So they went and saw Warwick Castle, with its great gray towers and its high gray walls, its green turf, and old, old trees. They saw the banqueting-hall that was burned down, and Guy's punch-bowl that holds Heaven knows how many gallons.

"It makes you thirsty to look at it," said Edward.

Also they saw the Portland vase which lives in a gla.s.s house all by itself, and the bed where Queen Anne slept, and the cedar drawing-room and the red drawing-room and the golden drawing-room, and all the other rooms which are "shown to visitors," and longed lawlessly to see the rooms that are not so shown.

"There must be _some_ comfortable rooms in the house," she said. "Even lords and ladies and Miss O'Gradys couldn't really live in these museums." And, indeed, all the rooms they saw were much too full of things curious, precious, beautiful, and ugly; but mostly large and all costly.

"It must be pretty awful to be as rich as all this," said Edward, as they came out of the castle gate.

"Would it be? The guide-books say Lady Warwick says she strives to fulfil, imperfectly, it may be, the duties of her stewardship and the privileges of her heritage. It would be interesting, don't you think, to find out just exactly what those were?"

"If I had a castle," said he, "there shouldn't be a knickknack in it, nor a sc.r.a.p of furniture later than seventeen hundred."

"I sometimes wonder whether it's fair," she said, "the way we collect old things. Have you noticed that poor people's houses haven't a decent bit of furniture in them? When my mother was little the cottages used to have old bureaus and tables and chests that had come down from father to son and from mother to daughter."

"It's true," said he, "and the worst of it is that we've not only taken away their furniture, but we've taken away their taste for it. They prefer plush and machine-made walnut to the old oak and elm and beech and apple-wood. It would be no good to give them back their old furnishing unless we could give them back their love of it. And that we can't do."

"But if we bought modern things?"

"Even then they wouldn't care for the old ones. And the only beautiful modern things we have are imitations of the old ones. We've lost the art of furniture-making, and the art of architecture, and we're losing even the art of life. It's getting to be machine-made, like our chair-legs and our stone facings. I sometimes wonder whether we are really on the down-grade--and whether the grade is so steep that we sha'n't be able to stop--and go on till there's no life possible except the life that's represented by the plush and walnut at one end and motors and the Ritz at the other."

"Can't we resist? all the people who still care for beautiful things?"

"We can collect them; it's not taking them from the poor now--it's taking them from the dealers who have cleared out the farms and cottages and little houses. I suppose one might make a nest, and live in it, but that wouldn't change things or stop the uglification of everything. You can't make people live beautifully by act of Parliament. The impulse to make and own beautiful things has to come from within--and it seems as though it were dead--killed by machinery and _laissez-faire_ and the gospel of individualism, and I'm sorry to talk like a Fabian tract, but there it is. Forgive me, and let's go down to Guy's Cliff and see the Saxon Mill and the perfect beauty of mixed architecture that wasn't trying to imitate anything."

"Yes, but go on with the tract."

"There isn't any more, except that what's so difficult is to know how to live without hurting some one else. This is my wander year. I'm spending my money just now for fun and to have a good time. I feel I deserve a holiday and I'm taking one. But what's one to do with one's life? How can one use one's money so as to do no harm?"

"If you invest it in mines or factories or railways, doesn't that employ people and make trade better?" she asked, diffidently. "I'm sure I've heard people say so."

"Yes," he said, grimly, "so have I. And, of course, it's true. You launch your money into this horrible welter of hard work and chancy wages, and it helps to keep some people in motors and fur coats and champagne and diamonds, and it helps, too, to keep others on the perilous edge of despair, to keep them alive in a world where they're never sure of next week's meals, never free from worry from the cradle to the grave, with no poetry in their lives but love, and no magic but drink."

"But what are we to do?" she asked, and they paused a moment on the bridge to look to the splendid ma.s.s of Warwick Castle along the river where the swans float and the weeping willows trail their hair in the water.

"I wish I knew," he said. "There must be some way to live without having any part in the muddle."

"We'll find a way," said she. And his heart leaped, for he knew that this was the most intimate thing she had ever said to him.

XIV

STRATFORD-ON-AVON

WHEN you have seen Warwick Castle and Guy's Cliff and the Saxon Mill--which is so old that it must be soothing to the most tempestuous temperament--and you hasten back to your hotel and get your dog--if that dog be Charles--on purpose to expose him to its calm influences, you go to St. Mary's Church, which is, the guide-book tells you, "one of the most remarkable specimens of ecclesiastical architecture extant," and you see the Norman Crypt, and the clumsy sarcophagus of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who wrote his own epitaph, and you read how he was "servant to Queen Elizabeth, Canceller to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney."

