E. Nesbit

“ And, look here, I won't come and see you and I won't bother you, but if you want me I'll be there. You must just do what you want to do."
What she wanted to do was to jump into the waiting taxicab and go back with him into that world of fine and delicate adventure where were blue skies, gold sun, green leaves, the mystery of mountains, the sparkle of water, and the velvet of old lawns; and, for each in the soul of the other, a whole world of unexplored wonder and delight. ”

“ Thus the two passed through Stoneham Lock and the next and the next, and then came to the Round Lock, which is like a round pond whose water creeps in among the roots of grass and forget-me-not and spearmint and wild strawberry. And so at last to Oak Weir Lock, where the turtledoves call from the willow wood on the island where the big trees are, and the wide, sunny meadows where the sheep browse all day till the shepherd calls them home in the evening—the shepherd [118] with his dog at his heels and his iron crook, polished with long use and stately as a crozier in a bishop's hand. ”

“ I can't think why the deuce-dickens [6] that sort of beastliness is always called seeing life. As if life were all gas, and wining, and electric light, and the things you don't talk about before ladies. No, my boy, I'm going out into the unknown—not into the night, because it happens to be afternoon—and I thought I'd just come and clasp that hand and gaze once into those eyes before I set my foot on the untrodden path of adventure. Farewell, Vernon of Martingale, good knight and true! ”

“ To drive into Eastbourne with the gentleman—rather slow the old horse was, but it was the best trap—to hold the reins outside important and unusual shops, including the Eastbourne Motor-Car Company and the telegraph-office at the station; to be taken to dinner at a fine hotel with flowers in all the windows, and real waiters dressed exactly like the gentlemen who sang at the school concert, white ties and all—or just like the butler at Mr. Ferney's who had the training-stables—and such things to eat as Tommy "never did." ”

“ Shall I call that chap back?"
She shook her head and hid her face in her hands.
"Forgive me," he said again. "Oh, don't cry! I'm not worth it. Nothing's worth it. Charles, you brute, lie down." For Charles, in eager sympathy with beauty in distress, was leaping up in vain efforts to find and kiss the hidden face.
"Don't scold him," she said. "I like him." And Edward could have worshiped her for the words. "And, oh," she said, after a minute, "don't scold me, either! I'm so frightfully tired and everything's been so hateful. ”

“ Edward sat very upright, his hands between his knees, holding the shortened chain of Charles. Mile after mile of the smooth down country slipped past, the car had whirled down the narrow, tree-bordered road into Alfreston, past the old church and the thirteenth-century, half-timbered Clergy House, where three little girls in green pinafores were seeking to coerce a reluctant goat along to Polegate and across the railway lines, and still Mr. Basingstoke never moved. His mind alone was alive, and of his body he was no longer conscious. ”

“ They spent long mornings on the hillside, cushioned by the heather; long evenings by the lakeside, always careful to choose their resting-place so that they need not see the scars where the waste slate is tipped into the lake, slowly overlaying the green and graceful margin with which Nature, if you let her alone, frames all water mirrors. And once they went as far as the mysterious Round Tower, which stands alone, with no entrance but the doorway high above your head. ”

“ And he, for all that he laughed at her fears and her predictions, with pride and joy swelling in his heart till they almost broke the resolution of quiescence, of waiting, of submitting his will to her will, yet felt in those deep caves that lie behind the heart, behind the soul, behind the mind of man, the winds of coming misfortune blow chilly.
It was no surprise to either of them to find at the hotel a telegram for Mrs. Basingstoke:
Aunt Alice much worse. ”

“ There are towers to climb at Kenilworth, as well as towers to gaze at, and with that passion for ascending steps which marks the young the two made their way to the top of one tower after another. It was as they leaned on the parapet of the third and looked out over the green country that Edward broke off in an unflattering anecdote of my Lord of Leicester. ”

“ It was bright daylight when a motor—one of the strong, fierce kind, no wretched taxicab, but a private motor of obvious speed and spirit—blundered over the shoulder of the downs down the rutty road to Crow's Nest Farm.
Mr. Basingstoke, happy to his finger-tips as well as to the inmost recesses of the mind in his consciousness of results achieved and difficulties overcome, slipped from the throbbing motor and went quickly around to the back door, Charles with him, straining at the lead. ”

“ Once in the boat, and in the lock, she leaned back, holding the edge of the lock with the boat-hook, [120] and with the other hand detaining Charles. She looked back dreamily on the day which had been, and she did not pretend that it had not been, the happiest day in her life. To be with one who pleased—he certainly did please—and to whom one's every word and look was so obviously pleasing! It is idle to deny that she felt smoothed, stroked the right way, like a cat who is fortunate in its friends. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Basingstoke had been alone he would have solaced himself by going to the nearest baker's and buying buns for every child in sight. But somehow it is very difficult to do that sort of thing unless you are alone or have a companion who trusts you and whom you trust beyond the limit of life's cheaper confidences. He felt that self-exculpatory eagerness to give which certain natures experience in the presence of sufferings which they do not share. ”

“ Living in the days of aeroplanes, motors, telegraphy, and cinematographs, in a world noisy with the nonsense of politics and the press, he told himself that the ideal life was the life of the farmer who plowed and sowed and reaped, tended his beasts and filled his barns, and went home from his clean, quiet work to the open hearth whence the wood smoke curled up to heaven like the smoke of an altar. ”

