Chapter IV: Part 4

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?”