Also you see the Beauchamp Chapel, and love it and linger in it, admiring the tombs of the earls of Warwick and other grown-ups, and feeling, even after all these years, a thrill of sadness at the sight of the little effigy of the child whose brocaded gown the marble so wonderfully produces and whose little years knock at your heart for pity.

"Here resteth," says the monument, "the body of the n.o.ble Impe Robert of Dudley, ... a child of greate parentage, but of farre greater hope and towardness, taken from this transitory unto the everlasting life in his tender age, ... on Sunday the 19 of July, in the yeare of our Lorde G.o.d 1584."

You see, also, the Warwick pew, and wish you could have worshiped there.

Then you go to Leicester's Hospital, half timbered and beautiful, with the row of whispering limes on its terraced front, where the "brethren"

still wear the "gown of blew stuff with the badge of the bear and ragged staff on the left sleeve." And the badges are still those provided by Lord Leicester in 1571.

You are sorry that the old banqueting-hall should now be used for the coal-cellar and the laundry of the brethren, and still more sorry that the minstrels' gallery should have been cut off to enlarge the drawing-room of the Master's house. If you are of a rude and democratic nature you may possibly comment on this in audible voices beneath the Master's windows, which, I am sorry to say, was what Mr. Basingstoke and his companion did.

You will see the Sidney porcupine on the wall of the quadrangle, some gilded quills missing, and no wonder, after all these years. You will see--and perhaps neglect to reverence, as they did--the great chair once occupied by that insufferable monarch and prig, James the First. You will visit the Brethren's Chapel, which seems to be scented by all the old clothes ever worn by any of the old brethren, and you will come out again into the street, and, as you cross the threshold, it will be like stepping across three hundred years, and you will say so. Then you will probably say, "What about Stratford for this afternoon?" At least, that is what Edward said. And as he said it he was aware of a figure in black which said,

"Can you tell me the way to Droitwich?"

It was a woman, spare and pale, in black that was green, but brushed to threadbareness.

"Do you want to walk?" Edward asked.

"I've got to, sir," she said.

"Do you mind," he asked, "telling me why you want to go?"

"I've got relations there, sir," said the woman in black, raising to his the plaintive blue eyes of a child set in a face that fifty years and more had wrinkled like a February apple. "My husband's relations, that is. They might do something to help me. I might be able to be of use to them, just to work out my keep. It isn't much I require. But I couldn't--"

She stopped, and Edward Basingstoke knew that she couldn't even bring herself to name the great terror of the poor--the living tomb which the English call the workhouse.

"I'm afraid you've had a hard time," said Mr. Basingstoke.

"I had many happy days," she said, simply. "I always think you pay for everything you have, sooner or later. And I'm paying now. I don't grudge it, but I'd like to end respectable. And thank you for asking so kindly, sir, and now I'll be getting on." And he saw in her eyes the fear that he would offer her money to pay her way to Droitwich.

Instead he said: "We're motoring your way this afternoon. If you'll let us give you a lift--"

The woman looked from one to the other. "Well," she said, "I do call that kind. But I wasn't asking for any help. And I'd best be getting on."

Then the other woman came quite close to the woman in black. "Won't you," she said, "come and have dinner with us--and then we'll drive you over? Do come. We're so happy and we do hate to think that you aren't.

Perhaps we can think of some way to help you ... find you some work or something," she added, hastily, answering the protest in the blue eyes.

"I don't like to, miss," she said, "thanking you all the same. It's truly good of you--but--"

Edward moved away a pace or two and lit a cigarette. He never knew what his lady said to the woman in black, but when he turned again a handkerchief was being restored to a rubbed black leather reticule and the woman in black was saying,

"Well, ma'am, since you say that, of course I can't say no, and thank you kindly."

The three had dinner together in the little private room over the porch at the Warwick Arms, and as they pa.s.sed through the hall there could have been, for the little woman in black, no better armor against the sniffs of chambermaids and the cold eyes of the lady in the gla.s.s case than the feel of another woman's hand on her arm. She was very silent and shy, but not awkward or clumsy, during the meal, and when it was finished Edward got up and said,

"Well, Katherine, I'll leave you two to talk things over."

It was the first time he had called her by her name. She flushed and sparkled, and was startled and amazed next moment to know that she had answered,