor’s

premises. And about ten they emerged, and rode quietly up the North

Street. He watched them until they turned the corner of the post

office, and then out into the road and up after them in fine style!

They went by the engine-house where the old stocks and the whipping

posts are, and on to the Chichester road, and he followed gallantly. So

this great chase began.

They did not look round, and he kept them just within sight, getting

down if he chanced to draw closely upon them round a corner. By riding

vigorously he kept quite conveniently near them, for they made but

little hurry. He grew hot indeed, and his knees were a little stiff to

begin with, but that was all. There was little danger of losing them,

for a thin chalky dust lay upon the road, and the track of her tire was

milled like a shilling, and his was a chequered ribbon along the way.

So they rode by Cobden’s monument and through the prettiest of

villages, until at last the downs rose steeply ahead. There they

stopped awhile at the only inn in the place, and Mr. Hoopdriver took up

a position which commanded the inn door, and mopped his face and

thirsted and smoked a Red Herring cigarette. They remained in the inn

for some time. A number of chubby innocents returning home from school,

stopped and formed a line in front of him, and watched him quietly but

firmly for the space of ten minutes or so. “Go away,” said he, and they

only seemed quietly interested. He asked them all their names then, and

they answered indistinct murmurs. He gave it up at last and became

passive on his gate, and so at length they tired of him.

The couple under observation occupied the inn so long that Mr.

Hoopdriver at the thought of their possible employment hungered as well

as thirsted. Clearly, they were lunching. It was a cloudless day, and

the sun at the meridian beat down upon the top of Mr. Hoopdriver’s

head, a shower bath of sunshine, a huge jet of hot light. It made his

head swim. At last they emerged, and the other man in brown looked back

and saw him. They rode on to the foot of the down, and dismounting

began to push tediously up that long nearly vertical ascent of blinding

white road. Mr. Hoopdriver hesitated. It might take them twenty minutes

to mount that. Beyond was empty downland perhaps for miles. He decided

to return to the inn and snatch a hasty meal.

At the inn they gave him biscuits and cheese and a misleading pewter

measure of sturdy ale, pleasant under the palate, cool in the throat,

but leaden in the legs, of a hot afternoon. He felt a man of substance

as he emerged in the blinding sunshine, but even by the foot of the

down the sun was insisting again that his skull was too small for his

brains. The hill had gone steeper, the chalky road blazed like a

magnesium light, and his front wheel began an apparently incurable

squeaking. He felt as a man from Mars would feel if he were suddenly

transferred to this planet, about three times as heavy as he was wont

to feel. The two little black figures had vanished over the forehead of

the hill. “The tracks’ll be all right,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

That was a comforting reflection. It not only justified a slow progress

up the hill, but at the crest a sprawl on the turf beside the road, to

contemplate the Weald from the south. In a matter of two days he had

crossed that spacious valley, with its frozen surge of green hills, its

little villages and townships here and there, its copses and

cornfields, its ponds and streams like jewelery of diamonds and silver

glittering in the sun. The North Downs were hidden, far away beyond the

Wealden Heights. Down below was the little village of Cocking, and

half-way up the hill, a mile perhaps to the right, hung a flock of

sheep grazing together. Overhead an anxious peewit circled against the

blue, and every now and then emitted its feeble cry. Up here the heat

was tempered by a pleasant breeze. Mr. Hoopdriver was possessed by

unreasonable contentment; he lit himself a cigarette and lounged more

comfortably. Surely the Sussex ale is made of the waters of Lethe, of

poppies and pleasant dreams. Drowsiness coiled insidiously about him.

He awoke with a guilty start, to find himself sprawling prone on the

turf with his cap over one eye. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and

realised that he had slept. His head was still a trifle heavy. And the

chase? He jumped to his feet and stooped to pick up his overturned

machine. He whipped out his watch and saw that it was past two o’clock.

“Lord love us, fancy that!—But the tracks’ll be all right,” said Mr.

Hoopdriver, wheeling his machine back to the chalky road. “I must

scorch till I overtake them.”

He mounted and rode as rapidly as the heat and a lingering lassitude

permitted. Now and then he had to dismount to examine the surface where

the road forked. He enjoyed that rather. “Trackin’,” he said aloud, and

decided in the privacy of his own mind that he had a wonderful instinct

for ‘spoor.’ So he came past Goodwood station and Lavant, and

approached Chichester towards four o’clock. And then came a terrible

thing. In places the road became hard, in places were the crowded

indentations of a recent flock of sheep, and at last in the throat of

the town cobbles and the stony streets branching east, west, north, and

south, at a stone cross under the shadow of the cathedral the tracks

vanished. “O Cricky!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, dismounting in dismay and

standing agape. “Dropped anything?” said an inhabitant at the kerb.

“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “I’ve lost the spoor,” and walked upon his

way, leaving the inhabitant marvelling what part of a bicycle a spoor

might be. Mr. Hoopdriver, abandoning tracking, began asking people if

they had seen a Young Lady in Grey on a bicycle. Six casual people

hadn’t, and he began to feel the inquiry was conspicuous, and desisted.

But what was to be done?

Hoopdriver was hot, tired, and hungry, and full of the first gnawings

of a monstrous remorse. He decided to get himself some tea and meat,

and in the Royal George he meditated over the business in a melancholy

frame enough. They had passed out of his world—vanished, and all his

wonderful dreams of some vague, crucial interference collapsed like a

castle of cards. What a fool he had been not to stick to them like a

leech! He might have thought! But there!—what WAS the good of that sort

of thing now? He thought of her tears, of her helplessness, of the

bearing of the other man in brown, and his wrath and disappointment

surged higher. “What CAN I do?” said Mr. Hoopdriver aloud, bringing his

fist down beside the teapot.

What would Sherlock Holmes have done? Perhaps, after all, there might

be such things as clues in the world, albeit the age of miracles was

past. But to look for a clue in this intricate network of cobbled

streets, to examine every muddy interstice! There was a chance by

looking about and inquiry at the various inns. Upon that he began. But

of course they might have ridden straight through and scarcely a soul

have marked them. And then came a positively brilliant idea. “’Ow many

ways are there out of Chichester?” said Mr. Hoopdriver. It was really

equal to Sherlock Holmes—that. “If they’ve made tracks, I shall find

those tracks. If not—they’re in the town.” He was then in East Street,

and he started at once to make the circuit of the place, discovering

incidentally that Chichester is a walled city. In passing, he made

inquiries at the Black Swan, the Crown, and the Red Lion Hotel. At six

o’clock in the evening, he was walking downcast, intent, as one who had

dropped money, along the road towards Bognor, kicking up the dust with

his shoes and fretting with disappointed pugnacity. A thwarted,

crestfallen Hoopdriver it was, as you may well imagine. And then

suddenly there jumped upon his attention—a broad line ribbed like a

shilling, and close beside it one chequered, that ever and again split

into two. “Found!” said Mr. Hoopdriver and swung round on his heel at

once, and back to the Royal George, helter skelter, for the bicycle

they were minding for him. The ostler thought he was confoundedly

imperious, considering his machine.

XXI.

AT BOGNOR

That seductive gentleman, Bechamel, had been working up to a crisis. He

had started upon this elopement in a vein of fine romance, immensely

proud of his wickedness, and really as much in love as an artificial

oversoul can be, with Jessie. But either she was the profoundest of

coquettes or she had not the slightest element of Passion (with a large

P) in her composition. It warred with all his ideas of himself and the

feminine mind to think that under their flattering circumstances she

really could be so vitally deficient. He found her persistent coolness,

her more or less evident contempt for himself, exasperating in the

highest degree. He put it to himself that she was enough to provoke a

saint, and tried to think that was piquant and enjoyable, but the

blisters on his vanity asserted themselves. The fact is, he was, under

this standing irritation, getting down to the natural man in himself

for once, and the natural man in himself, in spite of Oxford and the

junior Reviewers’ Club, was a Palaeolithic creature of simple tastes

and violent methods. “I’ll be level with you yet,” ran like a plough

through the soil of his thoughts.

Then there was this infernal detective. Bechamel had told his wife he

was going to Davos to see Carter. To that he had fancied she was

reconciled, but how she would take this exploit was entirely

problematical. She was a woman of peculiar moral views, and she

measured marital infidelity largely by its proximity to herself. Out of

her sight, and more particularly out of the sight of the other women of

her set, vice of the recognised description was, perhaps, permissible

to those contemptible weaklings, men, but this was Evil on the High

Roads. She was bound to make a fuss, and these fusses invariably took

the final form of a tightness of money for Bechamel. Albeit, and he

felt it was heroic of him to resolve so, it was worth doing if it was

to be done. His imagination worked on a kind of matronly Valkyrie, and

the noise of pursuit and vengeance was in the air. The idyll still had

the front of the stage. That accursed detective, it seemed, had been

thrown off the scent, and that, at any rate, gave a night’s respite.

But things must be brought to an issue forthwith.

By eight o’clock in the evening, in a little dining-room in the Vicuna

Hotel, Bognor, the crisis had come, and Jessie, flushed and angry in

the face and with her heart sinking, faced him again for her last

struggle with him. He had tricked her this time, effectually, and luck

had been on his side. She was booked as Mrs. Beaumont. Save for her

refusal to enter their room, and her eccentricity of eating with

unwashed hands, she had so far kept up the appearances of things before

the waiter. But the dinner was grim enough. Now in turn she appealed to

his better nature and made extravagant statements of her plans to fool

him.

He was white and vicious by this time, and his anger quivered through

his pose of brilliant wickedness.

“I will go to the station,” she said. “I will go back—”

“The last train for anywhere leaves at 7.42.”

“I will appeal to the police—”

“You don’t know them.”

“I will tell these hotel people.”

“They will turn you out of doors. You’re in such a thoroughly false

position now. They don’t understand unconventionality, down here.”

She stamped her foot. “If I wander about the streets all night—” she

said.

“You who have never been out alone after dusk? Do you know what the

streets of a charming little holiday resort are like—”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I can go to the clergyman here.”

“He’s a charming man. Unmarried. And men are really more alike than you

think. And anyhow—”

“Well?”

“How _can_ you explain the last two nights to anyone now? The mischief

is done, Jessie.”

“You _cur_,” she said, and suddenly put her hand to her breast. He

thought she meant to faint, but she stood, with the colour gone from

her face.

“No,” he said. “I love you.”

“Love!” said she.

“Yes—love.”

“There are ways yet,” she said, after a pause.

