The Incredible Honeymoon

by E. Nesbit

"There isn't any more, only I think that must have been the life I lived in my last incarnation, because a little house in the country—any little house, even an old turnpike cottage—always seems to call out to me, 'Here I am! Come home! What a long time you've been away!'"

"And yet," he said, and felt, as he said it, how stupid he was being—"and yet you love traveling and adventure—seeing the world and the wonders of the world."

"Ah!" she said, "that's my new incarnation. But what the old one loved goes deeper than that. I love adventure and new bits of the world as I love strawberries and ice-cream, and waltzing and Chopin, but the little house in the green country is like the daily bread of the heart."

"I understand you," he said, slowly. "I understand you in the only possible way. I mean that's the way I feel about it, too. If you were really my sister, what a united family the last of the Basingstokes would be."

"Do you really feel the same about it—you, too?" she asked. "Oh, what a pity I wasn't born Basingstoke, and we would have lived on our own farm and been happy all our lives."

He would not say what he might have said, and her heart praised him for not saying it. And so at last they came to Warwick, and Charles had bounded from the dog-box all pink tongue and white teeth and strenuous white-covered muscles, and knocked down a little boy in a blue jersey, who had to be consoled by chocolate which came out of the machine like the god in the Latin tag. And then all the luggage was retrieved—there was getting to be a most respectable amount of it, as she pointed out—and it and they and Charles got into a fly (for there are still places where an open carriage bears that ironic name) and drove through the afternoon sunshine to the Warwick Arms. But when they were asked to write their names in the visitors' book, each naturally signed a Christian name, and the management, putting two and two together, deduced Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke, and entered this result in more intimate books, living in retirement in the glass case which preserves the young lady who knows all about which rooms you can have. The chambermaid and the boots agreed that Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke were a handsome couple. Also, when a new-comer, signing his name, asked a question about the signatures just above his, "Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke," was the answer he got.

Now all this time, for all her frankness, she had been concealing something from him.

You must know that the wedding-dinner, if a mock marriage can be said to involve a wedding-dinner, had been at the Star and Garter, and after the wooded slopes and the shining spaces of the river her London hotel had seemed but a dull and dusty resting-place. And it was she who had met him when he called to take her out to breakfast with a petition for more river. So they had taken more river, in the shape of a Sunday at Coohmah, where the beautiful woods lean down to the water, and the many boats keep to the stream and the few creep into backwaters whither the swans follow you, and eat all the lunch if you will only give them half a chance. It was a delightful day, full of incident and charm. The cool, gleaming river, the self-possessed gray poplars, the generous, green-spreading beeches, the lovelorn willows trailing their tresses in the stream, the reeds and the rushes, the quiet, emphasized by the knowledge that but for the supremest luck they might have been two in a very large and noisy party, such as that on the steam-launch which thrust its nose into their backwater and had to back out with fussings and snortings, like a terrier out of a rabbit-hole. The dappled shadows on the spread carpet of lily-leaves, the green gleams in the deep darkness of the woods, the slow, dripping veil of dusk through which they rowed slowly back to the inn—even being late for the train and having to run for it—all, as he said, when they had caught the train and were crammed into a first-class carriage with three boating-men, a painted lady, an aged beau, and a gentleman almost of color, from Brazil—all had been very good. But he did not know all. There had been a moment, while he had gone in to the bar of the inn to settle for the boat—a moment in which she waited in the little grassy garden that shelves down to the river's edge—and in that moment a boat slid up to the landing-stage. The first man to get out of it was nobody, and didn't matter. The second was Mr. Schultz. As it happened, her face was lighted by a yellow beam from one of the inn windows, and as he landed the beam from the other window fell across his face, so that they saw and recognized each other in a blaze of light that might have been arranged for no other purpose.

He raised his cap and she saw that he meant to speak, but one of his companions thrust the painter into his hand at exactly the nick of time. He was held there, for the moment. She had the sense to walk slowly into the inn, and Mr. Schultz might well have thought that she was staying there. She meant him to think so. Anyhow, he did not cast the painter from him, as he might have done, and hurry after her. "Later on will do," was what his attitude and his look expressed.