XX

THE END

THE memory of luncheon died away and the picnic-basket, again appealed to, yielded tea. They had explored the towers, and talked of Kenilworth, the underground pa.s.sages, and talked of the round tower of Wales. And half their talk was, "Do you remember?" and, "Have you forgotten?" The early days of the incredible honeymoon had been days of exploration, each seeking to discover the secrets of that unknown land, each other's mind and soul; this day of reunion was one gladly given over to the contemplation of the memories they had together ama.s.sed. It was a day dedicated to the counting of those treasures of memory which they now held in common, treasures among which this golden day itself would, all too soon, have to be laid aside to be, for each of them, forever, the chief jewel of that priceless treasury.

It was when they were repacking the picnic-basket that they first noticed how the color had gone out of the gra.s.s, that was their carpet, and how the blue had faded from the sky, that was their roof. The day had changed its mind, after all. Having been lovely in its youth and glorious in its prime, it had, in its declining hours, fallen a prey to the grayest melancholy and was now very sorry for itself indeed.

"Oh dear!" said she, "I do believe it's going to rain."

Even as she spoke the first big tears of the dejected day fell on the lid of the teapot.

"We must hurry," he said, briskly. "I can't have my princess getting wet through and catching cold in her royal head. Run for it, Princess! Run to the big gateway!"

She ran; he followed with the basket, went out to cover the seats of his car with mackintosh rugs and put up the hood, and came back, dampish, to discuss the situation. They told each other that it was only a shower, that it couldn't possibly, as they put it, have "set in." But it had; the landscape framed in the arch of the gateway lost color moment by moment, even the yellow of the gorse was blotted and obscured; the rain, which at first had fallen in a fitful, amateurish sort of way, settled down to business and fell in gray, diagonal lines, straight and sharp as ramrods.

"And it's getting late," he said, "and your Highness will be hungry."

"We've only just had tea," she reminded him.

"Ah, but we've got some way to go," he told her.

"Where _are_ we going?"

"I had thought," he said, "of going to a place beyond Eastbourne; ...

my old nurse lives there. She's rather fond of me; ... she'll have gotten supper for us. I thought you'd like it. It's a farm-house, rather a jolly one, and then I thought, if you liked, we could drive back to the Eastbourne hotel by moonlight."

"That would have been nice."

"But there won't be any moonlight. Perhaps we'd better go straight to the hotel."

"But your nurse will expect you."

"I can telegraph."

"But she'll be so disappointed."

"Why didn't I get a car that would shut up and be weather-tight? The rain will drift under that hood like the deluge."

She laughed. "A little rain won't hurt us."

"Your beautiful hat!"

"I'll tie my ugly scarf around my head and put my beautiful hat under the rug. Come, don't let us disappoint your old nurse. No! It's not going to leave off; it's only taking breath to go on harder than ever."

It was said afterward that never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, had there been such a storm of rain in those parts--rain without thunder, rain in full summer, rain without reason and without restraint. The rain drifted in, as he had said it would, and abruptly a wild wind arose and tore at the hood of the car, flapped her scarf in her eyes, and whipped their faces with sharp, stinging rain. He stopped at the village inn and brought her out ginger-brandy in a little gla.s.s shaped like a thistle-flower, "to keep the cold out." Also he went into the post-office and bought peppermint bull's-eyes, "to keep us warm," he said. "How admirably fortunate that we both like peppermint!" And the journey began in earnest, up hills that were torrents, through hollows that were ponds, where the water splashed like a yellow frill from their wheels as they rushed through it. One village street was like a river, and the men were busy with spades, digging through the hedge-banks channels by which the water might escape into the flooded fields.

And so, along through Pevensey, where the great Norman castle still stands gray and threatening, through Eastbourne, like an ant-heap where the ants all use umbrellas, and, at long last, out on to the downs. Her hands were ice-cold with the rain and the effort of holding mackintosh rugs about herself and him. Her hair was blown across her eyes, the lash of rain was on her lips. Breathless, laughing for the joy of the wild rush through wind and water, they gained the top of Friston Hill, where the tall windmill is, and the pond and the sign-post and the small, gray, quiet church. And here, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain ceased; the clouds drifted away.

"As though some great tidy angel had swept them up with his wings," said she.