“Not for you. You are too full of life and hope yet for, what is

it?—not the dark arch nor the black flowing river. Don’t you think of

it. You’ll only shirk it when the moment comes, and turn it all into

comedy.”

She turned round abruptly from him and stood looking out across the

parade at the shining sea over which the afterglow of day fled before

the rising moon. He maintained his attitude. The blinds were still up,

for she had told the waiter not to draw them. There was silence for

some moments.

At last he spoke in as persuasive a voice as he could summon. “Take it

sensibly, Jessie. Why should we, who have so much in common, quarrel

into melodrama? I swear I love you. You are all that is bright and

desirable to me. I am stronger than you, older; man to your woman. To

find _you_ too—conventional!”

She looked at him over her shoulder, and he noticed with a twinge of

delight how her little chin came out beneath the curve of her cheek.

“_Man!_” she said. “Man to _my_ woman! Do _men_ lie? Would a _man_ use

his five and thirty years’ experience to outwit a girl of seventeen?

Man to my woman indeed! That surely is the last insult!”

“Your repartee is admirable, Jessie. I should say they do, though—all

that and more also when their hearts were set on such a girl as

yourself. For God’s sake drop this shrewishness! Why should you be

so—difficult to me? Here am I with _my_ reputation, _my_ career, at

your feet. Look here, Jessie—on my honour, I will marry you—”

“God forbid,” she said, so promptly that she never learnt he had a

wife, even then. It occurred to him then for the first time, in the

flash of her retort, that she did not know he was married.

“’Tis only a pre-nuptial settlement,” he said, following that hint.

He paused.

“You must be sensible. The thing’s your own doing. Come out on the

beach now—the beach here is splendid, and the moon will soon be high.”

“_I won’t_” she said, stamping her foot.

“Well, well—”

“Oh! leave me alone. Let me think—”

“Think,” he said, “if you want to. It’s your cry always. But you can’t

save yourself by thinking, my dear girl. You can’t save yourself in any

way now. If saving it is—this parsimony—”

“Oh, go—go.”

“Very well. I will go. I will go and smoke a cigar. And think of you,

dear.... But do you think I should do all this if I did not care?”

“Go,” she whispered, without glancing round. She continued to stare out

of the window. He stood looking at her for a moment, with a strange

light in his eyes. He made a step towards her. “I _have_ you,” he said.

“You are mine. Netted—caught. But mine.” He would have gone up to her

and laid his hand upon her, but he did not dare to do that yet. “I have

you in my hand,” he said, “in my power. Do you hear—_Power!_”

She remained impassive. He stared at her for half a minute, and then,

with a superb gesture that was lost upon her, went to the door. Surely

the instinctive abasement of her sex before Strength was upon his side.

He told himself that his battle was won. She heard the handle move and

the catch click as the door closed behind him.

XXII.

And now without in the twilight behold Mr. Hoopdriver, his cheeks hot,

his eye bright! His brain is in a tumult. The nervous, obsequious

Hoopdriver, to whom I introduced you some days since, has undergone a

wonderful change. Ever since he lost that ‘spoor’ in Chichester, he has

been tormented by the most horrible visions of the shameful insults

that may be happening. The strangeness of new surroundings has been

working to strip off the habitual servile from him. Here was moonlight

rising over the memory of a red sunset, dark shadows and glowing orange

lamps, beauty somewhere mysteriously rapt away from him, tangible wrong

in a brown suit and an unpleasant face, flouting him. Mr. Hoopdriver

for the time, was in the world of Romance and Knight-errantry, divinely

forgetful of his social position or hers; forgetting, too, for the time

any of the wretched timidities that had tied him long since behind the

counter in his proper place. He was angry and adventurous. It was all

about him, this vivid drama he had fallen into, and it was eluding him.

He was far too grimly in earnest to pick up that lost thread and make a

play of it now. The man was living. He did not pose when he alighted at

the coffee tavern even, nor when he made his hasty meal.

As Bechamel crossed from the Vicuna towards the esplanade, Hoopdriver,

disappointed and exasperated, came hurrying round the corner from the

Temperance Hotel. At the sight of Bechamel, his heart jumped, and the

tension of his angry suspense exploded into, rather than gave place to,

an excited activity of mind. They were at the Vicuna, and she was there

now alone. It was the occasion he sought. But he would give Chance no

chance against him. He went back round the corner, sat down on the

seat, and watched Bechamel recede into the dimness up the esplanade,

before he got up and walked into the hotel entrance. “A lady cyclist in

grey,” he asked for, and followed boldly on the waiter’s heels. The

door of the dining-room was opening before he felt a qualm. And then

suddenly he was nearly minded to turn and run for it, and his features

seemed to him to be convulsed.

She turned with a start, and looked at him with something between

terror and hope in her eyes.

“Can I—have a few words—with you, alone?” said Mr. Hoopdriver,

controlling his breath with difficulty. She hesitated, and then

motioned the waiter to withdraw.

Mr. Hoopdriver watched the door shut. He had intended to step out into

the middle of the room, fold his arms and say, “You are in trouble. I

am a Friend. Trust me.” Instead of which he stood panting and then

spoke with sudden familiarity, hastily, guiltily: “Look here. I don’t

know what the juice is up, but I think there’s something wrong. Excuse

my intruding—if it isn’t so. I’ll do anything you like to help you out

of the scrape—if you’re in one. That’s my meaning, I believe. What can

I do? I would do anything to help you.”

Her brow puckered, as she watched him make, with infinite emotion, this

remarkable speech. “_You!_” she said. She was tumultuously weighing

possibilities in her mind, and he had scarcely ceased when she had made

her resolve.

She stepped a pace forward. “You are a gentleman,” she said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Can I trust you?”

She did not wait for his assurance. “I must leave this hotel at once.

Come here.”

She took his arm and led him to the window.

“You can just see the gate. It is still open. Through that are our

bicycles. Go down, get them out, and I will come down to you. Dare you?

“Get your bicycle out in the road?”

“Both. Mine alone is no good. At once. Dare you?”

“Which way?”

“Go out by the front door and round. I will follow in one minute.”

“Right!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, and went.

He had to get those bicycles. Had he been told to go out and kill

Bechamel he would have done it. His head was a maelstrom now. He walked

out of the hotel, along the front, and into the big, black-shadowed

coach yard. He looked round. There were no bicycles visible. Then a man

emerged from the dark, a short man in a short, black, shiny jacket.

Hoopdriver was caught. He made no attempt to turn and run for it. “I’ve

been giving your machines a wipe over, sir,” said the man, recognising

the suit, and touching his cap. Hoopdriver’s intelligence now was a

soaring eagle; he swooped on the situation at once. “That’s right,” he

said, and added, before the pause became marked, “Where is mine? I want

to look at the chain.”

The man led him into an open shed, and went fumbling for a lantern.

Hoopdriver moved the lady’s machine out of his way to the door, and

then laid hands on the man’s machine and wheeled it out of the shed

into the yard. The gate stood open and beyond was the pale road and a

clump of trees black in the twilight. He stooped and examined the chain

with trembling fingers. How was it to be done? Something behind the

gate seemed to flutter. The man must be got rid of anyhow.

“I say,” said Hoopdriver, with an inspiration, “can you get me a

screwdriver?”

The man simply walked across the shed, opened and shut a box, and came

up to the kneeling Hoopdriver with a screwdriver in his hand.

Hoopdriver felt himself a lost man. He took the screwdriver with a

tepid “Thanks,” and incontinently had another inspiration.

“I say,” he said again.

“Well?”

“This is miles too big.”

The man lit the lantern, brought it up to Hoopdriver and put it down on

the ground. “Want a smaller screwdriver?” he said.

Hoopdriver had his handkerchief out and sneezed a prompt _atichew_. It

is the orthodox thing when you wish to avoid recognition. “As small as

you have,” he said, out of his pocket handkerchief.

“I ain’t got none smaller than that,” said the ostler.

“Won’t do, really,” said Hoopdriver, still wallowing in his

handkerchief.

“I’ll see wot they got in the ’ouse, if you like, sir,” said the man.

“If you would,” said Hoopdriver. And as the man’s heavily nailed boots

went clattering down the yard, Hoopdriver stood up, took a noiseless

step to the lady’s machine, laid trembling hands on its handle and

saddle, and prepared for a rush.

The scullery door opened momentarily and sent a beam of warm, yellow

light up the road, shut again behind the man, and forthwith Hoopdriver

rushed the machines towards the gate. A dark grey form came fluttering

to meet him. “Give me this,” she said, “and bring yours.”

He passed the thing to her, touched her hand in the darkness, ran back,

seized Bechamel’s machine, and followed.

The yellow light of the scullery door suddenly flashed upon the cobbles

again. It was too late now to do anything but escape. He heard the

ostler shout behind him, and came into the road. She was up and dim

already. He got into the saddle without a blunder. In a moment the

ostler was in the gateway with a full-throated “_Hi!_! sir! That ain’t

allowed;” and Hoopdriver was overtaking the Young Lady in Grey. For

some moments the earth seemed alive with shouts of, “Stop ’em!” and the

shadows with ambuscades of police. The road swept round, and they were

riding out of sight of the hotel, and behind dark hedges, side by side.

She was weeping with excitement as he overtook her. “Brave,” she said,

“brave!” and he ceased to feel like a hunted thief. He looked over his

shoulder and about him, and saw that they were already out of

Bognor—for the Vicuna stands at the very westernmost extremity of the

sea front—and riding on a fair wide road.

XXIII.

The ostler (being a fool) rushed violently down the road vociferating

after them. Then he returned panting to the Vicuna Hotel, and finding a

group of men outside the entrance, who wanted to know what was _up_,

stopped to give them the cream of the adventure. That gave the

fugitives five minutes. Then pushing breathlessly into the bar, he had

to make it clear to the barmaid what the matter was, and the ‘gov’nor’

being out, they spent some more precious time wondering ‘what—_ever_’

was to be done! in which the two customers returning from outside

joined with animation. There were also moral remarks and other

irrelevant contributions. There were conflicting ideas of telling the

police and pursuing the flying couple on a horse. That made ten

minutes. Then Stephen, the waiter, who had shown Hoopdriver up, came

down and lit wonderful lights and started quite a fresh discussion by

the simple question “_Which?_?” That turned ten minutes into a quarter

of an hour. And in the midst of this discussion, making a sudden and

awestricken silence, appeared Bechamel in the hall beyond the bar,

walked with a resolute air to the foot of the staircase, and passed out

of sight. You conceive the backward pitch of that exceptionally shaped

cranium? Incredulous eyes stared into one another’s in the bar, as his

paces, muffled by the stair carpet, went up to the landing, turned,

reached the passage and walked into the dining-room overhead.