“ The temperamental needle of Edward Basingstoke followed the magnet of romance. In a gayer, if less comfortable, age he might have been a knight-errant, or, at least, the sympathetic squire of a knight-errant. Had he been born in the days when most people stayed at home and minded their own business he would have insisted on going out and minding other people's. ”

“ Thus honor would have been satisfied, and Edward well in the lime-light. But in this little box of an overfurnished room, by the light of an ill-trimmed paraffin-lamp, to rag an anxious aunt. . . . He withdrew himself slowly from diplomacy—tried to find an inch or two of dry truth to stand on.
"Well, why don't you say something?" asked the anxious aunt.
"I will," said Mr. Basingstoke. "Madam, I have to ask your pardon for an unpardonable liberty. I have deceived you. I am not what you think. I am not a piano-tuner, but an engineer." ”

“ The key grated a little as he turned it in the lock. He threw back the door.
"This is the kitchen," he said. "Stand just inside and I'll make a nest for you. I know exactly where to lay my hands on the straw."
There was rustling in the darkness and a sound of boards grating on bricks. She stood at the door and waited.
"Ready," he said.
"They'll find me," she said. "We shall never get away."
"Trust me for that," said he.
"I must have been mad to come," he heard through the darkness.
"We're all mad once in our lives," he said, cheerfully. "Now roll yourself in your cloak. Give me your hands—so." ”

“ The man who attended to the wood and water was asleep, standing against the ladder that led from the stable to the hay-loft—a convenient position, and, if you were wanted in a hurry, not compromising, as lying down would be.
To right and left the road stretched, very white and shining, between dusty hedgerows and scattered cottages whose drawn blinds looked like the eyelids of sleepers. The whole village was asleep, it seemed—only a boy and a dog were awake. The boy had not gone to school because [10] he had torn his every-day trousers on a nail in the stable. ”

“ All the same, when the hour-glass of time had let through the last grain of the space of their separation, and a pale girl withdrew her eyes from the speck of a boat growing smaller and smaller on a sea that sparkled so brilliantly that you could hardly look at it, and almost listlessly turned to walk back alone to her hotel, she was confronted with a very pale young man standing beside a very new motor-car. ”

“ You walk across a great amphitheater whose walls of slate rise high above you, their green-trimmed edges sharply cut against the sky. You pick your way among pools of water so smooth, so clear, that they reflect like mirrors the blue sky and the high slate walls of the quarry. One such pool—the largest—lay in the middle of the vast amphitheater, and in it the towering cliffs of slate were reflected even more clearly than in the others.
"I never saw such reflections," she was saying, as they skirted the big pond. "They're almost more real than the real thing. ”

“ They met no one—or almost no one. At East Peckham a single rustic looked at them over the middle arch of the seven-arched bridge built of fine, strong stone in the days of the Fourth Edward, and at Lady White Weir a tramp gave them good day and said it was a good bit yet to Maidstone. He spat in the water, not in insolence, but contemplatively, and Edward gave him a silver token of good will and a generous pinch of dark tobacco, with a friendly, "Here's for luck."
"You're a gentleman," the tramp retorted, grudgingly, and spat again, and slouched off along the green path. ”

“ She ran up the stairs, and at the top called out, "Charles, drop it. Come here, sir."
And Charles dropped it and came.
It was then for the first time that she felt that she was Charles's mistress, even as Edward was Charles's master.
The dog and the woman went out together into the sunshine, and there, between blue sky and green grass, embraced with all the emotions proper to deliverer and delivered. When Edward rejoined them, five minutes later, she was able to say, quite calmly:
"Yes, he found me out. He is clever. He is a darling." ”

“ The inn at Stratford is intolerably half timbered. Whatever there may have been of the old woodwork is infinitely depreciated by the modern imitation which flaunts itself everywhere. The antique mockery is only skin deep and does not extend to the new rooms, each named after one of Shakespeare's works, and all of a peculiarly unpleasing shape, and furnished exactly like the rooms of any temperance hotel. ”

“ He would have been satisfied with five pounds."
"I believe he would, too," said Edward, with a grudging laugh. "It's your beaux yeux. The man has gone home feeling that he has as good as sacrificed fifteen pounds to a quixotic and romantic impulse. Wretched blackmailer though he is, he could not resist a princess."
"I like William," she said, decisively. "After all, as he says, one must live. Let's leave the cloak under this hedge. Shall we? It's like getting rid of the body. And I'll buy a flaxen wig to-morrow. ”

“ Edward was less discerning. He had been far too much occupied with Charles and the horse to do more than realize that the two people in the cart were women—and now when he heard again the voice that had talked to him yesterday in the freshness of the morning, the shock sent his blood surging. He looked up—face, neck, ears were burning. Men do not blush, but if they did you would have said that Mr. Basingstoke blushed in that hour.
He looked up. Holding the reins was a hard, angular woman of fifty, the sort that plays golf and billiards and is perfectly competent with horses. ”

“ He looked up contemptuously at the smug face of the bust.
"It's a life's work," said Mr. Basingstoke, "and I should think more than one life's work. Do you find that you can bring your mind to any other kind of work?"
"I gave up everything else," said the stranger. "I was an accountant, and I had some money and I'm living on it. But now . . . now I shall have to do something else. I've got a situation in London. I'm going there next week. It's the end of everything for me."
"There ought to be some endowment for your sort of research," said Edward. ”