The Wheels of Chance

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 ridin@@ 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 Enidymion, 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 bad 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 I 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.”