“It wasn’t that one at all, miss,” said the ostler, “I’d _swear_.”

“Well, that’s Mr. Beaumont,” said the barmaid, “—anyhow.”

Their conversation hung comatose in the air, switched up by Bechamel.

They listened together. His feet stopped. Turned. Went out of the

diningroom. Down the passage to the bedroom. Stopped again.

“Poor chap!” said the barmaid. “She’s a wicked woman!”

“Sssh!” said Stephen.

After a pause Bechamel went back to the dining-room. They heard a chair

creak under him. Interlude of conversational eyebrows.

“I’m going up,” said Stephen, “to break the melancholy news to him.”

Bechamel looked up from a week-old newspaper as, without knocking,

Stephen entered. Bechamel’s face suggested a different expectation.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said Stephen, with a diplomatic cough.

“Well?” said Bechamel, wondering suddenly if Jessie had kept some of

her threats. If so, he was in for an explanation. But he had it ready.

She was a monomaniac. “Leave me alone with her,” he would say; “I know

how to calm her.”

“Mrs. Beaumont,” said Stephen.

“_Well?_”

“Has gone.”

He rose with a fine surprise. “Gone!” he said with a half laugh.

“Gone, sir. On her bicycle.”

“On her bicycle! Why?”

“She went, sir, with Another Gentleman.”

This time Bechamel was really startled. “An—other Gentlemen! _Who?_”

“Another gentleman in brown, sir. Went into the yard, sir, got out the

two bicycles, sir, and went off, sir—about twenty minutes ago.”

Bechamel stood with his eyes round and his knuckle on his hips.

Stephen, watching him with immense enjoyment, speculated whether this

abandoned husband would weep or curse, or rush off at once in furious

pursuit. But as yet he seemed merely stunned.

“Brown clothes?” he said. “And fairish?”

“A little like yourself, sir—in the dark. The ostler, sir, Jim Duke—”

Bechamel laughed awry. Then, with infinite fervour, he said—But let us

put in blank cartridge—he said, “———!”

“I might have thought!”

He flung himself into the armchair.

“Damn her,” said Bechamel, for all the world like a common man. “I’ll

chuck this infernal business! They’ve gone, eigh?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, let ’em GO,” said Bechamel, making a memorable saying. “Let ’em

GO. Who cares? And I wish him luck. And bring me some Bourbon as fast

as you can, there’s a good chap. I’ll take that, and then I’ll have

another look round Bognor before I turn in.”

Stephen was too surprised to say anything but “Bourbon, sir?”

“Go on,” said Bechamel. “Damn you!”

Stephen’s sympathies changed at once. “Yessir,” he murmured, fumbling

for the door handle, and left the room, marvelling. Bechamel, having in

this way satisfied his sense of appearances, and comported himself as a

Pagan should, so soon as the waiter’s footsteps had passed, vented the

cream of his feelings in a stream of blasphemous indecency. Whether his

wife or _her_ stepmother had sent the detective, _she_ had evidently

gone off with him, and that little business was over. And he was here,

stranded and sold, an ass, and as it were, the son of many generations

of asses. And his only ray of hope was that it seemed more probable,

after all, that the girl had escaped through her stepmother. In which

case the business might be hushed up yet, and the evil hour of

explanation with his wife indefinitely postponed. Then abruptly the

image of that lithe figure in grey knickerbockers went frisking across

his mind again, and he reverted to his blasphemies. He started up in a

gusty frenzy with a vague idea of pursuit, and incontinently sat down

again with a concussion that stirred the bar below to its depths. He

banged the arms of the chair with his fist, and swore again. “Of all

the accursed fools that were ever spawned,” he was chanting, “I,

Bechamel—” when with an abrupt tap and prompt opening of the door,

Stephen entered with the Bourbon.

XXIV.

THE MOONLIGHT RIDE

And so the twenty minutes’ law passed into an infinity. We leave the

wicked Bechamel clothing himself with cursing as with a garment,—the

wretched creature has already sufficiently sullied our modest but

truthful pages,—we leave the eager little group in the bar of the

Vicuna Hotel, we leave all Bognor as we have left all Chichester and

Midhurst and Haslemere and Guildford and Ripley and Putney, and follow

this dear fool of a Hoopdriver of ours and his Young Lady in Grey out

upon the moonlight road. How they rode! How their hearts beat together

and their breath came fast, and how every shadow was anticipation and

every noise pursuit! For all that flight Mr. Hoopdriver was in the

world of Romance. Had a policeman intervened because their lamps were

not lit, Hoopdriver had cut him down and ridden on, after the fashion

of a hero born. Had Bechamel arisen in the way with rapiers for a duel,

Hoopdriver had fought as one to whom Agincourt was a reality and

drapery a dream. It was Rescue, Elopement, Glory! And she by the side

of him! He had seen her face in shadow, with the morning sunlight

tangled in her hair, he had seen her sympathetic with that warm light

in her face, he had seen her troubled and her eyes bright with tears.

But what light is there lighting a face like hers, to compare with the

soft glamour of the midsummer moon?

The road turned northward, going round through the outskirts of Bognor,

in one place dark and heavy under a thick growth of trees, then amidst

villas again, some warm and lamplit, some white and sleeping in the

moonlight; then between hedges, over which they saw broad wan meadows

shrouded in a low-lying mist. They scarcely heeded whither they rode at

first, being only anxious to get away, turning once westward when the

spire of Chichester cathedral rose suddenly near them out of the dewy

night, pale and intricate and high. They rode, speaking little, just a

rare word now and then, at a turning, at a footfall, at a roughness in

the road.

She seemed to be too intent upon escape to give much thought to him,

but after the first tumult of the adventure, as flight passed into mere

steady riding his mind became an enormous appreciation of the position.

The night was a warm white silence save for the subtile running of

their chains. He looked sideways at her as she sat beside him with her

ankles gracefully ruling the treadles. Now the road turned westward,

and she was a dark grey outline against the shimmer of the moon; and

now they faced northwards, and the soft cold light passed caressingly

over her hair and touched her brow and cheek.

There is a magic quality in moonshine; it touches all that is sweet and

beautiful, and the rest of the night is hidden. It has created the

fairies, whom the sunlight kills, and fairyland rises again in our

hearts at the sight of it, the voices of the filmy route, and their

faint, soul-piercing melodies. By the moonlight every man, dull clod

though he be by day, tastes something of Endymion, takes something of

the youth and strength of Endymion, and sees the dear white goddess

shining at him from his Lady’s eyes. The firm substantial daylight

things become ghostly and elusive, the hills beyond are a sea of

unsubstantial texture, the world a visible spirit, the spiritual within

us rises out of its darkness, loses something of its weight and body,

and swims up towards heaven. This road that was a mere rutted white

dust, hot underfoot, blinding to the eye, is now a soft grey silence,

with the glitter of a crystal grain set starlike in its silver here and

there. Overhead, riding serenely through the spacious blue, is the

mother of the silence, she who has spiritualised the world, alone save

for two attendant steady shining stars. And in silence under her benign

influence, under the benediction of her light, rode our two wanderers

side by side through the transfigured and transfiguring night.

Nowhere was the moon shining quite so brightly as in Mr. Hoopdriver’s

skull. At the turnings of the road he made his decisions with an air of

profound promptitude (and quite haphazard). “The Right,” he would say.

Or again “The Left,” as one who knew. So it was that in the space of an

hour they came abruptly down a little lane, full tilt upon the sea.

Grey beach to the right of them and to the left, and a little white

cottage fast asleep inland of a sleeping fishing-boat. “Hullo!” said

Mr. Hoopdriver, _sotto voce_. They dismounted abruptly. Stunted oaks

and thorns rose out of the haze of moonlight that was tangled in the

hedge on either side.

“You are safe,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, sweeping off his cap with an air

and bowing courtly.

“Where are we?”

“_Safe_.”

“But _where?_”

“Chichester Harbour.” He waved his arm seaward as though it was a goal.

“Do you think they will follow us?”

“We have turned and turned again.”

It seemed to Hoopdriver that he heard her sob. She stood dimly there,

holding her machine, and he, holding his, could go no nearer to her to

see if she sobbed for weeping or for want of breath. “What are we to do

now?” her voice asked.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“I will do what has to be done.”

The two black figures in the broken light were silent for a space. “Do

you know,” she said, “I am not afraid of you. I am sure you are honest

to me. And I do not even know your name!”

He was taken with a sudden shame of his homely patronymic. “It’s an

ugly name,” he said. “But you are right in trusting me. I would—I would

do anything for you.... This is nothing.”

She caught at her breath. She did not care to ask why. But compared

with Bechamel!—“We take each other on trust,” she said. “Do you want to

know—how things are with me?”

“That man,” she went on, after the assent of his listening silence,

“promised to help and protect me. I was unhappy at home—never mind why.

A stepmother—Idle, unoccupied, hindered, cramped, that is enough,

perhaps. Then he came into my life, and talked to me of art and

literature, and set my brain on fire. I wanted to come out into the

world, to be a human being—not a thing in a hutch. And he—”

“I know,” said Hoopdriver.

“And now here I am—”

“I will do anything,” said Hoopdriver.

She thought. “You cannot imagine my stepmother. No! I could not

describe her—”

“I am entirely at your service. I will help you with all my power.”

“I have lost an Illusion and found a Knight-errant.” She spoke of

Bechamel as the Illusion.

Mr. Hoopdriver felt flattered. But he had no adequate answer.

“I’m thinking,” he said, full of a rapture of protective

responsibility, “what we had best be doing. You are tired, you know.

And we can’t wander all night—after the day we’ve had.”

“That was Chichester we were near?” she asked.

“If,” he meditated, with a tremble in his voice, “you would make _me_

your brother, _Miss Beaumont_.”

“Yes?”

“We could stop there together—”

She took a minute to answer. “I am going to light these lamps,” said

Hoopdriver. He bent down to his own, and struck a match on his shoe.

She looked at his face in its light, grave and intent. How could she

ever have thought him common or absurd?

“But you must tell me your name—brother,” she said,

“Er—Carrington,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, after a momentary pause. Who

would be Hoopdriver on a night like this?

“But the Christian name?”

“Christian name? _My_ Christian name. Well—Chris.” He snapped his lamp

and stood up. “If you will hold my machine, I will light yours,” he

said.

