The Incredible Honeymoon Part 29

"You forget the underground pa.s.sage. When we were tired of mocking your uncles and cousins through the arrow-slits of our tower we'd quietly creep away to our great castle--it's at Caernarvon, you know--and call together all my uncles and cousins and sally out and have a great battle, and the sound of our blows on their helmets would be heard on the far side of Anglesea, and down to the very southernmost marches of Merioneth."

"But suppose her relations won the battle and shut you up in a dungeon and put her into a convent?"

"Oh, they wouldn't. All our armor would be so perfectly tempered that n.o.body would be hurt. It would be like a tournament, and at the end, just as your senior uncle and I had unhorsed each other and were about to perish, mutually cloven to the chine, you would rush between us--in white, with your hair flowing like a thunder-cloud behind you--and say to each of us, 'Spare him for my sake.' And of course we should. And then there would be a banquet in the great hall at Caernarvon and clean rushes on the floor, and you and I and all our relations sitting in state on the dais, and you'd be wearing your gown of cloth of gold and your cloak of vair, and all your jewels--and I should have my furred gown and my great ring, and we should drink out of the big silver drinking-bowl--mead and strong ale--and feast our guests and their men-at-arms and all our own people on roast boars' heads and barons of beef, and all live happily ever afterward."

"I don't think she'd wear her ermine mantle. Wouldn't she wear the one of woven red, with your coat of arms embroidered on it, and the gold beads you brought her from the East when you went to the wars there?"

"Perhaps you would," he conceded. "I believe I could climb up to that doorway. I should like to--just to be sure there's really a well inside."

"No, don't," said she, "because you might find out that there wasn't; or that this isn't really the tower that has the underground pa.s.sage leading to Caernarvon, and then we should know that we're not really remembering that other life when you carried her off, but only making it up."

"Of course we remember it. Do you remember whether you were angry with me for carrying you off."

"If she hadn't wanted to be carried off," she said, demurely, "she wouldn't have been. Or if she hadn't been able to help herself she'd have found a little knife, like the brown bride, or else something to put in your mead-cup, so that the first draught you had from her hand would have been the last. She wasn't the sort of woman to be taken against her will. Come away before you spoil the story with any more questions. I liked it best when we took the tale for granted--"

It was high up among the heather, with Charles safely tethered and the steep hillside dotted with hundreds and hundreds of sheep, that the talk grew earnest and dwelt not on dreams of old days, but the desire of new ones.

"Do you remember," he said, "what you told me when we were going to Warwick?" He spoke as though this had been a long time ago, as, indeed, by any count but time it was. "You remember about the scattered farms, and the way the little houses call to you to come home."

"Yes," she said.

"All that you said about the life--it was like my other self speaking."

"You mean that when I spoke, your inside self said, 'Yes, yes; that's what I mean'?"

"I mean more than that. My inside self said, 'Yes, yes, that's what I always meant. That's what I meant and what I wanted before ever I met you.' Then meeting you obscured everything else, but when you spoke I saw that what I had always wanted rhymed with what you had always wanted. But I want to be quite sure. May I ask questions?"

"Yes."

"Suppose we had been really married--would you have been contented to spend your working life on a farm, to live just that life that you spoke of that day going to Warwick?"

She did not speak for a moment, and for a moment he wished that he had not questioned. And when she did speak it was not to give him an answer.

"I didn't believe it was possible," she said. "I thought people couldn't make farming succeed, nowadays, and I don't think I could bear to spend my working life, as you call it, on a thing that is foredoomed to failure."

"Nor could I; and I don't mean to, either. My farm will succeed. If it costs me every penny I have it shall succeed. I shall go a new way to work. You know I've really got quite a lot of money, and I have a plan."

"Tell me about it."

"It's quite simple, and absolutely opposed to all the accursed teachings of political economy. Of course I shall get the best machinery and the best seeds and the best implements. But I shall also get the best labor."

"Doesn't every one try to do that?"

"Oh yes, every farmer tries to get the best labor he can, at current rates. I sha'n't bother about the current rates. I shall get the best men that are to be got and I shall pay them wages that will make them glad to come to me rather than to any one else. If I find a man's good I shall give him a share in the profits of the farm; if I find he isn't any good I shall sack him."

"I wonder," she said, "whether you'd have the heart to sack any one?"

"I might hesitate to sack a mere fool," he admitted. "I might be tempted to keep him on and find some work for him that even a fool could do.

But I'd chuck a slacker at a week's notice and never turn a hair. You'll see; I shall have failures, many of them, but the whole thing won't be a failure. Before I've done I shall have the best carters, the best dairy-women, the best bailiff, and the best plowman and the most successful farm in the country. You don't know how men can work who are working for themselves and not just for a master."

"You mean to make it a sort of communal farm?"