The sea showed again, gray with chalk stolen from the cliffs, and white with the crests of waves left angry by the wind. Under the frowning purple clouds in the west glowed a long line of sullen crimson, and they went on along the down road in the peace of a clear, translucent twilight. Below them, in a hollow, shone lights from a little house.

"Wasn't it somewhere here," she asked him, "that you left me and I didn't stay?"

"Yes," he said, "somewhere here."

And then they had reached the house--not so little, either, when you came close to it--and there were steady lights shining through the lower windows, and, in the upper rooms, the fitful, soft glimmer of firelight.

The car stopped at the wooden gate from which a brick path led to the front door, hospitably open, showing gleams of bra.s.s and old mahogany in a wide hall paved with black-and-white checkered marble.

He peeled the streaming waterproof from her shoulders and gave her his hand for the descent. Side by side they pa.s.sed down the wet path between dripping flower-beds, but at the threshold he stepped before her, entered the house, and turned to receive her.

"Welcome!" he said, caught her by the elbows, and lifted her lightly over the threshold.

"Why did you do that?" she asked, breathless and smiling through the drift of wet, disordered tresses.

"It's an old custom for welcoming a princess," he said.

The old nurse came from the kitchen, rustling in stiff print and white ap.r.o.n.

"Oh, Master Edward, sir," she said, beaming, "I never thought you'd come in all this rain, not even when I got the telegraph. Nicely, ma'am, thanking you kindly and hoping you're the same," she said, in answer to the greeting and the hand that the girl offered. "And your good lady, Master Edward, she must be wet through, but I've got a lovely fire in her room, if you'll come along with me, ma'am, and I'll bring up some hot water in two ticks."

So now, after the wind and the rain and the car, the girl finds herself in a long, low, chintz-curtained room where a wood fire burns on an open hearth and a devoted nurse of his is pulling off wet shoes and offering cups of tea and hot water.

"And are you quite sure there ain't nothing more I can do for you, ma'am, for I'm sure it's a pleasure?"

The girl, left alone at last, found herself wondering. He must have felt very sure of her, surely, to have brought her thus to his nurse, as if ... as if their marriage had been a real marriage, like other people's.

"Well, and why shouldn't he be sure of me?" she asked herself. "I'm sure of him, thank G.o.d!"

The appointments about her were so charming, all so perfectly in keeping with one another and with the room that held them, that she found herself making a comfortable, complete, and ceremonious toilette. She had with her, by a fortunate accident, as she told herself, a dress of soft, cream-colored India muslin, fine as gauze. But when she looked at herself in the gla.s.s she said, "Too white ... it's like a wedding-dress," and sought for some color to mitigate the dress's bridal simplicity. There was no scarf that quite stifled criticism, but there was the Burmese coat, long and red, with gold-embroidered hems a foot deep. She slipped it over the white gown and was satisfied.

She thought of the morning when she had last worn the Burmese coat, and "He liked the red rose," she said, as she put it on. When she was dressed she sat down in the great arm-chair before the fire and rested, tasting the simple yet perfect luxury of it all. She did not know how long she sat there, and reverie had almost given place to dreaming when a tap at the door aroused her.

She opened it. Edward stood there.

"Shall we go down to supper?" he said, exactly as though they had been at a dance. And, indeed, they might have been at a dance, as far as their dress went, except that he wore a dinner-jacket in place of the tail-coat which dances demand.

He offered his arm, and she took it and they went together down the shallow, wide, polished, uncarpeted stairs on which the lamps from the corridor above threw the shadows of the slender, elegant bal.u.s.trades.

"What a beautiful house!" she said. "And how nice of you to make yourself pretty for supper!"

"Well, we had to change into something, and I won't attack you with the obvious rejoinder. But you'll let me say, won't you, that you're like a princess in a fairy-tale? Did your fairy G.o.dmother give you a hundred dresses at your christening, each one more beautiful than the other?"

"She gave me something," the girl answered--"a secret amulet. It's invisible, but it brings me good fortune. It's brought me here," she added, "where everything is perfect. My room's lovely, and those stuffed sea-gulls over there ... nothing else could have been absolutely right in that recess. How odd that I never knew before how much I loved stuffed sea-gulls," she added, meditatively.

He stopped in front of the sea-gulls. "I got a ring for you at Warwick,"

he said, "only I didn't dare to ask you to take it. Will you take it now? The other one was the symbol of something you didn't mean. Let this one stand for--whatever you will."