She came round obediently and took his machine, and for a moment they

stood face to face. “My name, brother Chris,” she said, “is Jessie.”

He looked into her eyes, and his excitement seemed arrested.

“_Jessie_,” he repeated slowly. The mute emotion of his face affected

her strangely. She had to speak. “It’s not such a very wonderful name,

is it?” she said, with a laugh to break the intensity.

He opened his mouth and shut it again, and, with a sudden wincing of

his features, abruptly turned and bent down to open the lantern in

front of her machine. She looked down at him, almost kneeling in front

of her, with an unreasonable approbation in her eyes. It was, as I have

indicated, the hour and season of the full moon.

XXV.

Mr. Hoopdriver conducted the rest of that night’s journey with the same

confident dignity as before, and it was chiefly by good luck and the

fact that most roads about a town converge thereupon, that Chichester

was at last attained. It seemed at first as though everyone had gone to

bed, but the Red Hotel still glowed yellow and warm. It was the first

time Hoopdriver had dared the mysteries of a ‘first-class’ hotel. But

that night he was in the mood to dare anything.

“So you found your Young Lady at last,” said the ostler of the Red

Hotel; for it chanced he was one of those of whom Hoopdriver had made

inquiries in the afternoon.

“Quite a misunderstanding,” said Hoopdriver, with splendid readiness.

“My sister had gone to Bognor. But I brought her back here. I’ve took a

fancy to this place. And the moonlight’s simply dee-vine.”

“We’ve had supper, thenks, and we’re tired,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “I

suppose you won’t take anything,—Jessie?”

The glory of having her, even as a sister! and to call her Jessie like

that! But he carried it off splendidly, as he felt himself bound to

admit. “Good-night, Sis,” he said, “and pleasant dreams. I’ll just ’ave

a look at this paper before I turn in.” But this was living indeed! he

told himself.

So gallantly did Mr. Hoopdriver comport himself up to the very edge of

the Most Wonderful Day of all. It had begun early, you will remember,

with a vigil in a little sweetstuff shop next door to the Angel at

Midhurst. But to think of all the things that had happened since then!

He caught himself in the middle of a yawn, pulled out his watch, saw

the time was halfpast eleven, and marched off, with a fine sense of

heroism, bedward.

XXVI.

THE SURBITON INTERLUDE

And here, thanks to the glorious institution of sleep, comes a break in

the narrative again. These absurd young people are safely tucked away

now, their heads full of glowing nonsense, indeed, but the course of

events at any rate is safe from any fresh developments through their

activities for the next eight hours or more. They are both sleeping

healthily you will perhaps be astonished to hear. Here is the girl—what

girls are coming to nowadays only Mrs. Lynn Linton can tell!—in company

with an absolute stranger, of low extraction and uncertain accent,

unchaperoned and unabashed; indeed, now she fancies she is safe, she

is, if anything, a little proud of her own share in these transactions.

Then this Mr. Hoopdriver of yours, roseate idiot that he is! is in

illegal possession of a stolen bicycle, a stolen young lady, and two

stolen names, established with them in an hotel that is quite beyond

his means, and immensely proud of himself in a somnolent way for these

incomparable follies. There are occasions when a moralising novelist

can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course. For

all Hoopdriver knows or cares he may be locked up the very first thing

to-morrow morning for the rape of the cycle. Then in Bognor, let alone

that melancholy vestige, Bechamel (with whom our dealings are, thank

Goodness! over), there is a Coffee Tavern with a steak Mr. Hoopdriver

ordered, done to a cinder long ago, his American-cloth parcel in a

bedroom, and his own proper bicycle, by way of guarantee, carefully

locked up in the hayloft. To-morrow he will be a Mystery, and they will

be looking for his body along the sea front. And so far we have never

given a glance at the desolate home in Surbiton, familiar to you no

doubt through the medium of illustrated interviews, where the unhappy

stepmother—

That stepmother, it must be explained, is quite well known to you. That

is a little surprise I have prepared for you. She is ‘Thomas

Plantagenet,’ the gifted authoress of that witty and daring book, “A

Soul Untrammelled,” and quite an excellent woman in her way,—only it is

such a crooked way. Her real name is Milton. She is a widow and a

charming one, only ten years older than Jessie, and she is always

careful to dedicate her more daring works to the ‘sacred memory of my

husband’ to show that there’s nothing personal, you know, in the

matter. Considering her literary reputation (she was always speaking of

herself as one ‘martyred for truth,’ because the critics advertised her

written indecorums in column long ‘slates’),—considering her literary

reputation, I say, she was one of the most respectable women it is

possible to imagine. She furnished correctly, dressed correctly, had

severe notions of whom she might meet, went to church, and even at

times took the sacrament in some esoteric spirit. And Jessie she

brought up so carefully that she never even let her read “A Soul

Untrammelled.” Which, therefore, naturally enough, Jessie did, and went

on from that to a feast of advanced literature. Mrs. Milton not only

brought up Jessie carefully, but very slowly, so that at seventeen she

was still a clever schoolgirl (as you have seen her) and quite in the

background of the little literary circle of unimportant celebrities

which ‘Thomas Plantagenet’ adorned. Mrs. Milton knew Bechamel’s

reputation of being a dangerous man; but then bad men are not bad

women, and she let him come to her house to show she was not afraid—she

took no account of Jessie. When the elopement came, therefore, it was a

double disappointment to her, for she perceived his hand by a kind of

instinct. She did the correct thing. The correct thing, as you know, is

to take hansom cabs, regardless of expense, and weep and say you do not

know _what_ to do, round the circle of your confidential friends. She

could not have ridden nor wept more had Jessie been her own

daughter—she showed the properest spirit. And she not only showed it,

but felt it.

Mrs. Milton, as a successful little authoress and still more successful

widow of thirty-two,—“Thomas Plantagenet is a charming woman,” her

reviewers used to write invariably, even if they spoke ill of

her,—found the steady growth of Jessie into womanhood an unmitigated

nuisance and had been willing enough to keep her in the background. And

Jessie—who had started this intercourse at fourteen with abstract

objections to stepmothers—had been active enough in resenting this.

Increasing rivalry and antagonism had sprung up between them, until

they could engender quite a vivid hatred from a dropped hairpin or the

cutting of a book with a sharpened knife. There is very little

deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness

gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it

shows a different nature. And when the disaster came, Mrs. Milton’s

remorse for their gradual loss of sympathy and her share in the losing

of it, was genuine enough.

You may imagine the comfort she got from her friends, and how West

Kensington and Notting Hill and Hampstead, the literary suburbs, those

decent penitentiaries of a once Bohemian calling, hummed with the

business, Her ‘Men’—as a charming literary lady she had, of course, an

organised corps—were immensely excited, and were sympathetic; helpfully

energetic, suggestive, alert, as their ideals of their various

dispositions required them to be. “Any news of Jessie?” was the

pathetic opening of a dozen melancholy but interesting conversations.

To her Men she was not perhaps so damp as she was to her women friends,

but in a quiet way she was even more touching. For three days,

Wednesday that is, Thursday, and Friday, nothing was heard of the

fugitives. It was known that Jessie, wearing a patent costume with

buttonup skirts, and mounted on a diamond frame safety with Dunlops,

and a loofah covered saddle, had ridden forth early in the morning,

taking with her about two pounds seven shillings in money, and a grey

touring case packed, and there, save for a brief note to her

stepmother,—a declaration of independence, it was said, an assertion of

her Ego containing extensive and very annoying quotations from “A Soul

Untrammelled,” and giving no definite intimation of her plans—knowledge

ceased. That note was shown to few, and then only in the strictest

confidence.

But on Friday evening late came a breathless Man Friend, Widgery, a

correspondent of hers, who had heard of her trouble among the first. He

had been touring in Sussex,—his knapsack was still on his back,—and he

testified hurriedly that at a place called Midhurst, in the bar of an

hotel called the Angel, he had heard from a barmaid a vivid account of

a Young Lady in Grey. Descriptions tallied. But who was the man in

brown? “The poor, misguided girl! I must go to her at once,” she said,

choking, and rising with her hand to her heart.

“It’s impossible to-night. There are no more trains. I looked on my

way.”

“A mother’s love,” she said. “I bear her _that_.”

“I know you do.” He spoke with feeling, for no one admired his

photographs of scenery more than Mrs. Milton. “It’s more than she

deserves.”

“Oh, don’t speak unkindly of her! She has been misled.”

It was really very friendly of him. He declared he was only sorry his

news ended there. Should he follow them, and bring her back? He had

come to her because he knew of her anxiety. “It is _good_ of you,” she

said, and quite instinctively took and pressed his hand. “And to think

of that poor girl—tonight! It’s dreadful.” She looked into the fire

that she had lit when he came in, the warm light fell upon her dark

purple dress, and left her features in a warm shadow. She looked such a

slight, frail thing to be troubled so. “We must follow her.” Her

resolution seemed magnificent. “I have no one to go with me.”

“He must marry her,” said the man.

“She has no friends. We have no one. After all—Two women.—So helpless.”

And this fair-haired little figure was the woman that people who knew

her only from her books, called bold, prurient even! Simply because she

was great-hearted—intellectual. He was overcome by the unspeakable

pathos of her position.

“Mrs. Milton,” he said. “Hetty!”

She glanced at him. The overflow was imminent. “Not now,” she said,

“not now. I must find her first.”

“Yes,” he said with intense emotion. (He was one of those big, fat men

who feel deeply.) “But let me help you. At least let me help you.”

“But can you spare time?” she said. “For _me_.”

“For you—”

“But what can I do? what can _we_ do?”

“Go to Midhurst. Follow her on. Trace her. She was there on Thursday

night, last night. She cycled out of the town. Courage!” he said. “We

will save her yet!”

She put out her hand and pressed his again.

“Courage!” he repeated, finding it so well received.

There were alarms and excursions without. She turned her back to the

fire, and he sat down suddenly in the big armchair, which suited his

dimensions admirably. Then the door opened, and the girl showed in

Dangle, who looked curiously from one to the other. There was emotion

here, he had heard the armchair creaking, and Mrs. Milton, whose face

was flushed, displayed a suspicious alacrity to explain. “You, too,”

she said, “are one of my good friends. And we have news of her at

last.”