"Never," he said. "That's the last thing I mean it to be. But it will be a profit-sharing farm, and I shall run it. It's my own idea, the darling of my soul, and I won't trust its life to any other man. I'm almost afraid to trust it to you, for fear you should not be kind to it. But if what you said on the way to Warwick meant something that lasts in you--not just the beautiful thoughts of the moment--tell me, if we were really married could you endure a life like that?"

"I should know nothing about it; I should be of no use. And we're not married--"

"You could learn; we could both learn. Let's pretend for a moment that we're really going to spend our lives together, anyhow. Let's leave Mrs. Basingstoke out of it. Would Miss Basingstoke have been able to endure such a life?"

"Miss Basingstoke would have loved it," she said. "Miss Basingstoke would have done her best to learn, and--she isn't really stupid, you know--I think Miss Basingstoke would have succeeded."

"It would need patience," he said, "patience and bravery and loving-kindness and gentleness and firmness and unselfishness."

"And curiosity," she said. "That quality, at least, Miss Basingstoke has. She would have wanted to know all about everything, and that's one way of learning. She wants, now, to know ever so much more. Tell her everything that you've thought of about it, everything you've decided or not decided."

"You'll be kind to my darling dream, then," he said. "Well, here goes."

And with that he told her, and she listened and questioned, and he answered again till the shadows had grown heavy in the valley and they were very late indeed for dinner.

You cannot be long in Llanberis without wanting to "see over" a slate-quarry. It was on their fifth day that the desire came to these two. The mention of Colonel Bertram's name gained for them a personally conducted tour through the rows of little slate-roofed sheds where skilled workmen strip and chip and shape the flakes of quarried slate till they are the size and form needed for roofing cottages and schools and Nonconformist chapels. Having seen how the slate is treated in the sheds, they were taken into the quarry itself to see how the slate is got.

A big slate-quarry is a very impressive sight. 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. I am glad we came here; it's all so clear and bright and new-looking. I wonder--"

"I wouldn't walk quite so near the edge, if I was you, sir," said the foreman, who was their guide.

"Why?" Edward asked, gazing at the reflection of high cliffs in the pool at his side, "is the water deep--"

And even as he spoke his eyes were opened; but before he could obey their mandate, with a cry that went to his heart and held it she caught his arm and pulled him back. For in that instant she, too, had seen that this pool which reflected so perfectly the tall precipices of the quarry was not a pool at all, but another deep quarry within the first, and that what it held was no reflection, but a sheer and dreadful depth of precipice going down--she would not look to see how far. And he had been walking within six inches of its brink, carelessly and at ease, as one does walk by the safely shelving edge of any pond.

She did not let his arm go when she had drawn him away from that perilous edge; she held it closely pressed against her side, and when he looked at her he saw that her face was white and changed. The great precipice above them swayed a little to her eyes--she dared not look at the precipice below. She held his arm closely and more closely, folding both hands on it. The foreman was saying something. Neither of them heard what it was, only both caught the concluding words:

"Perhaps you'd like to see the place, sir."

"Thank you," said Edward, mechanically, "and then I think we must leave you. It's been most kind of you to show us all this; we've been most interested."

Her heart was beating in so wild an ecstasy of thanksgiving for an unspeakable horror escaped, his heart was beating in so pa.s.sionate and proud and humble a recognition of what her touch on his arm confessed, that neither of them heard the foreman's words or guessed at the meaning of what he was calmly and coldly telling them. Only afterward the memory of his words came back, bringing with it understanding. They were led across a flat wilderness of splintered slate toward the tall cliff from which now and then came the noise like thunder which blasting-powder makes when it does its work. They two, hardly conscious of anything but that they held each other--the one who had been in danger, safe; the other pa.s.sionately grateful for that other's safety; and the endangered one, pa.s.sionately sensible of her pa.s.sionate grat.i.tude, heard not a word that the foreman spoke, though he spoke all the time.

"You are here; I hold you safe; but, oh, if I had lost you!" her heart was singing to a breathless, syncopated measure.

"You cared; you cared as much as this. If I had fallen over that perilous edge... . Oh, but you care, you care! It is as much as this to you," his heart sang, keeping time to hers.

It was a trance of mutual meeting emotion such as they had not yet known. In that one moment, when he walked the narrow edge of that precipice and when she had seen the precipice for the horror it was, she learned more than in all her life before. And he, in the moments that followed, knew, beyond possibility of mistake or misunderstanding, what it was that she had learned. If only they could have walked straight out of that quarry into the world of stream and mountain, the world where you are only two--but the foreman was there, walking and talking, and at last stopping and saying:

"This is where it happened."

And they came out of their dream to find themselves close to the slate cliff at whose base lay great blocks of slate newly fallen, and to see the flat slate flakes at their feet, brown and wet.