It was decidedly an advantage to Widgery, but Dangle determined to show

himself a man of resource. In the end he, too, was accepted for the

Midhurst Expedition, to the intense disgust of Widgery; and young

Phipps, a callow youth of few words, faultless collars, and fervent

devotion, was also enrolled before the evening was out. They would

scour the country, all three of them. She appeared to brighten up a

little, but it was evident she was profoundly touched. She did not know

what she had done to merit such friends. Her voice broke a little, she

moved towards the door, and young Phipps, who was a youth of action

rather than of words, sprang and opened it—proud to be first.

“She is sorely troubled,” said Dangle to Widgery. “We must do what we

can for her.”

“She is a wonderful woman,” said Dangle. “So subtle, so intricate, so

many faceted. She feels this deeply.”

Young Phipps said nothing, but he felt the more.

And yet they say the age of chivalry is dead!

But this is only an Interlude, introduced to give our wanderers time to

refresh themselves by good, honest sleeping. For the present,

therefore, we will not concern ourselves with the starting of the

Rescue Party, nor with Mrs. Milton’s simple but becoming grey dress,

with the healthy Widgery’s Norfolk jacket and thick boots, with the

slender Dangle’s energetic bearing, nor with the wonderful chequerings

that set off the legs of the golf-suited Phipps. They are after us. In

a little while they will be upon us. You must imagine as you best can

the competitive raidings at Midhurst of Widgery, Dangle, and Phipps.

How Widgery was great at questions, and Dangle good at inference, and

Phipps so conspicuously inferior in everything that he felt it, and

sulked with Mrs. Milton most of the day, after the manner of your

callow youth the whole world over. Mrs. Milton stopped at the Angel and

was very sad and charming and intelligent, and Widgery paid the bill in

the afternoon of Saturday, Chichester was attained. But by that time

our fugitives—As you shall immediately hear.

XXVII.

THE AWAKENING OF MR. HOOPDRIVER

Mr. Hoopdriver stirred on his pillow, opened his eyes, and, staring

unmeaningly, yawned. The bedclothes were soft and pleasant. He turned

the peaked nose that overrides the insufficient moustache, up to the

ceiling, a pinkish projection over the billow of white. You might see

it wrinkle as he yawned again, and then became quiet. So matters

remained for a space. Very slowly recollection returned to him. Then a

shock of indeterminate brown hair appeared, and first one watery grey

eye a-wondering, and then two; the bed upheaved, and you had him, his

thin neck projecting abruptly from the clothes he held about him, his

face staring about the room. He held the clothes about him, I hope I

may explain, because his night-shirt was at Bognor in an American-cloth

packet, derelict. He yawned a third time, rubbed his eyes, smacked his

lips. He was recalling almost everything now. The pursuit, the hotel,

the tremulous daring of his entry, the swift adventure of the inn yard,

the moonlight—Abruptly he threw the clothes back and rose into a

sitting position on the edge of the bed. Without was the noise of

shutters being unfastened and doors unlocked, and the passing of hoofs

and wheels in the street. He looked at his watch. Half-past six. He

surveyed the sumptuous room again.

“Lord!” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “It wasn’t a dream, after all.”

“I wonder what they charge for these Juicèd rooms!” said Mr.

Hoopdriver, nursing one rosy foot.

He became meditative, tugging at his insufficient moustache. Suddenly

he gave vent to a noiseless laugh. “What a rush it was! Rushed in and

off with his girl right under his nose. Planned it well too. Talk of

highway robbery! Talk of brigands! Up and off! How juicèd _sold_ he

must be feeling! It was a shave too—in the coach yard!”

Suddenly he became silent. Abruptly his eyebrows rose and his jaw fell.

“I sa-a-ay!” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

He had never thought of it before. Perhaps you will understand the

whirl he had been in overnight. But one sees things clearer in the

daylight. “I’m hanged if I haven’t been and stolen a blessed bicycle.”

“Who cares?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, presently, and his face supplied the

answer.

Then he thought of the Young Lady in Grey again, and tried to put a

more heroic complexion on the business. But of an early morning, on an

empty stomach (as with characteristic coarseness, medical men put it)

heroics are of a more difficult growth than by moonlight. Everything

had seemed exceptionally fine and brilliant, but quite natural, the

evening before.

Mr. Hoopdriver reached out his hand, took his Norfolk jacket, laid it

over his knees, and took out the money from the little ticket pocket.

“Fourteen and six-half,” he said, holding the coins in his left hand

and stroking his chin with his right. He verified, by patting, the

presence of a pocketbook in the breast pocket. “Five, fourteen,

six-half,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Left.”

With the Norfolk jacket still on his knees, he plunged into another

silent meditation. “That wouldn’t matter,” he said. “It’s the bike’s

the bother.

“No good going back to Bognor.

“Might send it back by carrier, of course. Thanking him for the loan.

Having no further use—” Mr. Hoopdriver chuckled and lapsed into the

silent concoction of a delightfully impudent letter. “Mr. J. Hoopdriver

presents his compliments.” But the grave note reasserted itself.

“Might trundle back there in an hour, of course, and exchange them.

_My_ old crock’s so blessed shabby. He’s sure to be spiteful too. Have

me run in, perhaps. Then she’d be in just the same old fix, only worse.

You see, I’m her Knight-errant. It complicates things so.”

His eye, wandering loosely, rested on the sponge bath. “What the juice

do they want with cream pans in a bedroom?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, _en

passant_.

“Best thing we can do is to set out of here as soon as possible,

anyhow. I suppose she’ll go home to her friends. That bicycle is a

juicy nuisance, anyhow. Juicy nuisance!”

He jumped to his feet with a sudden awakening of energy, to proceed

with his toilet. Then with a certain horror he remembered that the

simple necessaries of that process were at Bognor! “Lord!” he remarked,

and whistled silently for a space. “Rummy go! profit and loss; profit,

one sister with bicycle complete, wot offers?—cheap for tooth and ’air

brush, vests, night-shirt, stockings, and sundries.

“Make the best of it,” and presently, when it came to hair-brushing, he

had to smooth his troubled locks with his hands. It was a poor result.

“Sneak out and get a shave, I suppose, and buy a brush and so on. Chink

again! Beard don’t show much.”

He ran his hand over his chin, looked at himself steadfastly for some

time, and curled his insufficient moustache up with some care. Then he

fell a-meditating on his beauty. He considered himself, three-quarter

face, left and right. An expression of distaste crept over his

features. “Looking won’t alter it, Hoopdriver,” he remarked. “You’re a

weedy customer, my man. Shoulders narrow. Skimpy, anyhow.”

He put his knuckles on the toilet table and regarded himself with his

chin lifted in the air. “Good Lord!” he said. “_What_ a neck! Wonder

why I got such a thundering lump there.”

He sat down on the bed, his eye still on the glass. “If I’d been

exercised properly, if I’d been fed reasonable, if I hadn’t been shoved

out of a silly school into a silly shop—But there! the old folks didn’t

know no better. The schoolmaster ought to have. But he didn’t, poor old

fool!—Still, when it comes to meeting a girl like this—It’s ’_ard_.

“I wonder what Adam’d think of me—as a specimen. Civilisation, eigh?

Heir of the ages! I’m nothing. I know nothing. I can’t do

anything—sketch a bit. Why wasn’t I made an artist?

“Beastly cheap, after all, this suit does look, in the sunshine.”

“No good, Hoopdriver. Anyhow, you don’t tell yourself any lies about

it. Lovers ain’t your game,—anyway. But there’s other things yet. You

can help the young lady, and you will—I suppose she’ll be going

home—And that business of the bicycle’s to see to, too, my man.

_Forward_, Hoopdriver! If you ain’t a beauty, that’s no reason why you

should stop and be copped, is it?”

And having got back in this way to a gloomy kind of self-satisfaction,

he had another attempt at his hair preparatory to leaving his room and

hurrying on breakfast, for an early departure. While breakfast was

preparing he wandered out into South Street and refurnished himself

with the elements of luggage again. “No expense to be spared,” he

murmured, disgorging the half-sovereign.

XXVIII.

THE DEPARTURE FROM CHICHESTER

He caused his ‘sister’ to be called repeatedly, and when she came down,

explained with a humorous smile his legal relationship to the bicycle

in the yard. “Might be disagreeable, y’ know.” His anxiety was obvious

enough. “Very well,” she said (quite friendly); “hurry breakfast, and

we’ll ride out. I want to talk things over with you.” The girl seemed

more beautiful than ever after the night’s sleep; her hair in comely

dark waves from her forehead, her ungauntleted finger-tips pink and

cool. And how decided she was! Breakfast was a nervous ceremony,

conversation fraternal but thin; the waiter overawed him, and he was

cowed by a multiplicity of forks. But she called him “Chris.” They

discussed their route over his sixpenny county map for the sake of

talking, but avoided a decision in the presence of the attendant. The

five-pound note was changed for the bill, and through Hoopdriver’s

determination to be quite the gentleman, the waiter and chambermaid got

half a crown each and the ostler a florin. “’Olidays,” said the ostler

to himself, without gratitude. The public mounting of the bicycles in

the street was a moment of trepidation. A policeman actually stopped

and watched them from the opposite kerb. Suppose him to come across and

ask: “Is that your bicycle, sir?” Fight? Or drop it and run? It was a

time of bewildering apprehension, too, going through the streets of the

town, so that a milk cart barely escaped destruction under Mr.

Hoopdriver’s chancy wheel. That recalled him to a sense of erratic

steering, and he pulled himself together. In the lanes he breathed

freer, and a less formal conversation presently began.

“You’ve ridden out of Chichester in a great hurry,” said Jessie.

“Well, the fact of it is, I’m worried, just a little bit. About this

machine.”

“Of course,” she said. “I had forgotten that. But where are we going?”

“Jest a turning or two more, if you don’t mind,” said Hoopdriver.

“Jest a mile or so. I have to think of you, you know. I should feel

more easy. If we was locked up, you know—Not that I should mind on my

own account—”

They rode with a streaky, grey sea coming and going on their left hand.

Every mile they put between themselves and Chichester Mr. Hoopdriver

felt a little less conscience-stricken, and a little more of the

gallant desperado. Here he was riding on a splendid machine with a

Slap-up girl beside him. What would they think of it in the Emporium if

any of them were to see him? He imagined in detail the astonishment of

Miss Isaacs and of Miss Howe. “Why! It’s Mr. Hoopdriver,” Miss Isaacs

would say. “_Never!_” emphatically from Miss Howe. Then he played with

Briggs, and then tried the ‘G.V.’ in a shay. “Fancy introducing ’em to

her—My sister _pro tem_.” He was her brother Chris—Chris what?—Confound

it! Harringon, Hartington—something like that. Have to keep off that

topic until he could remember. Wish he’d told her the truth now—almost.

He glanced at her. She was riding with her eyes straight ahead of her.

Thinking. A little perplexed, perhaps, she seemed. He noticed how well

she rode and that she rode with her lips closed—a thing he could never

manage.

Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind came round to the future. What was she going to

do? What were they both going to do? His thoughts took a graver colour.

He had rescued her. This was fine, manly rescue work he was engaged

upon. She ought to go home, in spite of that stepmother. He must insist

gravely but firmly upon that. She was the spirited sort, of course, but

still—Wonder if she had any money? Wonder what the second-class fare

from Havant to London is? Of course he would have to pay that—it was

the regular thing, he being a gentleman. Then should he take her home?

He began to rough in a moving sketch of the return. The stepmother,

repentant of her indescribable cruelties, would be present,—even these

rich people have their troubles,—probably an uncle or two. The footman

would announce, Mr.—(bother that name!) and Miss Milton. Then two women

weeping together, and a knightly figure in the background dressed in a

handsome Norfolk jacket, still conspicuously new. He would conceal his

feeling until the very end. Then, leaving, he would pause in the

doorway in such an attitude as Mr. George Alexander might assume, and

say, slowly and dwindlingly: “Be kind to her—_be_ kind to her,” and so

depart, heartbroken to the meanest intelligence. But that was a matter

for the future. He would have to begin discussing the return soon.

There was no traffic along the road, and he came up beside her (he had

fallen behind in his musing). She began to talk. “Mr. Denison,” she

began, and then, doubtfully, “That _is_ your name? I’m very stupid—”

“It is,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. (Denison, was it? Denison, Denison,

Denison. What was she saying?)

“I wonder how far you are willing to help me?” Confoundedly hard to

answer a question like that on the spur of the moment, without steering

wildly. “You may rely—” said Mr. Hoopdriver, recovering from a violent

wabble. “I can assure you—I want to help you very much. Don’t consider

me at all. Leastways, consider me entirely at your service.” (Nuisance

not to be able to say this kind of thing right.)

“You see, I am so awkwardly situated.”

“If I can only help you—you will make me very happy—” There was a

pause. Round a bend in the road they came upon a grassy space between

hedge and road, set with yarrow and meadowsweet, where a felled tree

lay among the green. There she dismounted, and propping her machine

against a stone, sat down. “Here, we can talk,” she said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, expectant.

She answered after a little while, sitting, elbow on knee, with her

chin in her hand, and looking straight in front of her. “I don’t know—I

am resolved to Live my Own Life.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Naturally.”

“I want to Live, and I want to see what life means. I want to learn.

Everyone is hurrying me, everything is hurrying me; I want time to

think.”

Mr. Hoopdriver was puzzled, but admiring. It was wonderful how clear

and ready her words were. But then one might speak well with a throat

and lips like that. He knew he was inadequate, but he tried to meet the

occasion. “If you let them rush you into anything you might repent of,

of course you’d be very silly.”

“Don’t _you_ want to learn?” she asked.

“I was wondering only this morning,” he began, and stopped.

She was too intent upon her own thoughts to notice this insufficiency.

“I find myself in life, and it terrifies me. I seem to be like a little

speck, whirling on a wheel, suddenly caught up. ‘What am I here for?’ I

ask. Simply to be here at a time—I asked it a week ago, I asked it

yesterday, and I ask it to-day. And little things happen and the days

pass. My stepmother takes me shopping, people come to tea, there is a

new play to pass the time, or a concert, or a novel. The wheels of the

world go on turning, turning. It is horrible. I want to do a miracle

like Joshua and stop the whirl until I have fought it out. At home—It’s

impossible.”

Mr. Hoopdriver stroked his moustache. “It _is_ so,” he said in a

meditative tone. “Things _will_ go on,” he said. The faint breath of

summer stirred the trees, and a bunch of dandelion puff lifted among

the meadowsweet and struck and broke into a dozen separate threads

against his knee. They flew on apart, and sank, as the breeze fell,

among the grass: some to germinate, some to perish. His eye followed

them until they had vanished.

“I can’t go back to Surbiton,” said the Young Lady in Grey.

“_Eigh?_” said Mr. Hoopdriver, catching at his moustache. This was an

unexpected development.

“I want to write, you see,” said the Young Lady in Grey, “to write

Books and alter things. To do Good. I want to lead a Free Life and Own

myself. I can’t go back. I want to obtain a position as a journalist. I

have been told—But I know no one to help me at once. No one that I

could go to. There is one person—She was a mistress at my school. If I

could write to her—But then, how could I get her answer?”

“H’mp,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, very grave.

“I can’t trouble you much more. You have come—you have risked things—”

“That don’t count,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “It’s double pay to let me do

it, so to speak.”

“It is good of you to say that. Surbiton is so Conventional. I am

resolved to be Unconventional—at any cost. But we are so hampered. If I

could only burgeon out of all that hinders me! I want to struggle, to

take my place in the world. I want to be my own mistress, to shape my

own career. But my stepmother objects so. She does as she likes

herself, and is strict with me to ease her conscience. And if I go back

now, go back owning myself beaten—” She left the rest to his

imagination.

“I see that,” agreed Mr. Hoopdriver. He _must_ help her. Within his

skull he was doing some intricate arithmetic with five pounds six and

twopence. In some vague way he inferred from all this that Jessie was

trying to escape from an undesirable marriage, but was saying these

things out of modesty. His circle of ideas was so limited.

“You know, Mr.—I’ve forgotten your name again.”

Mr. Hoopdriver seemed lost in abstraction. “You can’t go back of

course, quite like that,” he said thoughtfully. His ears waxed suddenly

red and his cheeks flushed.

“But what _is_ your name?”

“Name!” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Why!—Benson, of course.”

“Mr. Benson—yes it’s really very stupid of me. But I can never remember

names. I must make a note on my cuff.” She clicked a little silver

pencil and wrote the name down. “If I could write to my friend. I

believe she would be able to help me to an independent life. I could

write to her—or telegraph. Write, I think. I could scarcely explain in

a telegram. I know she would help me.”

Clearly there was only one course open to a gentleman under the

circumstances. “In that case,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “if you don’t mind

trusting yourself to a stranger, we might continue as we are perhaps.

For a day or so. Until you heard.” (Suppose thirty shillings a day,

that gives four days, say four thirties is hun’ and twenty, six

quid,—well, three days, say; four ten.)

“You are very good to me.”

His expression was eloquent.

“Very well, then, and thank you. It’s wonderful—it’s more than I

deserve that you—” She dropped the theme abruptly. “What was our bill

at Chichester?”

“Eigh?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, feigning a certain stupidity. There was a

brief discussion. Secretly he was delighted at her insistence in

paying. She carried her point. Their talk came round to their immediate

plans for the day. They decided to ride easily, through Havant, and

stop, perhaps, at Fareham or Southampton. For the previous day had

tried them both. Holding the map extended on his knee, Mr. Hoopdriver’s

eye fell by chance on the bicycle at his feet. “That bicycle,” he

remarked, quite irrelevantly, “wouldn’t look the same machine if I got

a big, double Elarum instead of that little bell.”

“Why?”

“Jest a thought.” A pause.

“Very well, then,—Havant and lunch,” said Jessie, rising.

“I wish, somehow, we could have managed it without stealing that

machine,” said Hoopdriver. “Because it IS stealing it, you know, come

to think of it.”

“Nonsense. If Mr. Bechamel troubles you—I will tell the whole world—if

need be.”

“I believe you would,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, admiring her. “You’re

plucky enough—goodness knows.”

Discovering suddenly that she was standing, he, too, rose and picked up

her machine. She took it and wheeled it into the road. Then he took his

own. He paused, regarding it. “I say!” said he. “How’d this bike look,

now, if it was enamelled grey?” She looked over her shoulder at his

grave face. “Why try and hide it in that way?”

“It was jest a passing thought,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, airily. “Didn’t

_mean_ anything, you know.”

As they were riding on to Havant it occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver in a

transitory manner that the interview had been quite other than his

expectation. But that was the way with everything in Mr. Hoopdriver’s

experience. And though his Wisdom looked grave within him, and Caution

was chinking coins, and an ancient prejudice in favour of Property

shook her head, something else was there too, shouting in his mind to

drown all these saner considerations, the intoxicating thought of

riding beside Her all to-day, all to-morrow, perhaps for other days

after that. Of talking to her familiarly, being brother of all her

slender strength and freshness, of having a golden, real, and wonderful

time beyond all his imaginings. His old familiar fancyings gave place

to anticipations as impalpable and fluctuating and beautiful as the

sunset of a summer day.

At Havant he took an opportunity to purchase, at a small hairdresser’s

in the main street, a toothbrush, a pair of nail scissors, and a little

bottle of stuff to darken the moustache, an article the shopman

introduced to his attention, recommended highly, and sold in the

excitement of the occasion.

XXIX.

THE UNEXPECTED ANECDOTE OF THE LION

They rode on to Cosham and lunched lightly but expensively there.

Jessie went out and posted her letter to her school friend. Then the

green height of Portsdown Hill tempted them, and leaving their machines

in the village they clambered up the slope to the silent red-brick fort

that crowned it. Thence they had a view of Portsmouth and its cluster

of sister towns, the crowded narrows of the harbour, the Solent and the

Isle of Wight like a blue cloud through the hot haze. Jessie by some

miracle had become a skirted woman in the Cosham inn. Mr. Hoopdriver

lounged gracefully on the turf, smoked a Red Herring cigarette, and

lazily regarded the fortified towns that spread like a map away there,

the inner line of defence like toy fortifications, a mile off perhaps;

and beyond that a few little fields and then the beginnings of Landport

suburb and the smoky cluster of the multitudinous houses. To the right

at the head of the harbour shallows the town of Porchester rose among

the trees. Mr. Hoopdriver’s anxiety receded to some remote corner of

his brain and that florid half-voluntary imagination of his shared the

stage with the image of Jessie. He began to speculate on the impression

he was creating. He took stock of his suit in a more optimistic spirit,

and reviewed, with some complacency, his actions for the last four and

twenty hours. Then he was dashed at the thought of her infinite

perfections.

She had been observing him quietly, rather more closely during the last

hour or so. She did not look at him directly because he seemed always

looking at her. Her own troubles had quieted down a little, and her

curiosity about the chivalrous, worshipping, but singular gentleman in

brown, was awakening. She had recalled, too, the curious incident of

their first encounter. She found him hard to explain to herself. You

must understand that her knowledge of the world was rather less than

nothing, having been obtained entirely from books. You must not take a

certain ignorance for foolishness.

She had begun with a few experiments. He did not know French except

‘_sivverplay_,’ a phrase he seemed to regard as a very good light table

joke in itself. His English was uncertain, but not such as books

informed her distinguished the lower classes. His manners seemed to her

good on the whole, but a trifle over-respectful and out of fashion. He

called her ‘Madam’ once. He seemed a person of means and leisure, but

he knew nothing of recent concerts, theatres, or books. How did he

spend his time? He was certainly chivalrous, and a trifle simpleminded.

She fancied (so much is there in a change of costume) that she had

never met with such a man before. What _could_ he be?

“Mr. Benson,” she said, breaking a silence devoted to landscape.

He rolled over and regarded her, chin on knuckles.

“At your service.”

“Do you paint? Are you an artist?”

“Well.” Judicious pause. “I should hardly call myself a Nartist, you

know. I _do_ paint a little. And sketch, you know—skitty kind of

things.”

He plucked and began to nibble a blade of grass. It was really not so

much lying as his quick imagination that prompted him to add, “In

Papers, you know, and all that.”

“I see,” said Jessie, looking at him thoughtfully. Artists were a very

heterogeneous class certainly, and geniuses had a trick of being a

little odd. He avoided her eye and bit his grass. “I don’t do _much_,

you know.”

“It’s not your profession?

“Oh, no,” said Hoopdriver, anxious now to hedge. “I don’t make a

regular thing of it, you know. Jest now and then something comes into

my head and down it goes. No—I’m not a _regular_ artist.”

“Then you don’t practise any regular profession?” Mr. Hoopdriver looked

into her eyes and saw their quiet unsuspicious regard. He had vague

ideas of resuming the detective _rôle_. “It’s like this,” he said, to

gain time. “I have a sort of profession. Only there’s a kind of

reason—nothing much, you know.”

“I beg your pardon for cross-examining you.”

“No trouble,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Only I can’t very well—I leave it

to you, you know. I don’t want to make any mystery of it, so far as

that goes.” Should he plunge boldly and be a barrister? That anyhow was

something pretty good. But she might know about barristry.

“I think I could guess what you are.”

“Well—guess,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“You come from one of the colonies?”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind. “How did

you find out _that?_” (the man was born in a London suburb, dear

Reader.)

“I guessed,” she said.

He lifted his eyebrows as one astonished, and clutched a new piece of

grass.

“You were educated up country.”

“Good again,” said Hoopdriver, rolling over again into her elbow.

“You’re a _clairvoy_ ant.” He bit at the grass, smiling. “Which colony

was it?”

“That I don’t know.”

“You must guess,” said Hoopdriver.

“South Africa,” she said. “I strongly incline to South Africa.”

“South Africa’s quite a large place,” he said.

“But South Africa is right?”

“You’re warm,” said Hoopdriver, “anyhow,” and the while his imagination

was eagerly exploring this new province.

“South Africa _is_ right?” she insisted.

He turned over again and nodded, smiling reassuringly into her eyes.

“What made me think of South Africa was that novel of Olive

Schreiner’s, you know—‘The Story of an African Farm.’ Gregory Rose is

so like you.”

“I never read ‘The Story of an African Farm,’” said Hoopdriver. “I

must. What’s he like?”

“You must read the book. But it’s a wonderful place, with its mixture

of races, and its brand-new civilisation jostling the old savagery.

Were you near Khama?”

“He was a long way off from our place,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “We had a

little ostrich farm, you know—Just a few hundred of ’em, out

Johannesburg way.”

“On the Karroo—was it called?”

“That’s the term. Some of it was freehold though. Luckily. We got along

very well in the old days.—But there’s no ostriches on that farm now.”

He had a diamond mine in his head, just at the moment, but he stopped

and left a little to the girl’s imagination. Besides which it had

occurred to him with a kind of shock that he was lying.

“What became of the ostriches?”

“We sold ’em off, when we parted with the farm. Do you mind if I have

another cigarette? That was when I was quite a little chap, you know,

that we had this ostrich farm.”

“Did you have Blacks and Boers about you?”

“Lots,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, striking a match on his instep and

beginning to feel hot at the new responsibility he had brought upon

himself.

“How interesting! Do you know, I’ve never been out of England except to

Paris and Mentone and Switzerland.”

“One gets tired of travelling (_puff_) after a bit, of course.”

“You must tell me about your farm in South Africa. It always stimulates

my imagination to think of these places. I can fancy all the tall

ostriches being driven out by a black herd—to graze, I suppose. How do

ostriches feed?”

“Well,” said Hoopdriver. “That’s rather various. They have their

fancies, you know. There’s fruit, of course, and that kind of thing.

And chicken food, and so forth. You have to use judgment.”

“Did you ever see a lion?” “They weren’t very common in our district,”

said Hoopdriver, quite modestly. “But I’ve seen them, of course. Once

or twice.”

“Fancy seeing a lion! Weren’t you frightened?”

Mr. Hoopdriver was now thoroughly sorry he had accepted that offer of

South Africa. He puffed his cigarette and regarded the Solent languidly

as he settled the fate on that lion in his mind. “I scarcely had time,”

he said. “It all happened in a minute.”

“Go on,” she said.

“I was going across the inner paddock where the fatted ostriches were.”

“Did you _eat_ ostriches, then? I did not know—”

“Eat them!—often. Very nice they _are_ too, properly stuffed. Well,

we—I, rather—was going across this paddock, and I saw something

standing up in the moonlight and looking at me.” Mr. Hoopdriver was in

a hot perspiration now. His invention seemed to have gone limp.

“Luckily I had my father’s gun with me. I _was_ scared, though, I can

tell you. (_Puff._) I just aimed at the end that I thought was the

head. And let fly. (_Puff._) And over it went, you know.”

“Dead?”

“_As_ dead. It was one of the luckiest shots I ever fired. And I wasn’t

much over nine at the time, neither.”

“_I_ should have screamed and run away.”

“There’s some things you can’t run away from,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “To

run would have been Death.”

“I don’t think I ever met a lion-killer before,” she remarked,

evidently with a heightened opinion of him.

There was a pause. She seemed meditating further questions. Mr.

Hoopdriver drew his watch hastily. “I say,” said Mr. Hoopdriver,

showing it to her, “don’t you think we ought to be getting on?”

His face was flushed, his ears bright red. She ascribed his confusion

to modesty. He rose with a lion added to the burthens of his

conscience, and held out his hand to assist her. They walked down into

Cosham again, resumed their machines, and went on at a leisurely pace

along the northern shore of the big harbour. But Mr. Hoopdriver was no

longer happy. This horrible, this fulsome lie, stuck in his memory. Why

_had_ he done it? She did not ask for any more South African stories,

happily—at least until Porchester was reached—but talked instead of

Living One’s Own Life, and how custom hung on people like chains. She

talked wonderfully, and set Hoopdriver’s mind fermenting. By the

Castle, Mr. Hoopdriver caught several crabs in little shore pools. At

Fareham they stopped for a second tea, and left the place towards the

hour of sunset, under such invigorating circumstances as you shall in

due course hear.

XXX.

THE RESCUE EXPEDITION

And now to tell of those energetic chevaliers, Widgery, Dangle, and

Phipps, and of that distressed beauty, ‘Thomas Plantagenet,’ well known

in society, so the paragraphs said, as Mrs. Milton. We left them at

Midhurst station, if I remember rightly, waiting, in a state of fine

emotion, for the Chichester train. It was clearly understood by the

entire Rescue Party that Mrs. Milton was bearing up bravely against

almost overwhelming grief. The three gentlemen outdid one another in

sympathetic expedients; they watched her gravely—almost tenderly. The

substantial Widgery tugged at his moustache, and looked his unspeakable

feelings at her with those dog-like, brown eyes of his; the slender

Dangle tugged at _his_ moustache, and did what he could with

unsympathetic grey ones. Phipps, unhappily, had no moustache to run any

risks with, so he folded his arms and talked in a brave, indifferent,

bearing-up tone about the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway,

just to cheer the poor woman up a little. And even Mrs. Milton really

felt that exalted melancholy to the very bottom of her heart, and tried

to show it in a dozen little, delicate, feminine ways.

“There is nothing to do until we get to Chichester,” said Dangle.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” said Widgery, and aside in her ear: “You really ate scarcely

anything, you know.”

“Their trains are always late,” said Phipps, with his fingers along the

edge of his collar. Dangle, you must understand, was a sub-editor and

reviewer, and his pride was to be Thomas Plantagenet’s intellectual

companion. Widgery, the big man, was manager of a bank and a mighty

golfer, and his conception of his relations to her never came into his

mind without those charming old lines, “Douglas, Douglas, tender and

true,” falling hard upon its heels. His name was Douglas-Douglas

Widgery. And Phipps, Phipps was a medical student still, and he felt

that he laid his heart at her feet, the heart of a man of the world.

She was kind to them all in her way, and insisted on their being

friends together, in spite of a disposition to reciprocal criticism

they displayed. Dangle thought Widgery a Philistine, appreciating but

coarsely the merits of “A Soul Untrammelled,” and Widgery thought

Dangle lacked humanity—would talk insincerely to say a clever thing.

Both Dangle and Widgery thought Phipps a bit of a cub, and Phipps

thought both Dangle and Widgery a couple of Thundering Bounders.

“They would have got to Chichester in time for lunch,” said Dangle, in

the train. “After, perhaps. And there’s no sufficient place in the

road. So soon as we get there, Phipps must inquire at the chief hotels

to see if any one answering to her description has lunched there.”

“Oh, _I’ll_ inquire,” said Phipps. “Willingly. I suppose you and

Widgery will just hang about—”

He saw an expression of pain on Mrs. Milton’s gentle face, and stopped

abruptly.

“No,” said Dangle, “we shan’t _hang about_, as you put it. There are

two places in Chichester where tourists might go—the cathedral and a

remarkably fine museum. I shall go to the cathedral and make an inquiry

or so, while Widgery—”

“The museum. Very well. And after that there’s a little thing or two

I’ve thought of myself,” said Widgery.

To begin with they took Mrs. Milton in a kind of procession to the Red

Hotel and established her there with some tea. “You are so kind to me,”

she said. “All of you.” They signified that it was nothing, and

dispersed to their inquiries. By six they returned, their zeal a little

damped, without news. Widgery came back with Dangle. Phipps was the

last to return. “You’re quite sure,” said Widgery, “that there isn’t

any flaw in that inference of yours?”

“Quite,” said Dangle, rather shortly.

“Of course,” said Widgery, “their starting from Midhurst on the

Chichester road doesn’t absolutely bind them not to change their

minds.”

“My dear fellow!—It does. Really it does. You must allow me to have

enough intelligence to think of cross-roads. Really you must. There

aren’t any cross-roads to tempt them. Would they turn aside here? No.

Would they turn there? Many more things are inevitable than you fancy.”

“We shall see at once,” said Widgery, at the window. “Here comes

Phipps. For my own part—”

“Phipps!” said Mrs. Milton. “Is he hurrying? Does he look—” She rose in

her eagerness, biting her trembling lip, and went towards the window.

“No news,” said Phipps, entering.

“Ah!” said Widgery.

“None?” said Dangle.

“Well,” said Phipps. “One fellow had got hold of a queer story of a man

in bicycling clothes, who was asking the same question about this time

yesterday.”

“What question?” said Mrs. Milton, in the shadow of the window. She

spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper.

“Why—Have you seen a young lady in a grey bicycling costume?”

Dangle caught at his lower lip. “What’s that?” he said. “Yesterday! A

man asking after her then! What can _that_ mean?”

“Heaven knows,” said Phipps, sitting down wearily. “You’d better

infer.”

“What kind of man?” said Dangle.

“How should I know?—in bicycling costume, the fellow said.”

“But what height?—What complexion?”

“Didn’t ask,” said Phipps.

“_Didn’t ask!_ Nonsense,” said Dangle.

“Ask him yourself,” said Phipps. “He’s an ostler chap in the White

Hart,—short, thick-set fellow, with a red face and a crusty manner.

Leaning up against the stable door. Smells of whiskey. Go and ask him.”

“Of course,” said Dangle, taking his straw hat from the shade over the

stuffed bird on the chiffonier and turning towards the door. “I might

have known.”

Phipps’ mouth opened and shut.

“You’re tired, I’m sure, Mr. Phipps,” said the lady, soothingly. “Let

me ring for some tea for you.” It suddenly occurred to Phipps that he

had lapsed a little from his chivalry. “I was a little annoyed at the

way he rushed me to do all this business,” he said. “But I’d do a

hundred times as much if it would bring you any nearer to her.” Pause.

“I _would_ like a little tea.”

“I don’t want to raise any false hopes,” said Widgery. “But I do _not_

believe they even came to Chichester. Dangle’s a very clever fellow, of

course, but sometimes these Inferences of his—”

“Tchak!” said Phipps, suddenly.

“What is it?” said Mrs. Milton.

“Something I’ve forgotten. I went right out from here, went to every

other hotel in the place, and never thought—But never mind. I’ll ask

when the waiter comes.”

“You don’t mean—” A tap, and the door opened. “Tea, m’m? yes, m’m,”

said the waiter.

“One minute,” said Phipps. “Was a lady in grey, a cycling lady—”

“Stopped here yesterday? Yessir. Stopped the night. With her brother,

sir—a young gent.”

“Brother!” said Mrs. Milton, in a low tone. “Thank God!”

The waiter glanced at her and understood everything. “A young gent,

sir,” he said, “very free with his money. Give the name of Beaumont.”

He proceeded to some rambling particulars, and was cross-examined by

Widgery on the plans of the young couple.

“Havant! Where’s Havant?” said Phipps. “I seem to remember it

somewhere.”

“Was the man tall?” said Mrs. Milton, intently, “distinguished looking?

with a long, flaxen moustache? and spoke with a drawl?”

“Well,” said the waiter, and thought. “His moustache, m’m, was scarcely

long—scrubby more, and young looking.”

“About thirty-five, he was?”

“No, m’m. More like five and twenty. Not that.”

“Dear me!” said Mrs. Milton, speaking in a curious, hollow voice,

fumbling for her salts, and showing the finest self-control. “It must

have been her _younger_ brother—must have been.”

“That will do, thank you,” said Widgery, officiously, feeling that she

would be easier under this new surprise if the man were dismissed. The

waiter turned to go, and almost collided with Dangle, who was entering

the room, panting excitedly and with a pocket handkerchief held to his

right eye. “Hullo!” said dangle. “What’s up?”

“What’s up with _you?_” said Phipps.

“Nothing—an altercation merely with that drunken ostler of yours. He

thought it was a plot to annoy him—that the Young Lady in Grey was

mythical. Judged from your manner. I’ve got a piece of raw meat to keep

over it. You have some news, I see?”

“Did the man hit you?” asked Widgery.

Mrs. Milton rose and approached Dangle. “Cannot I do anything?”

Dangle was heroic. “Only tell me your news,” he said, round the corner

of the handkerchief.

“It was in this way,” said Phipps, and explained rather sheepishly.

While he was doing so, with a running fire of commentary from Widgery,

the waiter brought in a tray of tea. “A time table,” said Dangle,

promptly, “for Havant.” Mrs. Milton poured two cups, and Phipps and

Dangle partook in passover form. They caught the train by a hair’s

breadth. So to Havant and inquiries.

Dangle was puffed up to find that his guess of Havant was right. In

view of the fact that beyond Havant the Southampton road has a steep

hill continuously on the right-hand side, and the sea on the left, he

hit upon a magnificent scheme for heading the young folks off. He and

Mrs. Milton would go to Fareham, Widgery and Phipps should alight one

each at the intermediate stations of Cosham and Porchester, and come on

by the next train if they had no news. If they did not come on, a wire

to the Fareham post office was to explain why. It was Napoleonic, and

more than consoled Dangle for the open derision of the Havant street

boys at the handkerchief which still protected his damaged eye.

Moreover, the scheme answered to perfection. The fugitives escaped by a

hair’s breadth. They were outside the Golden Anchor at Fareham, and

preparing to mount, as Mrs. Milton and Dangle came round the corner

from the station. “It’s her!” said Mrs. Milton, and would have

screamed. “Hist!” said Dangle, gripping the lady’s arm, removing his

handkerchief in his excitement, and leaving the piece of meat over his

eye, an extraordinary appearance which seemed unexpectedly to calm her.

“Be cool!” said Dangle, glaring under the meat. “They must not see us.

They will get away else. Were there flys at the station?” The young

couple mounted and vanished round the corner of the Winchester road.

Had it not been for the publicity of the business, Mrs. Milton would

have fainted. “_Save her!_” she said.

“Ah! A conveyance,” said Dangle. “One minute.”

He left her in a most pathetic attitude, with her hand pressed to her

heart, and rushed into the Golden Anchor. Dog cart in ten minutes.

Emerged. The meat had gone now, and one saw the cooling puffiness over

his eye. “I will conduct you back to the station,” said Dangle; “hurry

back here, and pursue them. You will meet Widgery and Phipps and tell

them I am in pursuit.”

She was whirled back to the railway station and left there, on a hard,

blistered, wooden seat in the sun. She felt tired and dreadfully

ruffled and agitated and dusty. Dangle was, no doubt, most energetic

and devoted; but for a kindly, helpful manner commend her to Douglas

Widgery.

Meanwhile Dangle, his face golden in the evening sun, was driving (as

well as he could) a large, black horse harnessed into a thing called a

gig, northwestward towards Winchester. Dangle, barring his swollen eye,

was a refined-looking little man, and he wore a deerstalker cap and was

dressed in dark grey. His neck was long and slender. Perhaps you know

what gigs are,—huge, big, wooden things and very high and the horse,

too, was huge and big and high, with knobby legs, a long face, a hard

mouth, and a whacking trick of pacing. Smack, smack, smack, smack it

went along the road, and hard by the church it shied vigorously at a

hooded perambulator.

The history of the Rescue Expedition now becomes confused. It appears

that Widgery was extremely indignant to find Mrs. Milton left about

upon the Fareham platform. The day had irritated him somehow, though he

had started with the noblest intentions, and he seemed glad to find an

outlet for justifiable indignation. “He’s such a spasmodic creature,”

said Widgery. “Rushing off! And I suppose we’re to wait here until he

comes back! It’s likely. He’s so egotistical, is Dangle. Always wants

to mismanage everything himself.”

“He means to help me,” said Mrs. Milton, a little reproachfully,

touching his arm. Widgery was hardly in the mood to be mollified all at

once. “He need not prevent ME,” he said, and stopped. “It’s no good

talking, you know, and you are tired.”

“I can go on,” she said brightly, “if only we find her.” “While I was

cooling my heels in Cosham I bought a county map.” He produced and

opened it. “Here, you see, is the road out of Fareham.” He proceeded

with the calm deliberation of a business man to develop a proposal of

taking train forthwith to Winchester. “They _must_ be going to

Winchester,” he explained. It was inevitable. To-morrow Sunday,

Winchester a cathedral town, road going nowhere else of the slightest

importance.

“But Mr. Dangle?”

“He will simply go on until he has to pass something, and then he will

break his neck. I have seen Dangle drive before. It’s scarcely likely a

dog-cart, especially a hired dog-cart, will overtake bicycles in the

cool of the evening. Rely upon me, Mrs. Milton—”

“I am in your hands,” she said, with pathetic littleness, looking up at

him, and for the moment he forgot the exasperation of the day.

Phipps, during this conversation, had stood in a somewhat depressed

attitude, leaning on his stick, feeling his collar, and looking from

one speaker to the other. The idea of leaving Dangle behind seemed to

him an excellent one. “We might leave a message at the place where he

got the dog-cart,” he suggested, when he saw their eyes meeting. There

was a cheerful alacrity about all three at the proposal.

But they never got beyond Botley. For even as their train ran into the

station, a mighty rumbling was heard, there was a shouting overhead,

the guard stood astonished on the platform, and Phipps, thrusting his

head out of the window, cried, “There he goes!” and sprang out of the

carriage. Mrs. Milton, following in alarm, just saw it. From Widgery it

was hidden. Botley station lies in a cutting, overhead was the roadway,

and across the lemon yellows and flushed pinks of the sunset, there

whirled a great black mass, a horse like a long-nosed chess knight, the

upper works of a gig, and Dangle in transit from front to back. A

monstrous shadow aped him across the cutting. It was the event of a

second. Dangle seemed to jump, hang in the air momentarily, and vanish,

and after a moment’s pause came a heart-rending smash. Then two black

heads running swiftly.

“Better get out,” said Phipps to Mrs. Milton, who stood fascinated in

the doorway.